My good old EEEPC
netbook is, day by day, getting too old. Apart from usual aging
hardware problems, like the decreasing battery capacity, also the
software side is worsening at every update. I still have the latest
Ubuntu release installed but
Gnome-Shell is showing a
persistent delay in responding to some mouse actions like opening
menus or showing the activities screen.
I decided for giving a look to some of the so
called “light-weight” desktop engine in order to possibly
completely or partially replace Gnome-Shell.
Lxde (Lubuntu-desktop)
Lxde is, together
with Xfce, among the most famous
lightweight desktop environments. I decided to install it on my
netbook instead of performing my tests with a live disk like I
usually do. This should let me obtain a more accurate and realistic
test. I'm not too worried about leaving my system too “dirty”
since I'm probably going to re-install the whole operating system on
the EEEPC once I'll have come to a decision.
I so installed Lxde trough the apt-get command:
sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop
then I logged out from Gnome-Shell and logged back
in after selecting Lxde from the login menu. Lxde offers, in the
login menu, selection between two desktop modes: the “classic”
(Lubuntu) and the netbook (Lubuntu-Netbook) mode.
Lxde “Classic” mode
The “Classic” Lxde desktop shows a
Gnome-2-like user interface with a bottom panel and a bottom-left
program launcher menu.
