What's the best (usable) lightweight desktop enviroment?

[yamfox]

And I mean lighter than Xfce.

[vrkalak]

Now, in 'lighter' than Xfce, are you refering to Xfce as in Xubuntu.

This is Xfce desktop environment installed over a Gnome base.
This is not the way Xfce was meant to run.

Xfce as a 'stand-alone' desktop is lots, lots lighter than Xubuntu.
and is way faster.

There are several Distros that run Xfce without a Gnome or KDE base.
Xubuntu (Xfce over Gnome) is way too 'bloated' for this.

I'd suggest you try Crunchbang 9.04 is built on a Ubuntu-base but without Gnome.
http://crunchbanglinux.org/
Crunchbang comes in either Openbox or Xfce

However, there are about 30 'light-weight' desktop environments for Linux.
Check some of them out.

http://xwinman.org/otherdesktops.php
http://xwinman.org/
http://penguinpetes.com/XWM_Guide/index.php

[Forged]

Openbox, or any of the *boxes really, is pretty awesome if you have some spare time to mess around. Otherwise you might want to try LXDE.

[JustinR]

I believe the most light and usable like GNOME would be OpenBox's version that was put into Lubuntu, called LXDE. Its an offical package in the repositories. It uses around 120MB RAM any little CPU usage in my tests.

[del_diablo]

Archlinux:
Xinit instead of using a DM, Openbox instead of a proper bloat DM.
Boots in about no time, i just need to get a SSD

[dzon65]

In "the ubuntu" family,minimal+openbox.Get some leightweight file manager and all the rest for that matter.
In the non-ubuntus,slitaz.Exept for tiny,you won't find any leighter/or faster.Puppy doesn't have that "ubuntu-look".

[ronnielsen1]

lxde or lubuntu

[philinux]

lxde or lubuntu

lxde is a desktop environment lubuntu is a distro which uses lxde.

Peppermint which is a bit lighter and uses openbox, only 407MG livecd.

[ronnielsen1]

openbox has always intrigued me because of the speed but I can't seem to learn how to tweak it

[ubun2warrior]

recently i came across a few lightweight distros, the lightes being dsl(damn small linux)only 50 MB. Then there is Puppy Linux (its quiet fast), arch linux, feahter linux. SLAX is also very cool even though it uses KDE it is very light and has the best looks.

[ubun2warrior]

I also read that blackbox which is used by dsl is one of the fastest dektop environments available

[dzon65]

recently i came across a few lightweight distros, the lightes being dsl(damn small linux)only 50 MB. Then there is Puppy Linux (its quiet fast), arch linux, feahter linux. SLAX is also very cool even though it uses KDE it is very light and has the best looks.

Dsl isn't really being updated.Tiny core comes in at about 10mb but is naked.Next in line is slitaz with a whopping <30mb,puppy is some 80mb.Slitaz looks alot like lxde (it has many lxde-components)and is blazing fast.It's hard to beat as footprint on the hd as well.You'll have to install a lot of things to have more than 500mb on your hd.

[Shazzam6999]

I feel like I argue for Arch + Openbox a lot, but on my laptop with awful specs it runs so quickly that I forget my laptop has an eighth the computing power of my desktop. It's pretty easy to configure if you install obconf and obmenu, plus it can be configured to look gorgeous with a decent conky and a nice panel. Tint2 looks amazing without any configuration and the pypanel config is extremely well laid out. It might be a little intimidating at first but once you get used to it you can set everything up extremely quickly.

It's not technically a DE, but it's great anyways.