Desktop Appearance

The general appearance and functionality of the desktop in Linux is known as the Desktop Environment Several choices are available:

LXDE and XFCE are suited where:

• only a few apps are required
• older or lower resource hardware will be used

GNOME and its derivatives, CINNAMON and MATE

• provide most apps likely to be required
• require moderate hardware resources

KDE is the most functional desktop

• with trade-off of greater resource requirements, particularly RAM

All Desktop Environments provide for multiple instances of the desktop to be loaded simultaneously

• facilitates rapid switching between running apps
• but requires much additional RAM

Those upgrading from an older Linux running KDE3 should follow:

• KDE 4 Desktop Environment