Any experience with LXDE?

[zvi]

Right now, I use Ubuntu, which occasionally feels a whee bit sluggish (particularly when I use FF, as I'm still using 3.0; I haven't quite wanted to do the upgrade to 3.5 before it was in the official repos. I am giving deep, deep thought to just switching to Chromium.)

I got a new-to-me laptop and put Xubuntu on it, which seems zippier, but frustrating to customize (Particularly the menus, I have to edit and create .desktop files, which is not exactly a barrel of monkeys, but not the least fun time I've ever had either.)

I was wondering if anyone were familiar with LXDE, how it is to use, whether it has a menu editor, where I would go for tips and tricks? Thanks for any help you can give.

Comments

[kerravonsen]

The only part of LXDE I've used is LXpanel; it's fine but fairly basic. The main reason I use it is because it can be used independently of its desktop environment (I use it with Fvwm just for the systray and menu). Unfortunately for you, in order to customize the menu in LXpanel, you have to edit the config file for the panel; there isn't a GUI for it.

I guess the first question of which desktop environment would suit you is: what features do you want? Obviously you want something zippier than GNOME, which means that KDE is out. I'm kind of surprised that you found XFCE4 (what Xubuntu uses) to be so frustrating; I rather like it. But then I don't tend to edit menus, I just go with the default.

Because of this, I can't speak to how easy or difficult menu-editing is with various DEs, but there are a couple of other lightweight DEs you might want to try out also: Enlightenment, and Fvwm-crystal. (Not Fvwm; it requires a lot of file-editing to customize, which wouldn't suit you. Me, I love it just because it is supremely flexible, but I like getting under the hood.)

[zvi]

The menu editing is probably the biggest thing for me; if I download a java app, I really much prefer to add it to the menu. (I try to avoid desktop or panel launchers.)

I've heard that Enlightenment is pretty fiddly, but I might see if there's ubuntu package for fwvm-crystal. Thanks.