Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Aug 20, 2008

I've been using XFCE for a while, but I've heard a few things about LXDE and my curiosity got the best of me. Since Linux is so forgiving I decided to take a while and install it. Here are my impressions.

In most ways I've found LXDE to be better than XFCE. This is really surprising since there's so much less code. The people working on XFCE aren't dumb by any stretch and though they do have legacy code to deal with they haven't exactly rushed out releases. I think they're wise to release when ready.

Still, LXDE is faster and takes up less space. It doesn't have a full blown configuration and settings section like XFCE does but Compiz-Fusion really does a good job of compensation for any shortcomings. The end result is that a few things that XFCE lacked LXDE does not. Specifically the PCManFM filemanager can handle the icons on the desktop as well as its regular duties. That means you can select icons with the mouse on the desktop and drag them all to an open 'finder' window. (those familiar with MacOS know what I mean by finder)

There aren't any other major advantages that I can think of, but considering I lost about 150MB of code, got speed, and added some functionality, I'm pretty thrilled.

There are a few shortcomings though. Most importantly there's no trash functionality in LXDE. Deleting files means they're gone for good. I'm not too sad about that right now but on the other hand I've only been using this for a week. Ask me how I feel after I accidentally erase something critical..

The other nice to have feature would be to auto-hide the dock. It's taking up valuable screen real-estate that I'd like to reclaim. I suppose I could remove the dock completely and go with Avant, but Avant has its own problems (e.g. no distinction between apps in the docs and apps running).

Overally, I'm *thrilled* with LXDE. I hope it continues to develop and that the components they've bunded continue to improve as well. My greatest wish is to be able to access an ssh share in pcmanfm exactly like I can in Dolphin or Konqueror..