Comparison of GNU/Linux desktop environments
GNU/Linux distributions typically provide one desktop environment as the only option when you install. There's plenty of other desktop environments available which can be installed and used regardless of which distribution and spin you used for your initial install. For example. XUbuntu comes with Xfce as a the default yet you can easily switch to KDE Plasma or LxQt or something else once your system's up and running. You do not need to re-install another spin to switch desktop environment, it is possible to have several installed and choose which to use from the login-manager. Here's a brief overview of the various choices that are available.
GNU/Linux desktops at a glance[edit]
| |LxDe was a light desktop-environment made using the GTK libraries. The developers abandoned to re-make it using the Qt Libraries under the name LXQt. It is still available in many distributions and you can still use it - but do be aware that there will be no more updates, bug-fixes or support of any kind.
|-style="vertical-align:top;"cally for it like KDE Plasma and GNOME. KDE software and most other software works perfectly in Xfce with GNOME "apps" being a notable exception since they tend to be brokenly written to only run on GNOME. |- |-style="vertical-align:top;background:#ebebeb;"
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|rowspan=2"|GNOME - default on distributions. Some like it. Others find it to be something better suited for phones or tablets. It uses a lot of JavaScript for the interface which makes it really memory hungry and wasteful. Development policy appears to remove any choice since having choices "confuse users". They are in full seriousness debating if they should remove all support for changing icon themes and colors because it gives users "an inconsistent GNOME experience".
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Window-managers[edit]
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IceWM provides the basic and essential desktop functionality using minimal resources. It is in principle just a stacking window manager but its features do not end there. There's more. IceWM has a panel which it calls a "taskbar", a virtual workspace switcher, an application list, network monitoring and a panel clock. There is no support fancy panel applications or anything like that. The desktop can have icons and right-clicking the desktop produces a menu.
IceWM is really light. The window manager itself uses 20-50 MB RAM depending on how it is configured. A ready to use IceWM desktop with X and all the system daemons uses around 220 MB RAM on Debian and around 170 MB on AntiX. |
![]() IceWM 1.5.5 running on Gentoo Linux. | |
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Fluxbox is a very light-weight window-manager. It does window management, it provides a very thin and small panel with a list of windows and it shows a menu when you right-click the root window. It's also got a system tray. There is no icons on the desktop, there's no panel applications, there's no built-in program for setting the desktop wallpaper or anything like that (you can, of course, use another program to set the wallpaper). You can run X and Fluxbox just fine on a machine with as little as 256 MB RAM. Or less. We did, in fact, claim 48 MB for Fluxbox+idesk in an old article titled "What Linux Desktop is the Best? Gnome, KDE or something completely different?" in 2004.
Fluxbox is a great choice if you are looking for a very light window-manager which provides a most basic desktop experience. |
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