Which Mint is lighter, Fluxbox or LXDE?

[rolandpish]

Hi there.

I'm looking for a Mint version for an old laptop.

Which one is suppossed to be lighter? LXDE or Fluxbox?

I appreciate your opinions.

Kind regards.

[Kendall]

Fluxbox is lighter by default.

[lmintnewb]

The answer you seek ... Red wine + a splash of prescription drugs to make it more interesting and Miami sound machine with a funky cuban beat are by far the lightest you could ever hope to achieve. Am so light I'm floating, lol. It's Friday here in the states ... whoooooo ! D:



Agree with Kendal for a few reasons.

1. He's no doubt knows more about gnu/nix software and software development than I could ever hope to. Unless am mistaken he's one of the people involved in developing Mint's latest flux release.

2. Common sense dictates that a windows manager will almost always be lighter than a light weight DE. My understanding lxde is one ( a DE ). Guessing you could install tons of stuff to fluxbox and make it much heavier and/or not use a ton of stuff with lxde and make it lighter. On avg though, would think fluxbox would trounce lxde in terms of system overhead. Same time though, think people should take into account the convenience factor. A DE for most of us ( me included ) will trounce a windows manager in terms of being user friendly.

Could help if you tell people what kind of specs the comp you have in mind here has. How oldish is oldish ... Guessing it could change people's recommendations and opinions ... etc. Just an opinion, but it's a trade off a lot of times from my limited experience and extremely limited understanding of things nix. Not so much which uses x amount less RAM/CPU cycles. More a matter of personal preference. Which combination of stuff will run fine and still be a really good user experience for a person.

2 cents.

[Kendall]

LXDE is, at minimum, a combination of Openbox, LXSession, LXPanel, and PCManFM all running at the same time on top of X and whatever display manager you use.

Fluxbox is, at minimum, just Fluxbox running on top of X and whatever display manager you use.

Because LXDE is more comprehensive out of the box, I have to add more processes to the Mint Fluxbox edition as opposed to the LXDE edition in order to achieve the necessary level of desktop coherence but it still ends up lighter in the end.

[rolandpish]

Hey.
I really appreciate your replies! that is helping me a lot to decide
I'll share the specs of the laptop and look forward to your comments:

It's an IBM Thinkpad T40, Pentium-M 1.5Ghz, 512MB, 40GB Hard Disk.
Two months ago I installed Mint LMDE+Gnome on it, and, for example, having 1 nautilus window open + Chromium (3 tabs open) + Thunderbird (2 mail accounts) + Skype; really slowed down the computer, trying to refresh one of the Chromium tabs resulted in a hard disk intense activity (thereby freezing the computer) and I had to wait about 4-5 minutes until the hard disk stopped reading/writing for the computer to respond again. Then I had to close some of the applications to free up some memory.

I really love the LMDE edition (I have it on my desktop computer) but I believe I will have to install a lighter Mint distro on the laptop; now I'm searching it and hopefully install it once I dedide which one to use.

Your opinions are very welcome.

Cheers.

[Oldredbeard]

Yes Kendall is right. Fluxbox is lighter and much more responsive on the hardware you posted. I think you will find it to be much better on that lapptop, it doesn't use as much ram, therefore it wont have to access the hard drive as much or as long.

[jeffreyC]

I have run Mint Fluxbox on a computer with about half the resources of yours.
I think if you wait a little longer you can get the Fluxbox version of LMDE, Kendall is working on it.

[Kendall]

Yep. Hoping to have a preliminary build up for initial testing at some point in the next week.

[rolandpish]

Yep. Hoping to have a preliminary build up for initial testing at some point in the next week.

Wow! Those are really great news!
I think I will wait for the LMDE+Fluxbox as I really prefer a Debian based distro. Meanwhile, I'll have to tune up my system, looking for lighter applications and wait with patience for this version of LMDE.

I really appreciate your replies and help.

Kind regards.

[rolandpish]

This thread takes me to another question: Does Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. use less memory resources in a Fluxbox version than in a Gnome version?
Are those applications resources dependent on the Desktop Environment used?

Cheers

[wayne128]

This thread takes me to another question: Does Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. use less memory resources in a Fluxbox version than in a Gnome version?
Are those applications resources dependent on the Desktop Environment used?

Cheers

I think browser are independent on DE used.

[secipolla]

In the newest Firefox (I suppose that Seamonkey/Iceape may be the same) in the about:memory page there are buttons for minimizing memory usage. I would think that they may be useful for machines with limited RAM.

[kibubu]

Hello guys,

Does anyone have any update on the Fluxbox LMDE version?

I'd love to test it and report back!

Cheers;)

[iusumon]

@Kendall
We would love to have a mint debian fluxbox edition as fast as puppy linux with featuer riched.

Some featurers are:
1. Out of the box SAMBA Network Support for folder sharing with windows machines
2. Printer Sharing Support with Windows Machines
etc.