XFce

&quot;Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems. Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources.&quot; (by Olivier Fourdan, creator of Xfce).

It is great for any machine from low-end 486 systems to high-end workstations. It is similar to the CDE window manager used by most proprietary UNIX variants, but is based on the GTK+ toolkit used by GNOME and supports modern desktop standards, such as XFT for nice anti-aliased fonts.

A strong point of Xfce is its ease of configuration - it is driven entirely by the mouse. The latest version features drag and drop, translations for numerous languages, including support for multi-byte character sets, and numerous other features.

The desktop environment includes a window manager, called Xfwm, the main panel, a file manager, a backdrop manager, a sound manager, a calendar, a pager module, and a GNOME compatibility module. Among other things this compatibility module allows applications to use the system tray in the same manner as they would with a GNOME (or other XEMBED-compliant) desktop.