LXDE is a minimalistic X11 desktop environment that provides a lightweight and efficient experience for users who value speed and simplicity.
The team behind LXDE has made usability, speed, and memory usage their main concern, and it certainly shows. The environment runs with reasonable memory usage and is fast enough to run on older machines that were produced as far back as 1999. The gtk+2 internationalized user interface is both lightweight and good-looking, while remaining simple enough to be usable.
One of the key features of LXDE is that it is desktop independent, meaning that every component can be used without it. It is also standard compliant and follows the specs on freedesktop.org. LXDE is ideal for older machines and comes equipped with a number of essential components, including the file manager PCManFM, the desktop panel LXPanel, the X11 session manager LXSession, and the window manager IceWM.
One of the best things about LXDE is that it doesn't require better hardware, but other applications under X do need it. For example, Firefox and OpenOffice.org 2 are quite memory-hungry, so it's recommended that you have RAM more than 128 MB to run them without any issues.
The latest release of LXDE features some upgrades, including an upgrade to lxpanel to 0.3.5, a provision of default config files for lxsession-lite, and the addition of a small xsettings daemon so gtkrc files are no longer needed. There are also some little fixes to ensure that the environment remains stable and efficient.
Overall, LXDE is an excellent desktop environment that is perfect for those who want something lightweight, efficient, and easy-to-use. If you're looking for something that runs well on older machines and doesn't require a lot of resources, then this is definitely worth checking out.
Version 0.3.2.1: N/A