What "minimal" Linux distribution do you use with a desktop environment?

General Linux Question
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Hello Friends

Just being curious:

  • What “minimal” Linux distribution do you use with Desktop environment?

where the OS itself uses a minimum amount of Hardware?

In my case

Thanks for your understanding

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Void with Xfce (potato laptop), Void with Cinnamon, Gentoo with Sway/Hyprland. I have switched to Sway on openRC systems (laptops) but still use Hyprland with Systemd (desktop). Sway and Hyprland aren’t full de though. Cinnamon is my choice when having a full DE. It’s like the old gnome used to be. Peppermint looks good but haven’t tried it.

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Huge Thanks for your feedback.

BTW Peppermint works with xfce too

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Void with Xfce, Antix with IceWM, Peppermint Devuan with Xfce, Artix with Xfce, Chimera with Plasma

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Thanks for the list … I will see each option in peace soon as I can

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Well, I use Bunsenlabs on two of my older machines, has not exactly a “desktop environment”, but the openbox window manager, is Debain based with a small footprint.
Doesn’t have fancy “bling-blings” on it, but is very quick, nicely configurable and gets the job done, once one has adapted to the usability…

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For me it’s Archcraft and Archbang, both with OpenBox

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Antix is a good choice for minimal with DE… it defaults to a choice of Window managers, but you can add any DE. It is Debian based and non-systemd. It has 32 bit versions.
My second choice would be Void with minimal package installs. Void has 32 bit.

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I like AntiX with JWM. If I want a full desktop environment, I’d use lxqt. It’s one of the lighter weight desktop environments. Equinox Desktop Environment using FLTK also seems like an interesting option for a full desktop environment. I run several FLTK apps. Not sure I like the idea of the extra theming library EDE makes use of and tries to integrate with other apps though.

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My Antix uses IceWM. I am thinking of trying Enlightenment… it is a half-way-house to a DE.

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Tried building Enlightenment from source at one point. Sent in some patches for some libraries the Enlightenment project had recently released that were still buggy. They weren’t really happy about receiving contributions from people outside of their team. Wasn’t impressed with how many dependencies the desktop needed either. Really not that lightweight. Plus, there weren’t any applications I truly wanted that were Enlightenment based. FLTK and Fox Toolkit had more applications I’d like to use in a desktop environment and both GUI libraries are more lightweight than the Enlightenment GUI libraries.

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If I wanted something “Minimal” desktop, it would be Debian with LxDE. Or maybe Devuan, but again: LxDE.

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If you want to do that sort of thing, have a look at lumina desktop.

It is all C++, completely portable, and needs development. They would welcome contributions, I am sure.
I had it going in Void some time ago… it is OK to use, easy to customize, and really minimal.

I would like to have a go at that.

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