

When Nicholas Negroponte founded One Laptop Per Child, the project kicked off with extremely limited hardware, so the developers set about creating a desktop environment that was both very light on resources and very child-friendly. Pantheon isn’t officially supported on any other distro, but can be installed atop Arch, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Fedora. Keyboard warriors can also access virtually all aspects of the desktop without using the mouse.
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Many of the default apps that ship with Pantheon, such as the Calendar app, the Code text editor are written from scratch, to blend in with the rest of the desktop. Once it’s installed, you can use the tool to change the appearance of the desktop, set fonts, control the animations and more.

You can use the Pantheon Tweaks tool to customize the desktop. Nearly all actions on the desktop are subtly animated, but the desktop manages to strike a balance between form and function. The desktop nicely integrates the various elements, such as the Plank dock, the top panel (called Wingpanel) and the Slingshot application launcher.
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The desktop uses its own Mutter-based window manager called Gala and takes cues from the Mac OS X desktop for a pleasant user experience. The Pantheon desktop from Elementary OS is another minimalist but stylish desktop that has created a name for itself as an elegant and user-friendly desktop environment. You can find LXQt in the repositories of virtually all distros. The desktop uses modules, which are essentially desktop-independent tools for desktop specific operations, and its panel also supports plug-ins. LXQt offers a decent number of tweakable options that help customize the most commonly used aspects of the desktop. The applications menu features the traditional categorized list of apps as well as a search box to help launch apps. It adheres to the old but familiar desktop metaphor, with a status bar laden with icons at the bottom of the screen. The desktop will feel at home on a modern machine, but is still light enough to push an out-of-commission computer back into active duty. Thanks to this combination, LXQt manages to pull off the look and feel of a modern desktop without being a drain on resources. The LXQt desktop environment is a combination of the GTK-based lightweight desktop LXDE and Razor-Qt, which was an equally lightweight, but far less mature, desktop that used the Qt toolkit. You can find Enlightenment in the official repositories of all major distros. Configuring the desktop requires patience and willingness to try the different options and learn what each does. However, you’ll have to put some time to set it up as per your liking.


The desktop also offers plenty of modules and configuration options to keep you busy without overwhelming new users. For example, you get an option to select the text size in the windows, which is a really useful feature and even more so if you’re running Enlightenment on a high DPI display. The desktop has a first boot wizard that enables you to select various aspects of the desktop that define its behavior and appearance. There are subtle animations tucked in almost every element of the desktop, from the menus to the various desktop widgets.
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Yet, unlike many lightweight environments, the Enlightenment desktop is full of eye-candy that you’d expect from a full-blown environment, at a fraction of the resources. It is in fact more of a window manager as it lacks taskbars, panels and even menus. Several distros, including Ubuntu and Manjaro have spins based on Budgie and Fedora users can fetch it from the COPR repo.Įnlightenment is a rather unusual desktop environment. The developers have refined some of the essential elements of the desktop, which includes the Budgie Menu, which now sorts category names alphabetically, and the Icon Tasklist applet that has several new features and behavior refinements. For example, by default Budgie doesn’t show icons on the desktop and has only one workspace, but both of these behaviors can be overridden easily from the Budgie Desktop Settings app. All the elements on the desktop, such as the applications menu, are implemented as applets.īudgie is easy to customize and extend and offers enough options to help you mold it as you want. The highlight of the desktop is its unified notification and customization center called Raven, which also gives you quick access to the calendar, media player controls, system settings and power options. Developed and used by the Solus distro, the Budgie desktop is written from scratch using components from the Gnome stack.
