In 2006, Hong Jen Yee (known as PCMan) wrote the PCManFm file manager. From this one program, LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) grew to become a major desktop environment. Unlike the tight integration of applications from the KDE Project and the GNOME project, LXDE is a collection of independent applications. The goals of LXDE are to be lightweight, in terms of resource requirements, and energy efficient. LXDE uses in less resources that Xfce, which is also a lightweight desktop.

LXDE uses the GTK+ toolkit, and is written in C. LXDE is licensed under GPL and LGPL. For LXDE, LXDM is the X11 Window Manager and Openbox is the display manager. LXDE has no hidden panels, no widget manager, no resource hungry components. It is a simple clean desktop, as shown in the following screenshot:

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The above screenshot was taken with LXDE as the desktop from the Lunbuntu distro. The Lubuntu desktop is slightly different, as shown below:

The icon on the far right of the lower panel launches the shutdown menu. The icon on the far left opens the application launcher menppu. The application launcher menu, itself, is a very simple menu as shown below:

The above screen shows the preferences menu, which contains most of the configuration applications. It does not contain any applications that modify the panel. To modify the panel, you need to right click on the panel, and select Panel Settings. The two icons after the menu icon are part of the Application Lauch Bar applet. To modify its contents, you need to right-click on the Application Launch Bar. Each applet on the panel has its own configuration menu that can be accessed by right-clicking on the applet. Configuration options do exist, they are just not contained in a single window.

LXDE has a default of two virtual workspaces (called Desktops in LXDE). To modify the number of "Desktops," you can either right-click on the Desktop Pager applet, or launch the Openbox Configuration Manager from the Preferences menu. To  move a window to another desktop, you need to right-click on the title bar of a window, and select the Send to desktop option.

For following Web sites provide additional documentation about LXDE:

• The official Web site for LXDE is LXDE.org.
• The Lubuntu Web site provides another source for documentation.