The future of Xfce

[Huckleberry Finn]

MX-19 was the third lightest, behind only Bodhi and LXLE.

But it's already said: "mid-weight" , "medium-sized footprint". Not "lightest".

[manyroads]

FWIW ... The thing I have noted (proved to myself) is that most DE's and WM's (Desktop Environments and Window Managers) seem to run plus/minus about 20% of each other on the same distro/ hardware. There are larger differences cross different distros. For example xfce and openbox and hlwm, dwm, and bspwm all run at just under 1GB on MX Linux (on the same laptop, by my tests). They each run about 30% lighter than a manjaro setup ( again on the same laptop again). On MX I run:
bspwm
openbox
hlwm
dwm
xfce
budgie
gnome

... at between 900MB and 1.1 GB at idle.

Given that most folks have PCs with 4GB+ and decent hard drives or SSDs, I think you are reasonably safe on MX and antiX in choosing whatever style desktop you like.

[asqwerth]

manyroads, are all those different DEs and WMs installed on the same MX installation/partition?

[manyroads]

Right now I have have bspwm, dwm, hlwm, openbox, xfce on the same partition sharing the same keybindings (using sxhkd and .xsessionsrc) and datafiles. I change environments from the LightDM screen. This older Dell idles at about 700-800MB (no matter the desktop) with DropBox running. I have experienced no stability (cross desktop) issues (over the last several months). Given I also run the same setup on a second laptop (Intel i5 gen 10), I currently prefer to use MX (I run ahs) over manjaro.

I'll publish something on the setup and my learning(s) sometime fairly soon.

btw. my current favorite desktops are dwm & OpenBox. But I'm fickle... they change...

[Katie Boundary]

MX-19 was the third lightest, behind only Bodhi and LXLE.

But it's already said: "mid-weight" , "medium-sized footprint". Not "lightest".

You seem to have missed my point: being lightweight is a major part of MX's appeal regardless of what weight class it's aiming for.

[richb]

Of course the term light weight is mushy. What does it mean, small ISO, low CPU, low memory. all of the above? You can have a distro with a huge ISO that installs many packages and is still "light" on CPU and memory usage.

[AA BB]

Installing Many Roads MX 18.3 minimal convinced me that 'minimal' is the only way to go' relative to meeting my office needs, but for MX-19 requires lots of time eliminating MX pkgs we don't need.

Using antiX-19 core, I was able to build a Fluxbox / spaceFM based desktop, then added the other pkgs our office staff regularly use.
... The AntiX-19 build does not have all the 'bells and whistles' that an MX /Fluxbox install has, but it's highly functional relative to meeting our day-to-day needs, and saves me lots of time managing several other boxes in my office environment. Snapshot backup on each box is very fast and multiple snapshots + home folder backups for each box easily fit on a USB stick.

IMHO MX would be greatly improved if it adopted a 'minimal build' philosophy that allows users to install whatever pkgs they want/need using MXPI.

[asqwerth]

Are we still discussing the future of XFCE in this thread? Looks to be going off topic.

[jeffreyC]

In years past I have whittled away Xfce installs on an i386 and managed to get one to run using 90mb of RAM and another later release used 109mb of RAM (this with Xfce4 terminal in dropdown and conky running).
If you want much lighter you probably need to run a Window Manager like Fluxbox or JWM.

Each release uses more resources than previous releases, this is true with any software though.

[richb]

Are we still discussing the future of XFCE in this thread? Looks to be going off topic.

You are absolutely right. Let's get back on topic.