I tested the LXDE version. Installation is done from the live session and the system boots quickly into a simple but attractive desktop. A control centre has been added to make LXDE more configurable. The LXDE version is very light-weight, running in less than 256MB, but even the KDE one claims to run in a minimum of 512.

Now for the problems. Documentation and forum discussion is mostly in German. There is no support for encryption, LVM, or RAID. If you choose to put Grub anywhere other than the MBR, it doesn’t get installed at all. The error message says “this is a bad idea ... will not proceed” and you have to do it later with “grub-install --force”. The control centre doesn’t give you any way to create keyboard shortcuts (edit ~/.config/openbox/lxde-rc.xml) or to activate the Level-3 Shift and Compose keys if your keyboard driver does not specify them. More seriously, the keyboard kept resetting to “us” every time I rebooted. I tried adding software and had quite a few failures with broken packages and missing dependencies.

If you want a Debian derivative, get Lubuntu, Mint, or WattOS for LXDE, Mepis or Mint for KDE.