HOW WE TESTED…
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We installed all of the desktop environments into a fresh Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Server edition installation. This gave us a functional Linux base without a graphical environment at all, and it enabled us to see exactly what the DE adds to a plain system.
MATE8/10
MATE 9/10
MATE7/10
MATE7/10
MATE7/10
MATE6/10
Trinity Desktop Environment (www.trinitydesktop.org) is a fork of KDE 3.x, and it can now be considered a lightweight environment. The main problem we had is that it’s difficult to obtain and install an up-to-date version without getting dragged into dependency hell.
MATE » Xfce » LXQt » Enlightenment » OpenBox
We could have eked a bit more efficiency out of each system by doing things such as compiling from the source code or leaving out certain aspects of the DE, but we installed each desktop environment using the package manager of the system to get a feel for what a typical user would install. We then pursued various methods to see what hoops we had to jump through to get the latest stable release.
XFCE5/10
XFCE8/10
XFCE8/10
XFCE8/10
XFCE 8/10
XFCE6/10
Pantheon is the desktop environment that was created as the front end for the Elementary OS (https://elementary.io) Linux distribution, but you can install it on other Linux distributions. Some features are freemium add-ons, but it’s a nice-looking desktop with a lot of attention to detail and a reasonably small memory footprint.