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I have two situations in which I need to run desktops without any 3D acceleration.

1) I often run Ubuntu and CentOS VMs on a machine who graphic card does not play nicely with VirtualBox's 3D acceleration (bug in the drivers).

2) Accessing remote sessions

This isn't a quick "log in and check something", I could be working at them for hours, and the performance hit from using LLVMpipe really annoys me, so I could really use a Desktop Environment that runs on Modern distros but doesn't require 3D acceleration, but I can't find reliable info easily.

So:

Which currently maintained, mature, DEs don't require 3D acceleration (note, I'm not asking for an opinion on whether they are any good, I just want a list).

Jeff Schaller
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Ian Sudbery
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3 Answers3

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It depends what kind of features you want from a desktop or what you generally expect from it:

  • MATE: fork of Gnome 2, traditional environment with lots of features
  • i3: tiling window manager and easy to configure
  • XFCE
  • dwm: there are many tiling window managers based on or similar to dwm (catwm, monsterwm, ocelot, ..)
  • xmonad
  • awesome
  • herbstluftwm
  • OpenBox
  • icewm: preinstalled on openSUSE/SLES as fallback WM
  • LXDE
poinck
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Personally, I'm using XUbuntu which comes with XFCE by default. This I believe doesn't need 3D acceleration.

See also this related post on the subject.

Community
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fduff
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practically any small VM without compositing.

New on scene is for example LXQt, which are trying create fully capable lightweight desktop.

LXQt Lightweight Desktop Manager

mimi.vx
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