It's a matter of taste (and a worthless endeless discussion). I've tried so many times Xfce and LXDE. I know there's a lot of love for Xfce, but rendering is quite poor to me. For me there are just two options. For DE I only consider KDE. Don't care about the rest. For WM, after trying so many I always go back to Openbox. I love Compiz standalone, which is not specially more heavy than OB, quite buggy, but my favorite rendering so far.bazsound wrote:if you really cant get used to LXDE (i dont understant why as its pretty similer to kde or xfce just without all the fancy cpu hogging fancy features which you really dont need its just effects) you can always apply the mac osx theme to lxde. This transforms it from the basica almost windows 95ish look to a shiny mac os theme.
however this does comsume a little more resources but no where near as much as kde.
I like LXDE, it uses around 100mb of ram on login freeing up ram and resources for more important tasks.
right now im only using 680mb of ram with firefox open
Kwin standalone is something that I still haven't managed to work right, but keep on trying. Regarding effects I don't use too many. Most are disabled. just five to improve my workflow. Nothing about eyecandy, just windows and desktop switching and windows management set to instant. But enabling them or disabling them all makes about no difference in Ram or CPU load besides the popular belief. There are other things in KDE which actually make the load. Not a few desktop effects. That's why I'd like to run Kwin alone instead. It's not bigger than the lighter DEs and doesn't have more impact in RAM or CPU.
BTW, my attempts with Razor-qt were quite disappointing. It still needs a long go. Just purged it.
Thank you for 14.04: I had to buy a new laptop, and this has SSD and Nvidia optimus, which are really better managed on Trusty... No problem installing with USB-stick, made with USB creator on Ubuntu.