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#1 2010-05-15 22:10:28

dcj123
Member
Registered: 2009-12-27
Posts: 58

Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

Hello,

I am sick of netbook being slow so I have Xfce+Openbox+gnome panel running on my Asus 1001P with some surprising results. However, I am wondering if I can improve upon the responsiveness even more by replacing Xfce with LXDE. I don't really want to lose very many features of Gnome since I am running gnome panel but am open minded to DE suggestions.

Right now my Desktop takes about 180 MB out of the Ram at bootup which to me is pretty good.

Opinions?

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#2 2010-05-15 22:13:26

SoleSoul
Member
From: Israel
Registered: 2009-06-29
Posts: 319

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

LXDE is lighter than XFCE for sure but it has less features.
You should try. No harm will be done from trying smile

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#3 2010-05-15 22:27:30

archman-cro
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From: Croatia
Registered: 2010-04-04
Posts: 943
Website

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

My opinion is to try a Non-DE stuff, WMs like Openbox or similar. RAM should not worry you, cause the more is used, the faster your pc will work (cached stuff etc). The rest is a RAM waste.

Cheers. smile

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#4 2010-05-15 22:51:27

Gusar
Member
Registered: 2009-08-25
Posts: 3,605

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

I don't think you're actually *using* Xfce when you're still running gnome-panel. Becasue with that comes a lot of gnome stuff, starting with gconf.
For me using Xfce would mean running it's native panel (xfce4-panel), it's native file manager (thunar), it's native window manager (xfwm4), and having your desktop managed by xfdesktop.
In the same vein, using with LXDE would mean running lxpanel, pcmanfm and openbox. Though openbox is not actually an LXDE project, but the LXDE people probably didn't want to bother programming their own WM. A good decision IMO, because openbox absolutely rocks.

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#5 2010-05-15 22:51:35

dcj123
Member
Registered: 2009-12-27
Posts: 58

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

archman-cro wrote:

My opinion is to try a Non-DE stuff, WMs like Openbox or similar. RAM should not worry you, cause the more is used, the faster your pc will work (cached stuff etc). The rest is a RAM waste.

Cheers. smile

Out of personal preferance I didn't really like running Openbox as a stand alone, but I can see how that might be good for older PCs. I ran Openbox as a stand alone for a while but simple task started to become annoying.

Alright so I am running LXDE and everything seems smooth, thanks.

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#6 2010-05-15 23:16:29

smakked
Member
From: Gold Coast , Australia
Registered: 2008-08-14
Posts: 420

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

ICEwm is the way to go faster then the rest and very light big_smile


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#7 2010-05-15 23:46:47

Fluxbox
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2010-04-26
Posts: 12

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

smakked wrote:

ICEwm is the way to go faster then the rest and very light big_smile

NO! IT'S THE CLI big_smile

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#8 2010-05-15 23:49:37

JWJones
Member
From: Cascadia
Registered: 2009-06-10
Posts: 20

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

LXDE is definitely lighter/faster than Xfce, and I'm liking what I'm seeing with PCManFM2: ability to access networks, FTP, etc. is a nice addition.

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#9 2010-05-15 23:58:56

lagagnon
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From: an Island in the Pacific...
Registered: 2009-12-10
Posts: 1,087
Website

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

dcj123 wrote:

Right now my Desktop takes about 180 MB out of the Ram at bootup which to me is pretty good.
Opinions?

LXDE on my wife's machine (including one instance of lxterminal) consumes just 63MB of ram at bootup, about 1/3 of your system.


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#10 2010-05-16 00:10:02

dcj123
Member
Registered: 2009-12-27
Posts: 58

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

Gusar wrote:

I don't think you're actually *using* Xfce when you're still running gnome-panel. Becasue with that comes a lot of gnome stuff, starting with gconf.
For me using Xfce would mean running it's native panel (xfce4-panel), it's native file manager (thunar), it's native window manager (xfwm4), and having your desktop managed by xfdesktop.
In the same vein, using with LXDE would mean running lxpanel, pcmanfm and openbox. Though openbox is not actually an LXDE project, but the LXDE people probably didn't want to bother programming their own WM. A good decision IMO, because openbox absolutely rocks.

Thats is true but you do increase the performance slightly by loading up a light weight DE and then loading the essential parts of gnome. It Saves RAM and CPU usage without a huge lost in features since I still want to run gnome. Basically I am abusing my netbook by using it like a full blown computer lol

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#11 2010-05-16 08:14:41

mamimoluo
Member
Registered: 2010-04-26
Posts: 4

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

fvwm,e17 will be more lightweight!

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#12 2010-05-16 09:16:32

Llama
Banned
From: St.-Petersburg, Russia
Registered: 2008-03-03
Posts: 1,379

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

JWJones wrote:

LXDE is definitely lighter/faster than Xfce, and I'm liking what I'm seeing with PCManFM2: ability to access networks, FTP, etc. is a nice addition.

+1

For some reason, Xfce is a lightweight option no longer.

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#13 2010-05-16 09:22:23

SoleSoul
Member
From: Israel
Registered: 2009-06-29
Posts: 319

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

@Llama
XFCE became a relatively complete desktop environment.
It came with a cost, but I think it's good because it fills the void GNOME left behind itself after marching forward.
I see XFCE as the GNOME of yesterday.

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#14 2010-05-17 03:45:35

akephalos
Member
From: Romania
Registered: 2009-04-22
Posts: 114

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

SoleSoul wrote:

XFCE became a relatively complete desktop environment.
It came with a cost, but I think it's good because it fills the void GNOME left behind itself after marching forward.
I see XFCE as the GNOME of yesterday.

You know, LXDE seems to have a bit of different principle: it doesn't have a centralized framework, like libxfce*, settings, and so on, which seems to be a GNOME-like approach. LXDE apps are GTK-only so I assume that they increase a bit the redundancy of code, but decrease useless loads for each app. So LDXE apps are usually completely independent on the rest of the desktop, which makes them lighter in ensemble.

I was looking at the XFCE panel applets, they require almost the same amount of RAM when loading, although they're different. So whether LXDE will become the same thing as XFCE or GNOME, that depends on the future developers' decisions.

I don't know which is the best approach, theoretically LXDE is what I want although it currently has some rough edges, the last time I changed back on XFCE for reasons that I forgot smile. I like them both, anyway.

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#15 2010-05-17 03:59:02

amarendra
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From: India
Registered: 2010-03-15
Posts: 2
Website

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

What is the best balance between light weight and look/functionality? XFCE/Fluxbox or other?

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#16 2010-05-17 05:43:48

akephalos
Member
From: Romania
Registered: 2009-04-22
Posts: 114

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

amarendra wrote:

What is the best balance between light weight and look/functionality? XFCE/Fluxbox or other?

Assuming that I understand what you mean by "best balance" I'd say XFCE or E17, just I didn't use things like ROX, Etoile, etc. Here's a rough comparison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison … vironments

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#17 2010-05-21 11:53:22

davidgreem
Member
Registered: 2010-05-20
Posts: 5

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

As per my knowledge you can go for replacement of Xfce with LXDE all the features are most probably similar and it will doesnt make any difference to your work and data.So Dont worry and most important thing that concerns you is that LDXE is more lighter as compared to Xfce.

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#18 2010-05-21 12:02:11

kokoko3k
Member
Registered: 2008-11-14
Posts: 2,390

Re: Which one is more lightweight? LXDE or Xfce?

Keep in mind that probably as you start a (gnome,kde) app, you'll probably loose al the benefits of the underlaying DE (at least in terms of memory).


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