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

| |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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|-style="vertical-align:top;" | |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". |-style="vertical-align:top;"

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Window-managers

	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.
	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.

Bankrupt And Finished

A Rox desktop in 2004.

The ROX desktop was a incredibly fast and efficient simple desktop environment made up of very small and really efficient components. It was abandoned in 2011. Some of it's components are still available in modern GNU/Linux distributions. The light-weight Debian-based distribution AntiX uses it's file manager rox filer as the default file-manager.

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Chaekyung

56 months ago

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Yes, go on?

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Chaekyung

56 months ago

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We are aware of it's existence. Please feel free to make a page about Wayland if you believe it is important that we know more.

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Dominique Mochel

49 months ago

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fvwm-crystal exercises fvwm quite a lot. It is an advanced ensemble of themes for fvwm and transform it into a desktop. It try to do its best to not be in the way of the system or of the user. It propose different themes called recipes. The recipes share a common set of functionalities (menus, key and mouse bindings, preferences directly from the main menu, and so on. The resource usage depends mainly of the number of buttons of a given recipe and each recipe try to minimize it in its own way (Not always possible like with the Amiga recipe which use a lot of buttons. Maybe some day I will do a stripped down version of that recipe.).

The very last released versions provides a Custom recipe with a magic button bar, which give a modern lock to fvwm-crystal. That Magic button bar have its own preference menu available via a right click on a button icon and can be put on any border of the screen.

For the desktop icons, it support Rox-filer, Nautilus and, with recent releases, it have its own desktop icon manager with support for different file managers (2 at a time and the user can add its own via custom commands).

Almost all windows can be put in fullscreen and you can navigate between the fullscreened pages and the desktop with keybindings, which give a navigation similar to the one of the AmigaOS, that on each desktop pages.

Its application menu have full support for the additional menu categories of the freedesktop specification (it was the first linux desktop to support it out of the box and still today, many of them lacks this support). Its last released version support both fvwm2 and fvwm3.

I can write an article about it, but as I am its main developer, it will be difficult for me to not be biased and for that, and also in order to get return from other peoples, I would prefer if someone else can write it.

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Anonymous (3c3d8ddcf7)

39 months ago

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"Xfce is a light-weight desktop environment..." Yes, it was light a long time ago! Unfortunately for most of the developers the develepment means to be more and more resource hungry and unnecessary complication of things. The "user friendliness" they claim to realize actually makes impossible an effective work and use of the OS. The real art of development and user friendliness would be to ensure an effective use of system resources, easy and clean configuration by text files and CLI (with understandable and detailed documentation), avoiding any meaningless effects, the unhealthy, eye-destroying flashy colors and dark themes. KISS...

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Anonymous (69c111bb8e)

22 months ago

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Oh please... I use Linux Lite with the XFCE on an old HP Pressario tower and it works just fine. People are always trying to find fault with things just to complain. It's 2023. XFCE can't stay as "light" as when it first began. It's just a fact of life. But it's not bloaty by any means.

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Anonymous (3057e33f97)

22 months ago

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review GNOME

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Anonymous (ea9485df7d)

18 months ago

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mate？

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Anonymous (ee45b8e46d)

6 months ago

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Agree, pls review MATE.

Fluxbox is incredibly lighweight and perfect for one of my applications.

It does require some work on the end users' part to get it where you want it, but that also keeps excess baggage out and performance up.

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