WE COMPARE TONS OF STUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO!
MATE » Xfce » LXQt » Enlightenment » OpenBox
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.
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
