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Can somebody clear this up for me please? I always thought LXDE comes without a compositor or an element that is present in other desktop environments (DE's) that causes other desktop environments to degrade desktop performance. If it was the case, LXDE would beat any DE in terms of gaming performance in any test but it doesn't seem to be the case - see http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1210beta_desktops&num=1


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up vote 3 down vote accepted

The tests were conducted by "Frames per second - More is better" and LXDE beats most of the DE's, aside from certain situations (sometimes XFCE beat it, also a lightweight option), and -


Which gave KDE quite an advantage.

This article does confirm that you made a way better choice than Unity, as:



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OK, OK, but, putting XFCE aside, LXDE should never loose to KDE, right? Because the recent advancement in KDE performance comes from the fact that they are able to disable KDE compositor (KWin) while LXDE has no compositor by default, right? –  Bucic Dec 1 '12 at 9:56
@Bucic I'm confused by that as well. Would be great if someone could clear that up. –  Glutanimate Dec 1 '12 at 15:20
I think is has to do with the advancements with the compositor that is responsible for the speed, is that the video or game is still going through the compositor, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing_window_manager Since you are used to seeing the compositing only used for flashy effects that slow down the system, It seems It can actually improve video quality and performance (espasally since they have the option to " automatically suspending desktop effects for full-screen applications" not disable the compositor as @Bucic said. –  Mateo Dec 1 '12 at 20:58
ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1889034 "1. Don't be scared from a previous experience with it" –  Mateo Dec 1 '12 at 21:01
About stacking window managers, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stacking_window_manager –  Mateo Dec 1 '12 at 21:15
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