When comparing Equinox vs Lumina, the Slant community recommends Lumina for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like Desktop Environments for everyday users?” Lumina is ranked 17th while Equinox is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Lumina is:
The desktop works without Systemd, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit or even D-Bus.
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 Does not depend on toolkits
The desktop works without Systemd, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit or even D-Bus.
Pro OpenSource with no copyrights
The whole desktop is licensed under 3-clause BSD license which gives you complete freedom for any reuse
Pro Lightweight
It's fast and responsive.
Pro No dconf or gconf
All desktop configuration files are simple plain-text files on the back-end.
Pro Filemanager Insight fully supports ZFS
As it was initially developed for BSD-systems its file manager "Insight" supports the advanced ZFS features other Unix file managers misses.
Pro Qt-based
A Qt-based desktop.
Pro Modular
Since there are no toolkits all applications are just GUIs to common *NIX applications.
Pro Easy to configure
Pro Completely customizable
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 Poor support by distributors
It is unavailable from the most distributions so you have to build it from source.
Con Not really beautiful
Functionality comes first.
Con Unthemeable for usual users
As all Qt desktop environments themeing is hard since you need to know C++. There is a workaround using qss, however, it's not as powerful as GTK/CSS, Enlightenment or Windows theming.