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Comment by russdpale | Hacker News Reader

lxde for the win! Seriously, I run it on a 12 year old laptop, and newer laptops and htpc's. It just can't be beat, in my opinion. The simplicity and customization is its power. I enjoy it more than xfce or mate. Though to be fair I have no tried mate on a non-ubuntu flavor.

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The one laptop I have running a Linux Desktop runs lxde, and it is pretty good, but I wouldn't say it's very customizable. Maybe I haven't spent enough time with it, but how do I add custom menu entries, for instance? How can I add additional menus to the panel? I miss Widowmaker/GNUStep, which still exists of course but no distro on earth uses it by default and Linux Desktops are enough of a pain to build from the ground up that people keep making distros with minor tweaks just so they don't have to do it again.

GNUStep could’ve been a contender. In an alternate universe, Gnome & KDE never fractured the desktop Linux space, and GNUStep became a first class alternative to macOS, eventually surpassing it.

I agree with that :) Though after a while I personnally traded simplicity* for more customization and performance and switched to openbox and now i3.

Edit: * Well no, "simplicity" does not exactly mean what I first thought it did. I guess I mostly traded ease of configuration / usage. Openbox and i3 are more difficult to approach but they don't lack on simplicity at all.

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