What is the lightest & fastest Desktop for Linux?

Comments

• jsg Member, Resident Benchmarker

  August 2025

  @plumberg said:

  @jsg said:

  @plumberg said:
  Whats the usecase?

  Depending on that, even the lightest gui will be a pain to run on 2gb ram.

  Uhm, no. I once had a really old pentium 4/mobile laptop and linux (Alpine) running quite nicely and let's call it very bearably kind of fast with JWM + taskbar + menu etc. on less than 1 GB. I also could browse kind of graphically with (IIRC) elinks.

  Btw, Free or Open BSD are quite nice and slim options as well.

  Re Firefox: Forget it, that's a bloated fat monstrosity.
  Re Ubuntu: Are you kidding? That's also a bloated fat monstrosity.

  Again its about usecase

  So yes I have used Linux with less than 1g ram with a full bloated gui and just works fine. But add more simultaneous tabs and all, it struggles to keep up.

  OP probably sounds like trying to maximize the buck by getting the cheapest vps and expecting quantum level performance simply by using a light weight skin

  Which btw wouldn't be the dumbest approach. I have been and still am running Unix servers doing useful work and with decent speed in 512 MB and, if push comes to shove in 256 MB - of bloody course without any GUI.
  OTOH of course (IMO) putting a GUI on a server (of any kind) isn't exactly the smartest approch in general.

  What I find a bit shocking is the majority of answers in between XFCE and Ubuntu as if a Xeon E5v4 was, frankly, way too yesterdecade and anything under at the very least 2 GB memory but a poor crutch.
  I always felt that Bill Gates was on a mission to stupidize people, and later linux was as well and it seems they won, but of course I-whatever and Android were the finalizers.

  Thanked by 1plumberg
• tpoll Member, Patron Provider

  August 2025

  I would go for openbox window manager
• default Veteran

  August 2025 edited August 2025

  @unfortunately said:
  I use LXQT
  https://lxqt-project.org/

  This is great for how it looks, but when I ran it a couple of years ago it had some issues with stability. Also x2go-server does not work properly on it.

  I had planned to give it a try again, but I ended up returning to LXDE and XFCE.