Windowmanagers ... A Necessary(sorta) Evil Which do you prefer??

[hashbang 0]

Hey Guys,

I am running an old clapped out PIII 600 machine. I have been starting to experience preformance handicaps particularly when running something like openoffice. I try and work off the command line as much as possible (like using pine for mail, vi for editor, etc.). Part of my problem is the current Mandrake distro I am using ... I think I'll switch back to debian unstable or gentoo (I'm still deciding) to maximise the resources of the machine.

 

Anyway ... I have played with most all of the windowmanagers. I liked KDE but found it to be too much of a hog on system resources. Gnome is also OK, but ... I dunno, just something about gnome that bugs me. I used Enlightenment for a long time and found that novel and fun and excellent to customise but I got irritated with it after a couple of months. Recently I had been running blackbox and icewm. Both are again OK but nothing spectacular. I briefly tried Xcfe and havn't looked at that one enough to know if I like or don't like it. And then there was WindowMaker ... I used this one a couple of years ago and found that it is still the same today .. again, fun to play around with but frustrating over time.

 

Which windowmanager do you prefer and why?

 

cheers

hashbang

[qwijibow 0]

I use the Kwin window manager (part of k desktop environment [ KDE ])i have a Athlon64 3400+ CPU, so i can spare a few extra cpu cycles.But when im using a slower machine (my pentium2 266mhz), i go without a desktop environment and just use a pure windows manager like IceWM or FluxBox.XFCE also deserves mention, its very good looking, but as as light on the cpu as fluxbox.. (almost).

[the empty calorie 0]

GNUstep can be frustrating at first, but I got quite comfortable with it. It's very light on resources, and very simple. Of course it doesn't get very friendly until you spend some quality time configuring it, then it seems to be just as funtional as any other window manager. The only thing that bugs me about it is that stupid paper clip...I noticed little to no slowdown on my computer at all when running this WM, even using the GIMP. It had a 266MHz Celeron-Covington, 440BX chipset, 256MB RAM, running Slackware 7.1, 7.2, and later 8.

[MajesticTreeFrog 0]

hmmm, XFCE looks good. I may have to try that, unless someone informs me of reasons not too. It lookes somewhat like a not as sexy version of OS X

[jonypawks 0]

Hmm, since you're on a slower machine you'd definitely want a minimalistic's WM. I would suggest Blackbox but you said you didn't like it too much. Fluxbox is similar in resource usage but has a bit more eyecandy. Openbox is another one that's pretty lightweight and it uses XML for it configuration. That's what I use. I've been hearing good things about XFCE4, but it wasn't for me. FVWM can be very lightweight and is probably the most customizable WM out there but you have to be willing to dedicate a large chunk of time to configuring it. Well, hope one of those suits what you need.