In search of extra speed and efficient use of resources checks out the best lightweight desktop environments.

Michael Reed

WE COMPARE TONS OF STUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO!

MATE » Xfce » LXQt » Enlightenment » OpenBox

Michael Reed started with Linux in 1996. If you can cope with Red Hat 2.x and TWM as the GUI, you can cope with anything.

Lightweight desktop environments (DEs) are perfect for situations where you need a responsive GUI on a resource-constrained system, such as an older computer or a virtual machine. We’re looking at five DEs that are light on memory, CPU and disk space usage.

MATE is the most fully-featured of the desktop environments we’re looking at here, and it’s not surprising because it’s a fork of the Gnome 2.x desktop, which was once one of the main full-fat Linux desktop environments.

Enlightenment was once a high-end desktop that threw a lot of visual bling at the screen, but in its current incarnation, it could reasonably be considered an efficient desktop environment.

CREDIT: Henrik Sorensen/DigitalVision/Getty Images

Xfce has become a stalwart of lightweight Linux distributions, but the version that you see on those distributions is often heavily customised, a testament to Xfce’s flexibility.

LXQt is in many ways the successor to the LXDE desktop, but it has a more modern look and greater flexibility.

Finally, we’ve put something together ourselves. OpenBox isn’t technically a desktop environment, because it’s a window manager, but we’ve added that to a system along with tools such as a file manager to see if we can beat the official desktop environments in efficiency and usefulness.

Included utilities

Some desktop environments come with either unique tools or additional, standard tools.

LXQt comes with the Qt edition of the PCManFM file manager, which looks smart and minimalist while fitting in with the overall look of the desktop. It’s lightweight, but it covers most of the important features, such as tabbed browsing, network browsing and image previews. We felt the same way about Featherlight, the lightweight text editor, because it has all the essential features, such as syntax highlighting and spell check. The other inclusions were fairly sparse, and we suspect that many users would like to hunt down a few (preferably Qt-based) extra applications to complete the desktop.

Terminology is Enlightenment’s own terminal emulator, and it’s quirky but perfectly usable. Enlightenment File Manager fits in well with the rest of the environment, and it can handle basic tasks, but it feels like it’s still at an early stage in its development.

MATE comes with quite a lot of utilities that are updated versions of Gnome 2.x-era programs. Due to this lineage, these tools are robust and comprehensive, and fit in well on the MATE desktop. The Caja file manager is a good example as it was forked from Nautilus, the Gnome file manager, and it’s in the top tier of Linux file managers. Many of the other tools, such as the disk usage calculator and the system resource usage monitor, are in a similar league. In addition, MATE (on Ubuntu) drags across full applications that are associated with the Gnome 2.x era, such as music player and librarian Rhythmbox and the entire LibreOffice office suite. They are all reasonably light, but if resources are extremely tight, it might be necessary to replace them with even lighter options.