
Why is LXDE losing its popularity among Linux users? - rms_returns
After trying out all the DEs including KDE, Unity, GNOME, XFCE and LXDE, I&#x27;ve found that the last one is a marvelous piece of engineering and is the only Desktop that follows the unix philosophy in the true sense.<p>In fact, it is not as much a DE as a meta-package consisting of components like openbox, lxpanel and lxappearance that you may as well assemble on your own! In other words, simplicity and minimalism which you don&#x27;t find anywhere else.<p>But I was truly astonished when I visited LXDE forums (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.lxde.org&#x2F;) and found that it is quite inactive. There hasn&#x27;t been a single post in the month of february. This indicates that lots of people have shifted to GNOME or KDE and forsaken this wonderful DE.<p>And the interesting part is that in most phronix benchmarks, LXDE turns out to be the fastest, then why do people insist on installing bloated monsters like Unity and GNOME. If all I use my machine to do &quot;actual things&quot; like browsing the Internet, checking emails, working with spreadsheets and other apps, then why is the choice of DE such an important thing?
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alexandrerond
Because if you want a simple Desktop Environment you can get it with XFCE,
which integrates better (or at least used to) with Gnome/KDE apps and has some
extra goodies (like a decent panel plugin selection) and many useful xfce-
configuration apps.

Maybe for old devices LXDE makes sense because it's even more lightway, but I
have the feeling XFCE fills the same niche (minimalist, cut the bullshit, down
to earth thing) a bit better for the general case.

Disclosure: XFCE user who tried LXDE and hates the bloated monsters of
Gnome/KDE.

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digi_owl
LXDE has something of a quiet revolution in the last year or so. Thanks to
various issues surrounding GTK3, they shifted their focus to Qt and merged
their efforts with Razor-Qt to form LXQt.

Also, while XFCE has made some moves to stay free of the systemd gravity well
(forking the depreciated Consolekit and making it compatible with Logind's
dbus protocol for example), LXQt seems to have embraced it.

This may well have turned some away that don't want to deal with systemd.

