When comparing Budgie vs LXDE, the Slant community recommends LXDE for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like desktop environments for developers?” LXDE is ranked 2nd while Budgie is ranked 9th. 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 It's minimal and gorgeous
Pro It's maintained by a dedicated bunch of folks with an eye for detail
Pro Modern design
Pro Built from scratch and integrates into current technolgies
Budgie is built from scratch to integrate with the Gnome stack, this way hopefully having more stability by utilizing technologies that have a lot of community work already behind them.
Pro Very lightweight
Runs well on low-end hardware and gaming PC’s alike.
Pro Many large distros support it out of the box
Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, and Budgie's own Solus all support Budgie.
Pro No big memory leaks
It can be run for weeks with no noticeable increase in memory usage. That is a vast improvement over gnome-shell.
Pro Can emulate Gnome 2 desktop look
The Budgie desktop can emulate the classic Gnome 2 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 a desktop environment
It's just a replacement for the GNOME-shell and you still need a GNOME-desktop installed at the same time.
Con Sometimes buggy
Budgie can sometimes be buggy.
Con Less lightweight than you would expect
Budgie has a nice and simple style, but the memory usage is quite high after booting. Thankfully, the lead developer is working to remedy this.
Con Does not properly support multi monitor
Having two monitors works, but it's not perfect.
Con Has not switched to Qt as promised
Very dependable on Gnome
Con Very hard to install
Installing in distros that are not Ubuntu-based can be hard.
Con Lacks some basic features
Many things you'd take for granted aren't available in Budgie, like an option for showing windows from all workspaces when alt-tabbing.
Con Issues with proprietary drivers and Mutter
Mutter causes issues with screen tearing and microstuttering in most applications especially with NVidia GPUs.
Con Still in development
Budgie is still young and in active development, so it may not be as stable as many other desktop environments.
Con Just another GNOME-shell alternative
You still have to install and use GNOME software.
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.