Linux Mint LXDE – Afterthoughts

So I’ve been running Linux Mint LXDE on my laptop at home for eight months or so. Having posted a review/opinion piece previously I wanted to add a few words – a warning if you will.


Basically there are some compromises to using the LXDE desktop – the limitations aren’t unique to Mint LXDE – they also apply to Lubuntu for example.

My main gripe is a lack of “Places” option for browsing your hard drive. This is kept inside the Accessories menu. And you simply get a File Manager so you can’t short-cut to specific folders. In addition to this I also struggled to connect to a network printer. I connected to the network drive ok – even one which was password protected using Samba. But come what may I couldn’t connect to the printer and therefore print.

One other what I would consider to be big omission was the ability to search your hard drive for a specific file. This has been around since before Windows XP so I was disappointed this was missing. I had to install a great little programme called Catfish which replaces the traditional search function and adds a few extras on top of this.

I also got frustrated with a lack of native ability to take a screen shot – I’m involved in coding a lot of website and for me the ability to take a screen shot of a web-page is a fundamental.

And this last one is more likely my own lack of experience but as I write it really isn’t obvious to me how to change my desktop wallpaper. Not crucial for your pc/laptop but irritating more than a show stopper.

Overall any LXDE distro is excellent on “older” hardware and breathes new speed into a machine that was more than likely beginning to wheeze under the stress of running XP or certainly Vista. I hope this little post doesn’t put you off choosing Linux Mint LXDE as it is overall an excellent choice – its FREE, very quick and very very stable. And that matters a lot to me.