When comparing Common Desktop Environment vs LXDM, the Slant community recommends LXDM for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like Desktop Environments for everyday users?” LXDM is ranked 16th while Common Desktop Environment is ranked 21st.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Useful for low-end devices
As Linux moves into low-end territory with the likes of Raspberry PI, CDE's level of consumption seems extremely small. When it was first developed, 128MB or RAM was a lot.
Pro Stays out of your way
Has the drawer concept and the middle button on the mouse has a use again.
Pro Mature
CDE was developed more than 20 years ago to work as a unified DE for all the various forms of commercial, proprietary Unix operating systems that dominated the market back then: AIX, TRU64, HP-UX, Solaris, IRIX etc...
Nowadays it's released as an open source Desktop Environment for Linux. It comes as a free tested, widely deployed and enterprise-level product even if it's recently re-release as FOSS for Linux.
Pro Fast and fluent
Pro Works with Nvidia
Works well with Nvidia.
Pro Only two dependencies
Only needs GTK and Xorg-Server.
Pro GTK2 and GTK3 versions
Pro Works well on USB
A full install of arch on live USB works well on many computers with no text issues with LXDM.
Cons
Con Outdated UI
The graphical interface is very outdated and ugly. It's mostly for lower-end machines and for people who want to give their Linux machine a true UNIX feel.
Con Requires Xorg-server
Currently LXDM does not support wayland.