Well the time has come to officially switch off from LXLE. This time around however I find myself in a weird spot. I’ve honestly struggled with LXLE; not in using the distribution itself but rather coming up with things to write about it. That isn’t to say that LXLE is bad by any stretch of the imagination, in fact it is quite good, it’s just that once you get used to the light weight desktop environment (DE) there is a perfectly capable “heavy weight” distribution underneath. What I mean by this is that once you get used to the DE and it fades into the background you’re left with a perfectly functional distribution that could just as easily have been Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Fedora or {insert your favourite one here}.

Due to this strength I didn’t find myself struggling to make things work or figure out new ways to accomplish the things I needed to do… things were pretty much where I expected them to be… and that’s a great thing! It means that if you want to run a distribution that will be somewhat lighter on your system but you don’t want to scrimp on the applications you need to get work done then LXLE may just be for you.

Pros:

One of the few distributions that uses the light weight LXDE environment

Very low system resources (my machine took less than 400MiB of RAM after logging into the desktop!)

Just because it is a light weight distribution doesn’t mean it gives you less featured alternative applications

Boring… but in a good way! The distribution gets out of your way and lets you get work done!

Cons:

Still a couple of little bugs that seem like obvious things that would be caught if it had a larger user base

Ships with a load of applications, the majority of which most people probably won’t use day-to-day (maybe they could save some space instead?)

Boring… other than the desktop environment there isn’t anything overly unique to this distribution. Seems like you could just install LXDE on top of Ubuntu and get the same thing.

Other:

How awesome is the desktop background changer button right in the tool bar? I mean at first I thought it was a ridiculous waste of space but now I’m addicted to changing my desktop wallpaper with the push of a button.

Be sure to check back here soon to find out where I land next!

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