[clue-tech] LXDE -- New Desktop for Old/Slow Machines

[Dennis J Perkins]

On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 21:44 -0600, Michael J. Hammel wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 20:52 -0600, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> > Never messed with Xfce. IIRC, it's supposed to resemble the old Unix CDE,
> > which I always thought was gross.
> 
> XFce is my preferred lightweight environment.  It's fairly
> straightforward to build so I built it under Cygwin to run under XP
> under VMWare where I was forced to do some Windows builds of Java apps.
> GNOME builds have always seemed more tricky to me, though I haven't done
> one in over a year.
> 
> It does look a little like CDE, but only superficially.  Motif was a
> pig, so CDE was a bigger pig.  GTK+ is not that much of a pig and so
> XFce is more lightweight.  I use it on memory limited laptops, etc.  I'm
> thinking of switching to it for my main machines because I'm sick of
> GNOME (I don't use - and won't use - KDE) reording my panel icons when I
> use xrandr to enable an external monitor on my laptop.

The difficulty with building Gnome is that there are several libraries
but the Gnome project does not feel it is important to provide
documentation for the correct build order and dependencies.  The
attitude seems to be that only distro developers should build it.  

I haven't built KDE in years, so I don't know if the same should be said
about it, but it did have less libraries.