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But for others, who have older machines, it is a very real problem. One of the good points of GNU/Linux is that one does not have to keep upgrading one's hardware when software upgrades take place or when a distribution moves from one version to the next.
In recent times, GNOME has lost some traction, especially after the release of version 3, when it moved to a desktop design that resembles the interface of a mobile phone. KDE lost some traction when it released version 4.0 some three years ago, but that loss has been largely forgotten as it has fixed all the problems which that version had.
But still, using either desktop environment on older hardware does tend to slow things down - at times, unbearably so.
Here is where a desktop like the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment comes in. It is not half as well-known as KDE or GNOME but an excellent substitute.
LXDE is fast, has plenty of features, and is very stable. Strangely, I had never heard about it until March this year. Simply put, being a long-time GNU/Linux user, I settled on a desktop environment of my choice and, once one has done that, one tends to stick with it if it does not get in the way of productivity.
On my PC everything has been fine; KDE works well and allows me to do what I want even though it is now into its sixth year and has only a single-core AMD64 processor. But on my laptop, a Thinkpad which is in its seventh year of use and has a Pentium M 1.70Ghz processor and 2GB of memory, I experienced some instability earlier this year.
I was using KDE and the desktop failed to load after an upgrade. At the time it happened, my workload was such that I had no time to fiddle and find out what was wrong. I looked for the easy way out, a DE that would allow me to keep working.
For me, GNOME is not an option given its lack of configuration options. I had one bad experience with GNOME some years ago when I was forced to reinstall after an installation of Ximian went bad. It scarred me for life. After that, I have only looked at GNOME when evaluating other distributions for the purpose of writing about them, and that, on my spare PC.
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I learnt of LXDE when I was reading some of the reactions to the release of GNOME 3. On that list, mostly one of complaints, most of those who had found GNOME to be unusable spoke of switching to LXDE and being satisfied. I decided to give it a go.
Installation of LXDE, as with the installation of all software on a Debian GNU/Linux system, is ridiculously easy. It took very little time to familiarise myself with the basic of the interface. It was a desktop environment that promised to get out of the way. And it has lived up to that promise.
The past eight months of using LXDE have been free of any hassles. For one, it has the necessary configuration options that I need. You can tweak things to your own liking. Secondly, it is fast - and that makes a lot of difference when you have a laptop as old as mine. And finally, it is stable, very stable.
It has a nice file manager, makes reverting to the desktop easy and is remarkably uncomplicated. When you switch to LXDE, there is nothing like the learning process involved when switching to another desktop. And it strikes a nice balance between features and speed.
I don't use all of the features of LXDE. The list is impressive - it has, among other things, its own network connection manager, a tool to configure monitors, its own terminal, a minimalist text editor, and a fast and robust file manager. It is not hostile to other applications either; in summation, it stays out of your hair and allows you to concentrate on what you are doing.
LXDE is fairly low-profile and deserves much more publicity than it currently receives. No amount of praise can be too much for the developers who thought it up and keep it going.
