LXDE vs. XFCE, Battle of the lightweight Desktop Environment

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Which one do you believe is better.

In the words of "Andy Pipkin" - 'That one!"

Details??

Pardon me but XFCE is gotten considerable more bloated in recent releases. Like back in 2005 when Xubuntu 5.10 was originally released XFCE was so light it can run like lightning with 64MB RAM and a 233Mhz Processor. Now a 350Mhz with 192MB of Ram is needed for the same performance in some instances. (Friend of mine tested it back in the day.) However I have started to notice not as wide of a cap between the performance of XFCE and GNOME/ KDE than in the past.

LXDE has in recent times become the king of lightweight desktop environments.

However the features of both shall still be debated.

I really liked the LXDE desktop but I am on a laptop and loose my wifi if I use it, where are the settings to find my network?

XFCE is bloatware. It provides precious little performance improvement compared to GNOME (at least in my experience), but with the loss of considerable functionality and a hundred mildly obnoxious quirks that combine to make it not at all worth my while.

On the other hand, I quite like LXDE. It starts instantly, it is blazing fast and is very highly configurable. It also has a clean, uncluttered interface that gets out of your way. PCManFM (the original, and central, component of LXDE) is hands down the best file manager ever written, lxpanel is both lightweight and very functional, and of course there is the power and flexibility of OpenBox underneath. What's not to like?

I agree with gamefreak's assessment- right now LXDE is the best lightweight desktop environment available. If XFCE continues on its current trend, it will no longer be considered a lightweight desktop environment at all, and will simply become a third heavy desktop alongside GNOME and KDE. Of course, LXDE has been growing in size as well. Hopefully they'll stave off the feature creep for many years to come.

Friskeygirl- LXNM is not yet mature or functional. I use GNOME's network manager in LXDE. You have to set it as a startup application unless you want to manually start it every time you log in. Another popular choice is to use wicd for wireless management.

Well LXDE is still being used on Knoppix and that is a Live CD distro that needs to be short, sweet and to the point. (Especially since loading a OS from a CD is slow just in nature.) Not to mention that Pre- G3 Macs and 13 Year Old Pentiums can run it at fairly good speeds.

I don't even know the difference between Ubuntu and Xubuntu on a 866MHz PIII I fixed for a friend. Testing both side-by-side in a dual-boot.

The window manager of xfce is compositing while the one used by lxde is stacking. That means xfce will always use more memory but it will be faster with a decent display card. It will also reduce the overhead when fancy effects (transparency, shadow) are used. I guess the xfce team has decided to target faster machines when they settled on xfwm. So if your machine is weak, especially in terms of RAM and display card, then lxde is the better choice.

I did get my network back LXDE disables the Network manager so installed Wicd as my network manager and finally got my wifi

XFCE isnt as lightweight as it used to be and infact operates slower than gnome in many setups and distributions. So for the purpose of being lightweight/smaller footprint I will have to say LXDE, but you asked which one is better and that all depends on what you want. XFCE is plenty more functional or rather feature rich. So its a matter of compromise between function and smaller footprint.