I just had a catastrophic hardware failure, my first in 20 odd years of computing, so goodbye motherboard and hello Windows XP laptop.

First I made XP safe to use, but this slowed the machine to a crawl, so I re-sized the XP partition to give me space to install Linux.

To cut a long story short I installed Slackware-13.0 (without KDE), and I decided to try a lighter WM/Desktop. I have tried most common desktops in the past but haven't tried LXDE at any length.

So now I have the following setup:

Packard Bell M5 284 - P4 2800MHz, 512mb ram, Intel 855GM graphics.
Slim
LXDE/openbox
Xarchiver
PCmanFM
Epdfview
Opera
Sylpheed
Leafpad
LXterminal
Gpicview
and various lightweight Slackware packages.

This is fast, light and reasonably complete, so I would suggest that Slackware should put more emphasis on a complete lightweight desktop. If you install all the packages in the /kde folder you get a full, but resource hungry, deasktop. Perhaps it is now time to have a xfce/ folder or a light/ folder, so that you can install a desktop that is light but complete right at the start.

I only suggest this because the default installs of XFCE, fluxbox, blackbox, windowmaker, fvwm95 all require a bit of work to make them useful. In fact it might also be better to cut these down to perhaps two choices, after all all the polls have KDE, XFCE and fluxbox dominating.

I would also heartily recommend Alien Bob's packages for LXDE and openbox.

samac

Vote for it

Overall, I think it is a good idea. However, I've tried LXDE and while it is pretty, it is more resource hungry than Xfce, but not as versatile.

Edit in: Perhaps "functional" would have been a better word than "versatile."

The only problem that I have in both XFCE and LXDE is the lack of a menu editor. This should really be a priority for both of these projects.

samac

And did you drop them a note on this, already?

gargamel

Err, I think it should be provided as an alternative option in the installer, but not by default.

Booting into a fresh vanilla KDE is what makes the feel of Slackware

Booting to a command prompt and from there being able to do whatever you want, and use whatever GUI you prefer, would be the "feel of Slackware," IMHO.

Fluxbox is fast enough and it is easy to configure. I voted for it.