When comparing Equinox vs LXDE, the Slant community recommends LXDE for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like Desktop Environments for everyday users?” LXDE is ranked 5th while Equinox is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose LXDE is:
LXDE is a simple desktop without a lot of bells and whistles, this allows it to remain lightweight which helps conserve battery power and maintain its speed of use.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro LIghtweight
Equinox only consumes and needs tiny memory space.
Pro Customizable through a user-friendly control panel
The control panel lets you customize Equinox through various applets with which you can customize everything from the wallpaper to the fonts to use.
Pro Uses FLTK
It uses the lightweight and stable Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK).
Pro Conservative look
Pro Energy saving and extremely fast
LXDE is a simple desktop without a lot of bells and whistles, this allows it to remain lightweight which helps conserve battery power and maintain its speed of use.
Pro Simple and straightforward menus
LXDE utilizes a XP like menu which is straightforward and familiar to many users.
Pro Nicely balanced between speed, stability and features
Pro The most lightweight desktop environment
LXDE is by far the most lightweight desktop environment, even topping XFCE.
Pro You can setup LXDE with the same look across different machines easily
Most of the configuration of LXDE is read from files. Consequently, you can store and manage these files in the same way you might manage other dotfiles, meaning that you can setup LXDE to your liking on a new machine very quickly and easily.
Pro Uses Openbox
Pro Designed for cloud networks
LXDE works well on lower end devices such as cloud computers or netbooks. it is able to do this because of its low CPU and RAM requirement.
Cons
Con Not very stylish
It's not a very stylish desktop.
Con Poor support by distributors
Most distributions don't ship Equinox so you have to build it from source.
Con Doesn't look very well out of the box
But it is very customizable.
Con Deprecated
Development has moved to LXQt.
Con Ugly and horrble UX
Con Development has slowed
LXDE is slowly reaching End of Life, but will still receive new updates as long as GTK +2 is in use.
Con No compositor
In order to keep the system light weight and CPU/GPU non intensive LXDE forgoes a compositing program, because of this there will be screen tearing. Though a compositor like Compton can be added for those that want it.
Con Only halfway to GTK+3
Most of Xfce's components were built in GTK+2 and the upgrade process to GTK+3 was very slow due to the lack of manpower.
Con Uses GTK
Nowadays, GTK is designed primarily for use with GNOME and with only GNOME in mind. Trying to do anything else with it results in needlessly hacky, unattractive programs.
Con Openbox doesn't support Wayland
Con Problem with log in
"The session is locked" message is a frequent problem when working with Lubuntu.