I recently stopped using my old workstation (a 6 year old home made quad core, with nice specs and still very usable but noisy. It had a lot of boot problems failing harddisk and other crazy stuff) and switched to a MSI 2050 All in one PC for a while. I don’t like the unity desktop experience provided by default Ubuntu 11.10 and switched to KDE for a while. But KDE feels kinda slow. So I tried XFCE4 and was very impressed by it’s speed and usability. While looking at XFce4 info; I also found LXDE; so I tested them both.
Tested it on Ubuntu and Debian systems. One slight problem with my dual screen setup could be resolved with:
xrandr –output HDMI-0 –auto –right-of DVI-0
Xfce4
XFCE looks nice, is fast to use, and doesn’t slow down working with nice standard keyboard shortcuts. It comes with some optional tools for screencapture and harddisk temp monitoring. It’s menu and windows placement, won’t mean that you need 3 years of your life to get used to Unity’s left side orientation of the current Ubuntu versions.
Xfce on Debian testing
XFCE feels kinda “at home” by using an almost classic win98 setup of OS GUI elements. It has a nice filemanager and can been run in a nice mix between Gnome/Unity and XFCE: lean and mean. Things like Dropbox integration in Filemanager are possible. With a little work you can give your users a “windows like” experience
**LXDE
** The “Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment” is an extremely fast-performing and energy-saving desktop environment. It’s a even faster then Xfce4.
LXDE on Ubuntu 12.04
After a couple of weeks: It useable for a work only setup. But when you als have a couple of macs with a nice filemanager and all kind of graphic bling bling it’s feeling kind of dull. For “just working” it’s perfect. You can change it trough GUI or by editing in simple conf or XML files. But after a couple of weeks you experience small things that I take for granted in other OSes nowadays; Dropxbox or Google Drive integration in Right click menuus in File Manager tools; just don’t work. Never got volume applet working, notification area isn’t working that well. More like some small annoyances.
Still both options leave you wet a very workable, multi virtuel desktop, multi screen desktop solution that will run very smooth and reliable on cheap hardware. And it’s all free.