Many of you have heard about desktop environments such as GNOME or KDE. You might also have heard of XFCE, an alternative which is relatively lightweight compared to the previous two. Perhaps you belong to the clique of people who believe desktop environments to be bloated, and are using plain X11 + window manager. What if there was a desktop environment, well integrated, though lightweight as a window manager? Well, there is.
LXDE has recently gained popularity. It is now included in Knoppix, a well known LiveCD distribution. Since Knoppix runs from a CD, there isn't much space for applications, so there's a need to reduce the size of the userspace programs that are always running, such as the desktop environment etc. That's exactly what LXDE is good at.
Included in LXDE is a desktop manager, a file manager and a panel. The desktop manager and file manager together forms something equivalent to nautilus in GNOME, which is managing desktop, icons and files. The panel is similar to gnome-panel, and even has similar menus (uses freedesktop.org .desktop definition files).
I'm currenty running LXDE on my Asus EeePC 4G (see screenshot), and it really feels fast compared to GNOME, while taking up much less memory. LXDE proves itself to work well on small/old systems with little memory and slow CPUs, but also on faster systems, leaving your precious memory for your applications. It's ideal for games with it's small memory footprint, using about 128MB less compared to GNOME on my system. This may not seem like much, but on a system with 1GB of RAM (or 512MB for that matter), it makes a difference.
As a bonus, there is a special launcher included that is similar to the one included in the default Xandros installation on the EeePC, so you can have the "easy mode" look if you'd like. I personally never was quite fond of that launcher, but it may be comforting for beginners to not be confused by desktop icons etc.
