LXDE vs OpenBox

[mashcaster]

What is the difference between LXDE and OpenBox. I know LXDE is basically OpenBox with a few extras, so how difficult is it to install OpenBox with some of the extras which come with LXDE like lxpanel?

[the yawner]

LXDE is not just Openbox plus some other stuff, it's a desktop environment which happens to use Openbox as a window manager. Much like how Metacity is used in GNOME. That said, if LXPanel can be run without the whole DE then you could switch your session to just use Openbox and have LXPanel.

[dekaru]

From their wiki:


We don't tightly integrate every component of LXDE. Instead, we try to make all components independent, so each of them can be used independently with few dependencies. This makes porting LXDE to different distributions and Unix systems easier.

http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Main_Page

So I guess you could theoretically install every component you'd like and have the lxde equivalent.

I do know for a fact that some appearance settings are a little ambiguous and not so easy to set if you install the components separately than if you install the whole desktop.