Lightweight Linux Desktop Proves Popular with Netbooks
LinuxWorld is under way in San Francisco this week (see Wired’s coverage) and gOS, the Linux distro that made a splash after Walmart started selling gOS-equipped PCs, is back with a new release.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the new gOS is that the distro has adopted the newer, lightweight LXDE (which stands for Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment), giving the old Enlightenment desktop the heave-ho in the process.
And gOS isn’t the only vender moving over to LXDE; the site lists a handful of others (including Ubuntulite, an Ubuntu derivative) that will ship or already are shipping with LXDE instead of Gnome or even Xfce.
Given that Linux has proved a popular money-saving choice for netbooks and low-cost, low-power internet PCs, it isn’t really surprising that venders are looking for a lightweight alternative to Gnome — something to reduce the hardware load.
Of course that’s not to say that LXDE is somehow less full-featured than Gnome, all the things you would expect — tabbed filebrowser, session manager, theme tools, terminal, text editor and more — are in LXDE, but the underlying framework allows for much lighter hardware requirements.
Indeed that’s part of the pitch on the distros’ website: “Not everyone on this earth is rich. There must be a nice desktop environment for those who can’t afford new fancy hardware, and we have the ability to help them.”
I’m curious to know if any Webmonkey readers have used LXDE. If so, let us know what you think in the comments. I’m planning on giving it a try (probably using Ubuntulite in a virtual machine) but if you have experiences with LXDE, let me know.
If you’d like to see some more screenshots, DesktopLinux has a few. The official LXDE website has several as well.
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