Like this:

So I decided to try LXDE on my netbook to compare performance/speed with the bog-standard Ubuntu Gnome desktop that I already have running on it.

It’s simple to install, just open a terminal and run:

sudo apt-get install lxde

then logout and select LXDE from the sessions tab in the login screen.

Your system will then boot into LXDE.

After a little tweaking my desktop looks like this:

LXDE is a GPL licensed open source desktop environment and stands for “Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment”. It’s based on Openbox, built in the c programming language and uses the GTK+ toolkit. Because its components are not tightly integrated, they are able to run independently of each other. This enables a window environment which is fast and snappy, where resource usage, both CPU and RAM is surprising low, achieving a similarly low disk usage footprint.

As such, this is an ideal window manager to use in conjunction with a netbook and I have noticed a quite considerable performance improvement.

It is highly configurable with various appearance tweaks, accessible via the appearance and Openbox configuration manager in the preferences menu.Various panel applets/plugins are integrated to enhance the experience, ranging from temperature and cpu usage monitors to volume control and bateery monitors.

I must say that I am very impressed so far and plan to adopt LXDE as the default window manager for my Netbook.

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