Which is lighter : LXDE or fluxbox?
 

I have an old computer : 800 MHz / 384 MB RAM
Which GUI would be more suited (in terms of speed) for this machine?

Fluxbox or Icewm would be lighter than LXDE IMO.

If you have the room on Hardrive. You could install all 3 to see which you like best. Just change session at login window.

E17 is pretty nice and light also but requires a bit of a learning curve to use for some users. I like it.

Those specs are not that bad. I've run Ubuntu (rather sedately, it's true) with 6ooMHz!

The memory is rather small for Ubuntu/Mint though. It all depends on whether you have a video card; if you don't, then you haven't got 384MB: more like 320. If that's the case, go into the BIOS at the boot and make sure that the memory allocated to video is the minimum it will allow.

Distro will often matter more than the GUI. For example, Dream running Gnome uses 3/4 of the memory that Fedora does. For a good performance on your machine, I'd recommend Crunchbang; it's Debian based, like Ubuntu or Mint, and will run with 400MHz and 256MB. Vector is also nice, but use the text-based installer rather than the GUI one.

fluxbox is very easy to use and very configurable with apps like fluxconf/fluxkeys, etc

fluxbox is a stacking window manager
lxde is a compositing wm
a stacking wm is lighter than any compositing wm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stacking_window_manager

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing_window_manager

I thought LXDE uses Openbox which is on the Stacking window manager list?.
I'd think Fluxbox is lighter than LXDE,not sure about Fluxbox compared to Openbox though......

I stand corrected
I think LXDE is a stacking wm as Openbox is...?
does LXDE have 3d effects,etc?
no right?