Availability
Can you find it in a repository near you?
VERDICT Equinox DESKTOP Lumina Lxqt 5/10 7/10 9/10 moksha DESKTOP Openbox 5/10 8/10 Desktops designed for a particular distribution don’t work well on others.
With the exception of a couple, all the desktops in this
Roundup are available in the repositories of mainstream desktop distributions. Arch, however, leads the pack, in that it gives you access to all the options via its official and community-supported repositories. You’ll also get good mileage with Fedora, thanks to its Copr build system which complements its repositories.
Similarly, Ubuntu with its PPAS enables you to get your hands on a wide number of DES. One word of advice though: the quality of packages in the community-maintained repositories varies widely and ranges from anywhere between rock-solid to barely usable. You might not get the best experience using packages from a community-supported repository as compared to the official ones.
LXQT and Openbox are the two options that are universally available in almost every Linux distribution. LXQT maintains an extensive list of projects it supports officially on its website, and you can install it on Fedora using a Copr repository. Openbox too is universally supported. We couldn’t bring up the right-click applications menu using the package in the repositories of Fedora 29, but that was easily (oh really?–ed) resolved by downgrading the python-pyxdg package.
Lumina is primarily developed for the BSDS, but has also been ported to some Linux distributions. The project’s page lists a few distributions that have pre-built packages, including Debian, Gentoo and Arch. The desktop is also available via a Copr repository for Fedora, but it doesn’t perform well and crashed
during virtually every session. Ubuntu users can find guides to take them through the process of compiling it from source, which isn’t too cumbersome.
Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) hosts installation instructions on its official wiki and covers Arch, Debian, Slackware, Alpine and a couple of BSDS. The project itself lists these packages as experimental and advices you to compile EDE from source for the best user experience.
The Moksha desktop is a fork of the Enlightenment (E17) desktop. Again, it’s the default only on Bodhi Linux and we couldn’t get it to work on any other distribution besides Arch. There is a Copr repository but its last build failed for Fedora 25.