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X GUI

Xfce: Alternative to GNOME/KDE 143

Posted by Hemos from the the-more-the-merrier dept.
tintin writes "While GNOME and KDE get most of the attention from the user and distributions, other alternatives should not be left out. The interview with Olivier Fourdan of Xfce points out one lightweight alternative, XFce. To get more information on Xfce, go to xfce home page"
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Xfce: Alternative to GNOME/KDE More

Xfce: Alternative to GNOME/KDE

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  • Well... while I agree that KDE or GNOME will be used by the majority, myself included, the minority may prefer something different. Also, more choice is good and that is not a bad thing. XFce is not about competing with GNOME or KDE... There is no competition here... people who like it will use it.

    I believe people who have come from a SunOS, Solaris, and HP-UX background to use XFce because it provides them with an interface which is very very similar to CDE. On the other hand, KDE and GNOME will help users with a windows background to make the transition more easily to linux.

    We have to keep in mind that linux is about choice. Sure GNOME vs. KDE battle will always be there but so will enlightenment, blackbox, fvwm, afterstep, openlook, sawfish, etc... We must also remember that raw linux is the command line, yet another choice for how users interact with their boxes.
  • that's just one of the flaws with the open source, model I guess -- we have dozens of teams reinventing the wheel and none building the car.

    Actually, given the nature of open source, each time somebody reinvents the wheel, it just gives another option for our car.

    Or, to put it in precise, real-world terms: each time somebody writes a new window manager, we have another option for our desktop.

    I've been using KDE 2.0 since the early alphas. The very early versions (out of CVS) were buggy, and a buggy WM can knock you out. (POI - I was using some KDE 1.1 apps, some KDE 2.0 apps - they coexist just fine).

    So, what did I do? I switched the Window Manager to BlackBox, a very nice lightweight WM that works wonderfully. I'll stay in it until KDE 2.0 is officially released, and possibly afterwards: I happen to like it.

    Of course, most people would agree that the KDE Window Manager is much more advanced... it allows fancy theming (BlackBox just allows some nice color gradiants), and a nice launch bar and other such "modern" GUI features.

    But tastes vary, and I happen to have gotten used to BlackBox, and may very well keep using it one KDE 2.0 final comes out.

    To use your analogy: I bought a KDE car... but tricked it out with nice custom alloy wheels.

    --
    Evan

  • Man, the signal to noise ratio in here sucks...

    Now that THAT'S out of the way, I'll go on to say that I've actually tried Xfce (as opposed to just going out and looking at screenshots), and found that it does pretty much what it claims: it's an attractive, lightweight windowmanger that is backward compatible with kde and gnome.

    In addition, it has the look and feel of cde. I don't care that much for CDE, but the dashboard is not always on top, it's easy to add apps to, and my newbie brother who just loaded linux on his old 233 doesn't have to sit around waiting for gnome to become un-io-bound.

    If you want quick, out of the box ease-of-use and a desktop environment that leaves enough juice available on low-end hardware to do more than play with the perty widgets, check this out - and it's a hellofalot more stable than gnome on my (slightly) bigger iron, too.

    I've nothing against gnome - in fact I rather like it - but it's got some distance to cover in terms of stability just yet.

    Blessed Be
    May the Force be with You
    Live Long and Prosper

  • Ya know, it's posts like this, not to mention most of the other posts I've read so far, that really makes me wonder if anybody in this community really wants Linux to become the dominant desktop OS.

    Who cares?

    Really. I like linux because it works right. If making it work like that other dog of an OS is needed to make it "become the dominant desktop OS" then screw that, I sure as hell don't want it! If I wanted that crap I'd be using that crap already!

    But projects like GNOME and KDE are necessary for they will help bring Linux to the masses.

    And the people that work on those projects are perfectly entitled to spend their time and their talent where they see fit, however stupid I might think their choices are. But bringing Linux to the masses IS stupid. Let the masses come to Linux, when and if they learn to appreciate it. Dumbing it down and imitating the same bloated ugly monster that drove most linux users to try it in the first place is just plain insane. And useless.

    I am not a big fan of Xfce - I tried it, I didn't particularly like it, I went back to WindowMaker. But a lot of people do like it, and that's the whole point - it serves the needs of some users a lot better than any of these damn stupid world dominations schemes will ever serve anyone. Except Bill Gates, of course. He's very well served by this whole mindset that computers have to cater to the lowest common denominator, and he has the bank account to prove it.

  • Trust me, I've been using Linux for 5+ years now and at different times I've played with just about every window manager out there from fvwm, olwm, afterstep, windowmaker, icewm, black box, enlightenment-gnome, sawmill/sawfish, twm, mwm, and of course KDE.

    Of all of them KDE was the most useful to me, after I reconfigured it of course. But like I said, KDE is HUGE! Icewm comes close, but has the annoying "feature" of only having windows in the task bar for the virtual desktop you've currently got open, and I've found no way to turn this feature off.

    I'm not sure which versions of enlightenment and sawfish you're using, but the one's I've encountered DON'T resize windows correctly in call cases. If a window is partially "under" the task bar, it will be resized to overlap the task bar. Netscape is where I bites me every time. So I have to double click on the window, which causes it to "scroll up" macintoy style, then I have to unmaximize and remaximize it, then unsroll it to get it to fill the proper portion of the screen. Both E and sawfish do this which leads me to assume its a gnome issue instead of a problem with the window managers themselves. I'm using helix-gnome, so that may be part of it.

    Lee Reynolds
  • Thanks for bringing this up. I've used AfterStep for years now. When I started looking at kde/gnome, they just offered me more choices. I use gnome-terminal as my Xterm and other gnome apps. kpackage as my rpm manager and other kde apps. But I use NEdit as my editor and various other packages from other open source efforts. The beauty of this is that I can combine the best of whatever is out there and build my own work/desktop environment.!!

  • I don't mean to disparage the hard work that the authors have put into this project, but do they really think that this can compete with KDE and GNOME?

    Somewhere back in time, 1992

    I don't mean to disparage the hard work that the authors have put into this project (Linux), but do they really think that this can compete with AIX and Solaris?

    Fast forward and you'll see... (and I am talking about low/middle end servers)

  • I'm not saying it can't be pretty or flashy. I'm also never said a word about drag and drop. Bells and whistles may attract some people who see it as a toy, but serious users, which is anyone using it at work, wants something that works well instead of simply looking pretty. A consistent look and feel is of course important, but these are application issues, not Window manager issues.

    I'm hoping that as time goes by and the uber-desktop developers get over the phase of placing flash before function, that the issues I have with most of the current desktop environments (and all of the upcoming ones) will be resolved through user feedback.

    Linux has the potential to become the most powerful desktop system ever. Because the users ultimately define what it is, we can sculpt and hone it till it to perfection.

    To me part of that perfection will mean that it is extremely configurable with each user able to alter the interface to his or her personal tastes. So someone coming from a windows background will be able to get a desktop that works just like windows if he wants, and someone coming from a Mac background will get a Mac desktop if she wants. Or any combination of features from both of them, or neither of them.

    Traditionally GUI's have tried to be something the user had to learn and get used to, malleable in some areas and unyielding in others. This simply isn't how it has to be and I'm waiting for the day when it isn't.

    Lee Reynolds
  • IIRC a year and a half ago xfce was written using the xforms library. They've since switched to gtk. Last time I used it is was actually possible to run it alongside icewm (I beleive they use the same WM hints as gnome).
  • Sure, I do!

    I've got 2! a VR319 I do BnW stuff on (amazing resolution compared to a color monitor doing BnW) and a VRT19, 20" trinitron tube (that's the size of the image not the size of the monitor)

    Got both of them of a skip, the trick is to be able to drive them because they only do fixed sync and worse, they sync-on-green (but I've seen on the net that you can solder in some resistors and get it driven by external sync, too!!!)

    So how do you do fixed sync/ sync-on-green monitor to work with linux?

    Get yourself a millennium 1/2 maybe the new G200/G400 do it too and stick a sync_on_green option in your XF86Config:

    Section "Device"
    Identifier "Primary Card"
    VendorName "Unknown"
    BoardName "Matrox Millennium II"
    Option "sync_on_green"
    You will also need the modlines:
    Modeline "1280x1024" 130 1280 1300 1460 1696 1024 1027 1030 1069 +hsync -vsync
    (I've seen some 1024x768 modelines for the VRT19 but I don't care, as long as 1280x1024 works) and that's it, you're all set!

    Don't forget your friendly

    Visual "GrayScale"
    in your screen/svga section and you'll enjoy your black'n'white monitor even better!

    That's for X, I haven't checked if SVGATextMode works with these monitors, 'coz driving characters at 1280x1024 maybe a little too fast for a millennium 2 but! you never know :-) Now, to get two of these suckers on your desk, use x2x or better, xfree86 4 (which I still have to try when I have time to spare)

    If you are serious about imaging, buy yourself some of these OLD monitors, you won't regret it, they are well worth the 20$ you'll pay for them at a computer fair (because nobody knows how to drive them with PCs...)

    Only drawback appart from being fixed frequency... they run hot... something to consider if you have them at home.

    Back to the subject, olvwm [columbia.edu] is your WM if you run 256 colors. Slick and functional.

    ---

  • My average day involves playing with Solaris, FreeBSD, and various breeds of Linux. I've tried all the windows managers out there for *nixes. XFCE is easily configurable, easy on resources, and builds well across platforms. I liked the CDE environment and this is a logical extension. I don't play games, I don't play with graphics much, and i have no taste for themes. I do like logical interfaces. When I need a desk I'll continue to look to XFCE, all the functionality with only 25% of the bloat. Easy human readable confs are also a plus.
  • "Do not look at desktop with remaining eye"


    ___________________________
  • None of the desktop environments, Gnome, KDE, XFce, and others, address what I really want in a desktop environment: an easy way to integrate applications and reuse functionality. Instead, they are all complex C/C++ programs with even more complex APIs.

    Oh, sure, when I have to, I can hack them (I have written some Gnome/GTK code). But it feels like it's a lot more work than it ought to be. Let's hope some future desktop will address that issue.

  • I'm not sure why it is that there can't be a small, efficient, simple, window manager for X.

    There are plenty of small, light window managers for X11. You just havn't found them. Since they're all over the place, I imagine you havn't found any because you haven't looked. Examples: Sawfish [sourceforge.net], BlackBox" [alug.org], and LarsWM [fnurt.net]. Just to name a few.

    maximize a window so it fills as much of the screen as possible without overlapping things you don't want it to

    That's a configuration error. The three window managers I use on a regular basis(Enlightenment, Sawfish, and IceWM) all support this feature.

    No offense, but if I had any moderation points, your post would quickly be rather to (-1:Troll). Pretty much everything you railed against is configurable at the user's end. You're not bitching about KDE and GNOME, you're bitching about what Corel Linux uses for its default desktop(or Debian, or Red Hat, whatever). Sure, it might take you a bit of work to get things "just right", but it can be done. Pretty easily, too. So, most of your post is not only trolling, but also *WRONG*, as in incorrect. Sorry to have to break the news to you.

    Dave
    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,
  • You're absolutely right. I was just trying to point an alternative to THAT particular dude, which seemed to not be liking any of the alternatives...

  • Re:Less choice is always a good thing... (Score:3)

    by DickBreath ( 207180 ) on Friday September 29, 2000 @04:06AM (#745288) Homepage
    More choice is always a good thing...
    ...because three holy wars are better than one!

    I disagree.

    As someone already pointed out, it is the developer who chooses. So you end up with some apps for GNOME and some apps for KDE. This helps to spread our resources out thinner so that we are less effective at combatting big evil expensive systems.

    Of course, someone counters that you can run GNOME apps under KDE and vice versa.

    This just shows how out of touch the programmers are with what users want. (The abysmal user interface of most non-GNOME and non-KDE apps, and even of some GNOME and KDE apps, already make this abundantly clear, but that's a different topic.)

    It is not just a matter of which widget set a program is written with. I want the applications to be deeply integrated togerher. I want to cut and paste between apps. I want to grab some cells from my spreadsheet and embed them into my word processor, or charting application, and still keep those cells as "live" references back to the spreadsheet. I want component embedding. I want drag and drop between applications, where the receiving application is aware of the kind of data being dragged to it and can act accordingly. I want powerful scripting of all of the applications, but in an integrated way. Other fluff, like themeability where all the apps obey the theme -- not just the window decorations around the apps, but things that affect how the content of the app is presented, that is nice too.

    Despite all the bitching and moaning that only stupid end users want such things, make no mistake that this kind of an environment makes programmers more productive too.

    Me thinks it is a case of sour grapes. (Windows has it, we don't, so we make noises like we don't like it or want it. But then when it materializes, everyone will say "Of course, I was always in favor of Unix having such a rich and productive application environment.")

    Everytime I read about yet another new "lightweight" desktop environment, I read it as meaning "feature deprived". Other people seem to read "feature rich" as "bloat" or "heavyweight".

    I suppose that is why choice is good. At least I can choose either GNOME or KDE, while others can choose twm.

    I can understand where some people who cry "bloatware" come from. When I need to use under-powered hardware, I am glad to have icewm, and happy to use it. But most of the time I don't need to run on under-powered hardware.

    Mostly I use my "productivity" machine. The computer is supposed to make me productive, not the other way around, like in the 70's. How many megahertz and megabytes it requires be damned! Moore's Law and all that.

    There are plenty of "lightweight" desktops or widow managers out there. Why do we need yet another one? This question seems to go perpetually unanswered.

    I can imagine why some of them get written. It is fun to program. And such a project is quite a learning experience. I and don't begrudge anyone from building their own flavor of window manager just for the fun/learning of it. Maybe that's all that's happening here. I suppose yet another "lightweight" window manager isn't going to deplete resources from either KDE or GNOME. Serious developers porting from Windows will probably look mostly at GNOME or KDE. So I suppose I should quit ranting now.

  • One word: sawfish.

    Currently, I have 5 workspaces. Local xterms are configured to open in workspace 1, remote xterms in workspace 5. Sawfish knows that I want my time tracker not to be able to get focus, just like XMMS. It also knows that I don't want any maximized window to cover gkrellm so he doesn't do that. With middle-click on the root window I get a list of all the windows open, with left-click I get my customized menu. With right-click I get the normal sawfish menu. My right 'windows' key launches a local xterm, the 'menu' key makes my customized menu appear.

    Of course, aside from gkrellm, there is no permanent app or taskbar or whatever, but I like it that way. I decided to look around for another wm, but I didn't find any who would do what I wanted with the easiness of sawfish. Btw, I don't know lisp.

    Did I mention it is fast?

  • There's a difference between running (i.e. not crashing upon launch) and working together/integrating nicely with the rest of your software. Most X applications I've seen don't come even close to working together.
    That's more an indication of X's long history and ubiquity. Many X apps have development histories rather older than that of Linux and are used on many different Unices. Many of those are still being developed primarily on those other platforms. They are written for what's common to them all.
    Anyway, you prove my point. It mostly depends on the applications you need what environment you run.
    That's not at all what I said, I was merely pointing out the existence of alternatives. There are plenty of good apps that don't care which environment (or any) you run.

    As for working together, you don't need to standardise on either Gnome or KDE for that. Drag and drop protocols are not Gnome/KDE dependent.

    I find the current situation with GUIs on unix reducing choice
    You have every choice to have an integrated GUI, just choose the components. The problem is that you want to force everyone else to fit in with your choice and to develop just for that.
    Regardless which environment you target as a developer [...]
    sigh There's no need to target either environment or any. I have several commercial apps on my work machine that work perfectly well under Gnome or KDE - coming complete with auto-configured desktop icons and menu items - and also in my tailored WindowMaker-plus-selected-tools set-up, drag-drop and all.

  • Re:Er, so what's the point? (Score:5)

    by teraflop user ( 58792 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @10:13PM (#745292)
    For me, the point is that it is small.

    While I like GNOME a lot, and KDE 2 looks great, if I had a machine with less than 48M I wouldn't try to run either. Windowmaker, Afterstep, and XFce are all good options in such a case.

  • AccelX feels a great deal faster than any other G400 drivers I've run across.

    As someone who is running the XFree86 4.0 G400 beta drivers (3200x1200 24bit, dualhead), I'd be interested in benchmarking the Xi versus the Matrox XFree86 driver.

    Anybody know of any reliable X benchmarks that seperate system performance from raw X performance?

    Oh, and yes, this is topic drift, but it seemed vaguely on-topic enough to post with the following paragraph:

    For that matter, has anyone actually real-world benchmarked the various WMs on various levels of systems? Memory footprint aside, are the lightweight WMs actually that much faster? Links to sites, anyone?

    --
    Evan

  • For those wondering why.... (Score:3)

    by Cire LePueh ( 26571 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @10:22PM (#745294)
    A few people have already asked why another wm/desktop, I tend to agree, but then looking at the ability to turn off modules such as gnome and other features that help reduce overhead...well one of the comments on the Interview [linuxorbit.com] page gives the answer:


    it's refreshing to find a desktop that conserves memory and lets my applications run faster. Netscape is distinctly faster than it was with Gnome. XFCE is stylish without being distracting, and it does what I need without a lot of tweaking.

    I'll stick to my desktop, but for those who need it's strengths XFce provides a needed alternative for them.

  • Gotta love multiple desktops... or heads. I finally bought another monitor for my G400's second video port, don't think I could ever go back to a single head! Gotta have CodeWarrior (or CodeCrusader for folks on a budget) open on that second screen all day long.
  • I'm actually running Xfce at this moment. My first experience with it was rather dismal. At the time I was on an Ultra 10 with 8bpp color and I simply couldn't get it to load correctly. Everything ran, but in monochrome, and after stealing every available color from my other apps. (Have I mentioned that I hate palettes?)

    Anyway, at my new job I needed to choose a window manager. I like Enlightenment generally and run it on one of my boxes at home, simply because of its configurability. Unfortunately, this machine (an HP Kayak with 128MB) seems to have problems running efficiently, and since it uses Rambus we couldn't just run out and buy more RAM for cheap, and my machine would take close to 10 seconds to switch virtual screens. (Have I mentioned that I hate Intel?)

    I decided to give Xfce another try and was incredibly pleased with the results. It had the first GUI configuration tool that didn't feel insulting to me (but that's probably just my fragile geek ego talking =), and it was smoother even than the excellent WindowMaker to set up through the dialogs.

    I've got a few tweaks I'd like to make (remapping certain events, turning off session management), but this configuration has been running for months now without a hitch. And it's lightweight--almost no thrashing.

  • Because both the other leading desktop environments are morally corrupt. Using GNOME implies your implicit support of the GPL and Communism, while using KDE demonstrates un-Chrisitan, nihilist leanings - even their very name has no meaning! With GNOME as the sole domain of warez traffickers, Napster users, and terrorists, and KDE as the exclusive territory of blasphemers, child pornographers, and murderers, what is a decent, God-fearing X user in search of a desktop environment to do?

    Use XFce, of course: it's the right thing to do.

    Bruce

  • ... I guess the extra choice is good.

    Why does everyone always say that! Like a cult or something.

    McDonalds makes Big Mac's. (Yuk!) I guess the extra choice is good. Microsoft makes Windows. I guess the extra choice is good. Look at how many brands of cigarettes. I guess the extra choice is good.

    I guess I'll be getting a visit from the cult elders now.
  • Ha, I found a Mandrakesoft-user here!.-) Let me see... I just installed the LM 7.2 beta3, and I can choose between KDE2, Gnome, WindowMaker, XFce, IceWM, Sawfish or Fvwm1 on login. And this is just a vanila instalation (i asked for additional WM-s though). Yup, I'm not going to use XFce (WINDOW MAKER FOREVER), but I would kill to make sure you can use it.

  • Ughh! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Jeez I hate that name!!! Why dont they just go ahead and call it XFeces

  • Ugh (Score:1)

    by bradfitz ( 23252 )
    But it's so ugly. :-(
  • THE LAST OF THE REAL TROLLS

    Good work. Slashdot needs more people like you. Much better than those fuckwit child molesters and penis bird/fish/whatever junior high schoolers.

  • In what possible way is the post a troll?

    It doesn't inflame things between GNOME and KDE. It doesn't attack anyone. It isn't deliberately provacative. It doesn't try to offend anyone.

    Oh! I see now! It attacks our cult! It says: But that's just one of the flaws with the open source, model I guess... and then proceeds to state an opinion.

    Ok, I see now. I stand corrected. I guess qualifies as a troll.

  • Hmm. (Score:1)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    Well, maybe I'll give it another shot, but this used to suck. It was a CDE-looking add-on for fvwm, back in the day, and it was a pain to get it to compile.

    However, I like the GNOME compliant stuff, and I don't think they wrote it with gtk widgets before, either, so maybe they totally rewrote the thing.

    Also, the pictures are under "Snapshots"; please call them screenshots, people; when I see "Snapshots", I expect to see a tgz file with a date on it. :)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • Uhh it's not difficult to find someone who likes Big Mac's or Windows. Neither are inherently evil; it's just that not very many people like them. For the people that *do* like them, though, then choice would be good.

    And I don't see how more brands of cigarettes would be bad. If I smoked (and I didn't feel like growing my own), I think I'd appreciate not having to be stuck with one brand.

  • im relativley new to linux and one of the things i like about x is the choice of the gui. i know when i first started, gnome was easy fun to use. after kde came out with v. 2, i quickly switched to that. ive also used blackbox and wm... but lean towards kde and gnome. i think its a good experience to use more than one interface. it gives the user and idea of how in control they really are :)
  • Use a window manager that does nothing but manage windows:

    lwm [genedata.com]

    I've been using it for a couple of years now, and the aggressive simplicity has really grown on me. Now, I find it impossible to use anything more baroque and crocky. lwm launches my xterms, and that's all anybody needs.

    Best,
    (jfb)
  • I tried this one on my 32MB laptop

    Actually it consumes more memory than both blackbox and icewm

    So I can't say I agree that this is truly a lightweight wm

    Maybe it's smaller than GNOME / KDE - but then agin who isn't ;)
  • One of the things that always bugs me about X apps is the fact they're often so inconsistent. And having a dozen different "desktop environments" doesn't help this at all. While I'll agree that choice is nice, I see no reason why the two major desktop environments can't have their development teams collaborate a little more. Not too long ago I thought I had read something about KDE and Gnome working on a singular specification for objects sharing between both. Now there's little if any mention of this anywhere, and they seem to have gone their separate ways again, with Gnome sticking with a CORBA based solution, and KDE using DCOP. More recently, I've heard rumours of them working on standardizing the window manager hints, so that a WM wouldn't need to specify supporting one or the other. But who knows if/when this'll fall through.

    I firmly believe that with collaboration, we'll end up with desktop environments that are truely fantastic, and give users as much choice as developers. Without it, we're only going to end up with merely adequate desktops that lock users into the choice they make, and that's no way to compete with Microsoft.

  • More choice is always a good thing... (Score:3)

    by spam-o-tron mk2 ( 235466 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @09:53PM (#745310)
    ... because three holy wars are better than one!

    Bruce

  • Xfce really reminds me of the OS/2 Warp 3.0 app starter panel. I always thought CDE's panel was an imitation of that panel, but I suppose CDE could have come first. I suppose they both came from HP Dashboard.

    Anyway, I don't see Xfce as "competition" for Gnome/KDE, both of which I see primarily as transition technologies to make users coming from other OSes a little more comfortable. I think there are going to be more Windows and MacOS users coming over than Warp3 and CDE users.

    For my own part, I almost never run things out of a panel, but if I do, I much prefer the "hidden slide-out menu at the top of the screen" variety like the old AmigaDOS, or a configurable desktop root menu like everything else used to use. But hey, more choice is better. There are a million Explorer replacements for Windows too, and you don't see too many holy wars on their turf.

    Maybe to be REALLY lightweight what we need is "bwm", the bash window manager, whose desktop looks just like a console except you can bring up X apps in front of it, and have all the widgets rendered in ASCII ;)

  • X11perf is a pretty common synthetic 2D benchmark. A better choice would probably be 2D draw time for a CAD or pagelayout app (perhaps the linux beta of Adobe Framemaker). Two of my own benchmarks are "how does scrolling feel?" and "can I drag around solid windows without getting chop?".
  • xengine :)

    apt-get install xengine

    Then see how many RPMs you get. On a good day I get about 4000 rpms on my G400 MAX with XFree86 drivers. Xi gives me a whopping 17000 rpms, that's 4 times faster!

    Still, Xi is missing too many of the cool extensions: no Xinerama, no DGA, no VidmodeExt, so it's still not an option for me personally.
  • damn... i have the g400... just looking for a second monitor now.. 17 + 21 may be overkill... any suggestion on a good mix ? ?
  • i used XFce maybe 2 or 3 years ago on an old 486 (which is being used as a footrest atm). it was the only wm that i could get to run at any speed with like 6 megs of ram in the system.

    so all you pansies running gnome on your 1ghz athlons with 128 megs of ram, i bet this 486 runs X just as fast as your system.

    all hail code-bloat!


    With love,
  • When I first started with Linux a year ago, I'll admit that I was drawn to KDE. It was windows-ish, and made the transition a lot easier.

    However, as I got used to the command line, and usually ended up running all my apps from there, I began to wonder more and more why I was wasting precious resources with KDE when all I really wanted was a few simple menus for more obscure commands and the ability to open a shitload of xterms.

    (Actually, pathetically enough, what really promped my search for a new WM was that I wanted to make more resources available to seti@home, but I'll never admit that pub... oh.)

    I tried a few different WMs (blackbox, afterstep, icewm, fvwm2, and even *shudder* twm), but the only one that felt like "home" was XFce. I had used CDE very briefly on Solaris before, and found that I was quite fond of it.

    XFce is impossibly easy to install on an *NIX clone. `./configure ; make ; make install` should get it working for those with the proper libs installed. RPMs are available everywhere. It's part of the OpenBSD and FreeBSD (and NetBSD, I'd imagine, but I can't say) ports trees.

    gnome runs pitifully slow and all the fancy panels and such that make gnome worthwhile take up too much real estate on my P-166 laptop. XFce runs like a charm.
  • Three holy wars just means a bigger mess. Really, what's a windows application developer going to do when faced with the task of porting his windows app to unix. Right! He's going to choose. So it's not the users who choose but the developers.

    That's what unix is about: choice for developers. Mere users, are left with no choice. If you choose KDE, your Gnome apps suffer, if you choose Gnome your KDE apps work lousy. And now some nerd reinvented the wheel again! Please, I don't need another window manager. I already have five installed. I don't need another desktop environment (I already have three fighting for control over my apps). I need usable applications on top of my window managers and desktop environments. I don't want application developers to reinvent window minimizing/maximizing, cut&paste, file managing, and other stuff my MS Windows and Apple environments have been able to do quite satisfyingly for nearly a decade!!!!

    Please developers, grow up and start working on the apps of tomorrow rather than reinventing the wheel.
  • I don't see any vote on it. He's probably just got a +2 default due to his karma.
  • Not at all....

    You've missed one determining factor of WM choice other than overall personal preference - hardware

    Would you run Enlightenment on a 386? No, ofcourse not. The main point of this WM is that it is light-weight, something that KDE, Enlightenment or Gnome can not currently claim with a straight face. If I was to run X on a box with limited resources, I would look carefully at XFce as it seems quite funky..


    Simon
  • twm is great, but have you ever tried lwm [genedata.com]? It's very familiar to twm users, and is, if anything, tinier and less obtrusive.

    For instance, on my FreeBSD box:

    ~:% ls -l `which lwm`
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 23404 Sep 18 16:20 /usr/local/bin/lwm

    23k!

    Try it out; a lot of old twmers I've shown lwm to have switched.

    Just my own little advocacy,
    (jfb)
  • "..a completely new way of driving my car. I mean, just about every car out there from any brand is the same. Steering wheels, gas pedals, brakes, etc. I am looking for something new and different. "

    Now, doesn't that sound silly? Sometimes there IS a best solution to a particular problem.

    A great UI that lifts us to the next level is not likely to be enormously different than today's UIs. A great UI uses exisiting elements in a better new way, improving them.

    Cars are better today than 30 years ago because they're safer, more efficient, more reliable, cleaner. Not because someone spent time figuring out what alternative gadget might be cooler than a steering wheel.

    They *do* reinvent the wheel: making it more ergonomic, less likely to break your skull, putting the horn on it, less likely to slip out your hand, etc.
  • noone has mentioned it yet so its
    here [alug.org]. Loads up in under half a second.

  • Yeah, twm is not bad, as long as you change those default colors, blech!

    :)

    "Free your mind and your ass will follow"

  • > Why dont they just go ahead and call it XFeces.
    XFeces??? What a sh*tty name! ;-)
  • Enlightenment is sweet! It is easy to customize, and I can use all GNOME and KDE programs in it.

  • Yes it is extremely fast, even on my P166 / 32MB.

    Kind of makes fools of people who insist that interpreted languages like lisp are always way too slow...

    "Free your mind and your ass will follow"

  • http://www.xfce.org/xfce-snap-large.jpg

    look in the upper lefthand corner - "Thomas.jpg". IANAL (BIAAT -but i am a troll), but isn't it illegal to provide pictures of young children?

    did "Thomas" agree to having his photograph on the global internet? (NO!)

    is this visage of "Thomas" being gazed upon by a large number of sex-starved geeks right now? (YES!)

    are the remaining pictures listed in the filebrowser pictures of "Thomas" in various forms of undress? (PERHAPS!)

    just like downloading MP3S promotes communism, using XFce promotes paedofile style behavior. do what any good hearted X-Windows user would do and use CDE.

    CDE - Promoting consentual sexual relations between people of compatible ages since 1982!


    With love,
  • Best monitor I can recommend is the Sony/SGI GDM 20E21. Made by Sony (20" Trinitron) and packaged and sold by Silicon Graphics (really cool gray/granite plastics with the SGI cube logo). Dual inputs (13w3 and HD15, switchable via the on-screen display). Works great on PCs, Macs, and Sun/SGI/HP unix machines. Handles all the way up to 1800x1440@80Hz, as well as all the way back down to DOS and BIOS resolutions. Reputable Systems [reputable.com] has used 20E21s for $250. They're not all that old and in great condition, plus Greg (owner of Reputable) is an awesome guy. I should know, I've bought 4 from him!
  • It's great to see something that's both modern and runs well on older hardware. It wasn't too long ago when Linux was "the modern OS for folks with older hardware". With the latest WMs and desktop environments, not to manage the latest GUI libraries, it seems like a fella almost has to get a 300+ MHz box for a Linux workstation these days. (Doesn't sound like much, but that's quite a step up from a 486/100 or Pentium 233). Gotta love something that works great on an older system (albeit loaded with RAM).
  • If you're on a budget how about: Monitor + TV?! :) I just got it working. TV resolution is only good at up to 640x480 for NTSC (can't get PAL to work for now). But it's neat to tune into your X server. The extra space on the TV is used for gkrellm and the other monitoring tools. That way I can keep an eye on my networks while channel surfing. You need the mga_drv released by Matrox which includes the HALlib.

    BTW, Enlightenment 0.16.4 crashes on my Xinerama setup while WindowMaker works flawlessy.
  • Olivier (who is a pretty cool guy, btw) didn't reinvent the wheel with XFce...Although I don't use it regularly (not much for CDE) it's a powerful, small (last I heard the source fit on a floppy) gtk-based WM for people who like a CDE-style interface. This is by far *not* a replacement for GNOME/KDE; it's a solid wm that fills the needs of CDE-loving linux users.
  • > People who view these screen shots [...] enjoy having sex with children.

    Since you know what's on those screenshots, you must have viewed them as well, ergo you also enjoy having sex with children. Correct me if I'm wrong :-)

    I was actually thinking something along those lines when I saw the screenshots, and it strikes me that a lot of geeks seem to be into the repressed sexual phantasies thing, be it the pedophile or just plain nudie pics angle. Also check out the latest screenshots of KDE 2, where the guy might think that he covered up his desktop wallpaper strategically. But the desktop thumbnail [kde.org] gave him away. Dirty young man!!!

  • Kylix (Score:2)

    by uradu ( 10768 )
    > a windows application developer going to do when faced with the task of
    > porting his windows app to unix.

    He ought to use Kylix, which hopefully will take care of the KDE/Gnome differences fairly transparently. Not to speak of the Windows/Linux differences.
  • Seems to me Xfce users like gals and nudies.
  • I have never quite understood why people want 'desktops' on their Linux boxen. I've tried KDE and GNOME both, and was disapointed to find they are highly inefficient and tend to get in my way.

    Currently, i use fvwm2, though i like enlightenment and may switch when i get a better machine. fvwm2 is fast, easy to use and incredibly productive.

    And, of course, Real Men Use Shells.

  • Actually, the single most important feature for me is being able to put that "X" on the left (i.e. to close a window). In every other WM, I inadvertantly hit close when I want to maximize.

    So I use fvwm/fvwm2. Just define, for example, right click in the LEFT corner to be close for example and we're good to go.
  • Just an FYI, a lot of people have that "slow to switch desktops" thing going on, and it can be solved on one of two ways: first upgrade your video card :-P Assuming that an HP Kayak == crappy integrated video, we'll move on to 2: choose a solid color as your background. If it speeds up significantly after doing that, then your problem is video ram, not sysem ram. If neither helps, report it to e-devel@enlightenment.org and lots of friendly people will be glad to help out.
  • Though a great deal of my work is on SGI systems (4Dwm + a well configured toolchest and several xterms), I've been happy with fvwm(1) with a good root menu. These days I run CDE on my linux systems, though. (I work with many Motif-based apps, matches well, looks well, runs well, and keeps the Sun natives happy). Blackbox with a nicely configured root menu also works well. Clean and simple. Nice empty desktop, right (or center) click for all the apps you'll ever need. Need more, right-click, pick your xterm, and go to work.
  • I have been toying since yesterday with LarsWM [fnurt.net]. It is based on 9wm, takes a quarter of the memory a typical xterm does, is as fast as a lightning, easy to get used to and super-minimalistic. Compiled straight on my HP-UX 10.20 box, and ofcourse on my Linux laptop. I usually use Enlightenment, which is fine on a reasonable machine, but a bit on the slow side on a HP 715/50 (which also got Gnome 1.0 compiled and used from time to time just for the sake of the exercise - it wasn't the most straightforward operation...). This thing was just what I was looking for; the only gripe being that I will have to create eventually .xmodmaprc file for my HP keyboard.
  • Or, if you don't like kfm, you can use gmc from Gnome. I use that on my Afterstep desktop, and it works great.

    You can even drag links out from Netscape or Mozilla and attach them to your desktop. :=)

  • What's the difference between the window manager and the environment? Where's the bounary drawn between theie responsibilities. Some things which are described as part of the "environment" are to me nothing more than applications. For example they claim to include file managers as part of the environment. Where I come from, a file manager is nothing more than a application. Why does it have to be so confusing?

    Phil
    (who runs TWM at home still, cos it does what he wants in the way that he wants)

  • I've got one that I'm working on... I call it KronoSTEP, which is based loosely on the NeXTSTEP desktop with key elements from OS/2, Windows, MacOS and RiscOS.
    No code exists at this point, it's just in the planning stages, but I'm waiting for it to be approved by SourceForge. The idea is to have an object-oriented desktop (a la NeXT, OS/2) that corresponds to what's really on the filesystem (a la MacOS/RiscOS). Also, some security features (as in localhost security) will be incorporated, like an encrypted Vault for storing sensitive files and a Shredder (name from OS/2) that securely destroys files.
    Of course it's still WIMPy - that is, Windows, Icons and Mouse Pointing, and lots of DnD (a lot of ideas taken from OS/2 and RiscOS on DnD), and it's mostly going to start as a collection of hacks on top of existing software (ROX, WindowMaker, XFCE and a few others). But, with any amount of luck, it will be a breath of fresh air.
  • hey, if all you want is a few menus and the ability to open up a bunch of terminal windows (that you can easily copy/paste between) try twin!

    http://linuz.sns.it/~max/twin/

    just runs in console mode...don't even need x

  • I hardly ever boot up Windows at home anymore, what with KDE Netscape Quake DescentDemo Terminus Sound RealAudio StarOffice GnuCash CorelDraw etc etc etc etc, more utilities than I know what to do with, plus very distinguished and stylish wheels - the only time I bring up the closed partition is to use Forte' Agent and that's only because I haven't taken time to sort thru all the available oss alternatives. Gaaaa, open source is working GREAT from my point of view!
  • Xfce is going to face a uphill battle winning users over

    This is your problem, you think someone wants to dominate the market, get more users, stablish itself as the standard and all the other usual crap. Has someone ever told you that programming is fun? That you scratch an itch you are feeling? That no everything has has to be determined in terms of corporate acceptance.

    Had I moderator points, would have marked the original post as "troll".

  • I don't mean to disparage the hard work that the authors have put into this project, but do they really think that this can compete with KDE and GNOME?
    You seem to have pretty much misunderstood the very basics of X. For a start, XFce is a Window Manager. Gnome and KDE are Desktop Environments, not Window Managers (though KDE comes with a purpose built wm). You can actually use XFce in combination with either of the two biggies.
    Both KDE and GNOME have been around for years and have established user and software bases
    In comparison many of the Window Mangers available for X they are newcomers - which only recently achieved decent stability and ease of use.
    as well as plenty of corporate sponsorship.
    What relevance does that have to anything?
    They're the de facto standards for Linux
    Um, no... Most distibutions ship them both but they don't all install them as default - and where they do, the first thing many people do is find out how to turn them off.
  • Why not just a plain old window manager?
    XFce is just a "plain old window manager" - but he's added some useful modules that you can run if you like - or not - to create a low-maintence destop environment.
    It's really well done, and you can run kfm on top of it to get the functionality of kwm's icons.
    Which is cutting down the bloat precisely how? Especially considering how much crap you have to install just to get kfm running.
  • http://linuz.sns.it/~max/twin/ [linuz.sns.it] sigh. where's my mind this morning.
  • It still is CDE looking; i took one look at those and thought thats what i was looking at. I looked at the screen shot, the back to my desktop on the computer science machine i'm on, and wow, its almost the same thing but with themes.
  • Perhaps what is needed is a wrapper class that will take a generic call and map it what whatever desktop is installed/in use.

  • If you ask me, this sort of thing is one of the strong points of *nix operating systems. Win DOS, you have command.com (unless you run Nortin Commander, etc., IN command.com), and with windows you have one visual shell (explorer) or DOS command com. If you don't like these, your screwed. With Linux (etc.), you can choose, Bash, Tcsh, Zsh, etc., for text shells, and can choose between fvwm, KDE, Gnome, Ice, Xfce, etc., for a gui. I hope none of these "win" (as in, gain hegemony), and am always glad to see another option get some credit (even if I don't plan on leaving KDE).

  • PWM is the window manager for people who hate the slow, awkward window managers and 'desktop environments'. Just look at how weirdly aligned the text and menubars are in kde, gnome, and this xfce. It's just not right. PWM is what a sane person would ask for. Who wants all of the features in these other desktops when they all aestheticly inconsistant, in constant development, and look like ugly hacks. Try something simple, fast, and intuitive.

    http://freshmeat.net/projects/pwm/homepage/

    I have 'Be' looking menu bars, and it looks just right. Plus, it loads in less than a second on my pretty average SMP machine. I am plugging this project because it is a true 'back to basics' style WM, that fixes all of the ugliness and awkwardness that even FVWM still has.

  • Choices Choices Choices (Score:3)

    by jjr ( 6873 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @11:41PM (#745360) Homepage
    This is what I love about Unix,Linux,BSD is that you have the of how you want things to look and if you do not like how it looks you can change it easier that if you want to change windows or mac. Choices is what is going to keep unix around for a long time.
  • Let us try to reword this a little and see how it sounds...

    I don't mean to disparage the hard work that the authors have put into this project, but do they really think that this can compete with Windows and Unix? Both Windows and Unix have been around for years and have established user and software bases, as well as plenty of corporate sponsorship. They're the de facto standards for computing, and Linux is going to face a uphill battle winning users over.

    It seems that Linus' time would have been better spent helping to improve the existing application base instead of coding a new platform from the ground up. But that's just one of the flaws with the open source, model I guess -- we have dozens of teams reinventing the wheel and none building the car.

    It sounds about the same, but do you still agree with it?

  • I have tried various window managers/desktops, ncluding KDE and Gnome, but I'm still using plain old twm. Pop open a couple of xterms, xbiff, netscape, and I'm happy. Everything in plain colors, no fancy shading, themes, or shiny icons. I have been using twm since tvtwm was still considered revolutionary.

    Twm is ultra fast, uses very little memory, and starts up in a blink of an eye. I also shuts down really fast using ctrl-alt-backspace :-) With my hands on the keyboard, and aliases for often used commands, starting up new applications is faster than picking up the mouse, and navigating through menus, or finding the right icon.

    Maybe I'm just too old... haha... but I am very thankful that nobody's forcing me to upgrade to the latest desktop. Having the choice to use something old-fashioned and outdated is what makes Linux and OSS great.

    If people want to extend the number of choices, more power to them. If they don't want to help working on KDE, but start their own project, I respect them. I'm glad Linus started his own little project, instead of contributing to minix.
  • Choices is also what is going to keep unix around for a long time out of the limelight. Unless you make a tweaked version that keeps everything from the users, most windows users will want to stay in their 'control panel' and attribute to MS's power. I guess you could ironically say that we are all attributing to MS's power. . . we have the power to change linux, but we aren't providing a viable alternative to the home user.
  • Actually, I have seen only two free-unix WM's that work "right" out-of-the box. XFCe (on Mandrake) and IceWM (on FreeBSD). XFCe changes virtual desktops with C-F[1234...], IceWM with M-F[1234...]. And IceWM also pops up xterms with M-t (on FreeBSD). To achieve this kind of intuitivity with Gnome, you have to spend some considerable time tinkering it (but SawFish makes that possible, hooray to them).

    Therefore, XFCe or IceWM might be good for default initial desktop (especially for root, which should not spend much time in X anyway)... especially since the most important use of X is still having multiple xterms & emacs simultanously visible, and being able to view "modern" web pages with graphics (and emacs in color).

    IceWM also seems to be the only WM that correctly sets the initial size & pos for applications. Perhaps we will see this feature in Gnome 3.0...

    Oh yeah, I forgot that KDE is also a viable option nowadays after the evil, oppressive reign of QPL.

  • I'll stick to my desktop, but for those who need it's strengths XFce provides a needed alternative for them.

    And why not blackbox, for example? It's a remarkably thin window manager. I've used it for quite some time, and was very satisfied with it. It feels ... thin. That's the only way to describe it. It's like other window managers / desktop environments drop a very thick woolen blanket over your system, while Blackbox drops only a thin barely opaque silk sheet over it.

    Currently I run GNOME + Sawfish and I like that too, but I have a history of switching desktop environments and window managers quite often :)

    )O(
    Never underestimate the power of stupidity

  • XFce (Score:2)

    by RPoet ( 20693 )
    The name is actually XFce, not Xfce ;)

    While I can't see why anyone would want to run a CDE clone, I guess the extra choice is good.
    --
  • Why not just a plain old window manager? They seem to get the job done using hardly any system resources.

    www.afterstep.org [afterstep.org]

    It's really well done, and you can run kfm on top of it to get the functionality of kwm's icons. My thoughts on the matter anyway.

  • ...a completely new way of handling the user interface. I mean, just about every GUI out there now on any platform is the same. Overlapping windows, mouse pointer, left/right/center clicking, etc. I am looking for something new and different.

    What about an object oriented desktop? I know OS/2 & NeXT tried to do this to some extent. Why don't we learn from them instead of trying to copy Windows all the time! Surely someone out there has a unique thought in their heads!

    [Sorry for the duplicate posting -- damn enter key]


    Later...

  • gnome runs pitifully slow and all the fancy panels and such that make gnome worthwhile take up too much real estate on my P-166 laptop. XFce runs like a charm.

    That is indeed the best reason to find a less heavy window environment. I currenlty use GNOME with Sawfish, and it's running like a charm on my PII 392MHz with 128MB. I rarely even run into my swap. I have used many lighter window environments too, like blackbox (loved it) and fvwm2 (hated it), and the system did feel much more responsive, but GNOME does the trick quite nicely, so why switch? :)

    And we're right back to what makes Open Source so great: To each his own.

    )O(
    Never underestimate the power of stupidity
  • Windows *IS* OO. Never heard of COM? Never dragged an image from an email to a spreadsheet?

    Gnumeric to Evolution? Gee, that wasn't hard.

    But at the same time, I wouldn't quite call Windows truly OO (though it does come fairly close). COM was a good idea (the whole component architecture thing; hardly an innovation even then but still a good idea) but it does have a few fundamental flaws. Then again, CORBA (off of which Gnome's Bonobo is based) has many of the same ones.

    The best idea I'd seen out there was IBM's SOM (off of which Apple's OpenDoc and, IIRC, BeOS' Replicants, were based). Based off of, and interoperable with, CORBA, but fixing the holes (one of the most glaring being lack of true inheritance in interfaces; in COM and most CORBA-based technologies one can inherit interfaces but not implementations, leading to unnecessarily bloated code in many cases). NeXT's EOF was also great; glad to see it still around in OSX.
    ----------
  • What I intensely dislike about both Gnome and KDE is the fact that they are so bloated. I'm not sure why it is that there can't be a small, efficient, simple, window manager for X. One which minimizes the dexterity needed to do things like start an Xterm, maximize a window so it fills as much of the screen as possible without overlapping things you don't want it to, and minimize a window but still keep it on the desktop in an easy to access location.

    KDE 1.x will do these things well if you reconfigure it properly, but its friggin HUGE! You have to load up all this nonsense into memory just to use a decent window manager, which is really sad. Gnome is even worse. Trying to use it is like fighting with your computer. It may have all kinds of nifty features and programs under the hood, but its desktop leaves much to be desired. If I open up netscape and maximize its window, netscape will overlap the damned gnome bar along the bottom of the screen. There are other issue I have with it, but that is the one that really pisses me off. KDE 2.x is almost worse. Instead of improving the window manager, they've taken out the best features and removed the ability to configure other features. I consider it a big step backwards, not forwards. Built in web browsers and point-and-drool file managers don't mean squat to me. I just want a window manager that works.

    In the race to create the uber-desktop, lets not forget that people want to USE their computers, not just look at pretty desktops. Special effects on a computer are about as useful as special effects in a movie. Both are pointless without substance to back them up.

    I for one would just love to see a window manager that recreates the best features of the win9x desktop. Create a taskbar at the bottom for all the currently running windows. Create a second bar along the left or right side that users can start commonly run applications such as netscape or xterm on to. Then have a menu system for other programs accessible via a "start" button as well as via drop down menus on the desktop itself. Add to this the ability to properly maximize windows so they fill the available real estate without overlapping these to bars, and to me you'll have the perfect desktop. To me this is far more important and useful than the creation of yet another theme for a desktop that doesn't work.

    I'm almost at the point where I want to create a window manager of my own because of all this.

    I'm suprised that so many people seem to love both KDE and Gnome when both are bloated hogs and the latest versions of them get in the way more than they help. Get rid of the nonsense. Lets have a desktop that's functional instead of merely flashy. Flashy may look pretty, but it sure doesn't make for a better user interface.

    Lee Reynolds
  • "No. Most X apps run fine under any window manager or Desktop Environment. For the vast majority of X apps it's which widget sets you have installed that make the difference, not which wm."

    There's a difference between running (i.e. not crashing upon launch) and working together/integrating nicely with the rest of your software. Most X applications I've seen don't come even close to working together.

    "Those apps specifically designed for Gnome almost all have KDE equivalents - and where you find ones that don't you do find volunteers rapidly remedying the situation."

    My experiences are different. Anyway, you prove my point. It mostly depends on the applications you need what environment you run. That's why users generally have both KDE and Gnome installed (i.e. they don't choose).

    I find the current situation with GUIs on unix reducing choice. I can very well imagine people waiting for the dust to settle before porting their apps. Adding yet another environment delays this moment. Regardless which environment you target as a developer, you can expect that over half of the users runs something else.
  • try aewm - it takes up less memory than xscreensaver. I started out with GNOME, went to Enlightenment, then XFce, still too bloated, aewm is excellent. Right click on the desktop to get an xterm. Left click for a popup menu of apps that you define in a very simple config file. Personally all I want a WM for is to control those damn X windows. Anything else I don't need.

  • Hmm.. I wouldn't compare it with Gnome or KDE (Score:3)

    by Pengo ( 28814 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @10:02PM (#745396) Journal
    KDE and Gnome is also a paradigm in user interface and design. I don't see XFce quite as grandeur in mission.

    I believe that XFce would be better compared with Enlightenment, WindowMaker, etc. ... maybe not even that.

    XFce is a FAST alternative to Gnome/KDE/Bloat and runs very very well on older hardware.

    I might add that Gnome supports XFce as a alternative window manager.




    --------------------
  • im sure people are getting tired of hearing comments like this, but i just have to point out that XFce has been mentioned on /. before. see:

    http://slashdot.org/asksl ash dot/00/06/24/2253237.shtml [slashdot.org]
    http://slashdot.org/articles /99 /11/18/0957218.shtml [slashdot.org]

    i checked this out a while back when i first saw it mentioned. someone said in a previous comment it was a pain to compile, but i dont remember it being so (though maybe i had a different version). sometimes i kinda like having that cde feel, and it is pretty relatively light weight. it seems like development is progressing steadily, too.

    ok...commence flaming

    --Siva

    Keyboard not found.
  • Slackware is about the only distro i know that still has Openlook... with is funky green background and filemanager its probably the coolest little file manager you can find... and it (like Enlightenment) dont have that menu bar on the bottom... i know you can move it in kde/gnome/whatever.....BUT once you use something like enlightenment you see what serious configurability is all about... i mean the first thing i do on any new system is copy my ~/.enlightenment dir. fix the file pointer (which i think are stored so very well!) and good to go.
    Try it out (0.16.5 just came out!!)
    http://www.enlightenment.org/ [enlightenment.org]!
    And all you Gnome/Kde users.... they are good too and provide a lot of cool features for most users, but if all you want is something to give you a good devel env. (a screen for Xemacs, one for Eterms, one for Mozilla(/.) and finally one for mail/etc.) enlightenment gives you a clean and good looking window manager with a lot of punch.... try it out and then flame back at me :)
  • I just want to point out that the perhaps most powerful alternative to all those X based environments is GNUstep - see

    http://www.gustep.net and
    http://www.gnustep.org

    While there is still some way to go, it becomes more and more usable every day!

    If you are interested in a platform independent environment (or just API!), check it out!

    cheers, Phil
  • Uh, there's like a zillion of these. WindowMaker (I use it), blackbox, icewm are the most popular, then there's fvwm, twm, aewm, and tons more. I use WM because it's about 1/5 mem usage of XF86_SVGA and I think it looks better than Enlightenment and UI is better than that of both GNOME and KDE. Yeah, I know you could use it with them, but that adds bloat and that awkward panel.. But on a slower box i'd probably use blackbox, I heard it's one of the lightest window managers.
  • Annoys the living daylights out of me, too.

    There's that quote, "Those who don't understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly."

    Well, what the @#$% are we doing continually trying to reinvent Windows? Are we doomed to do it, poorly?

    As a former OS/2 user, I'll say that the WPS was the only GUI that has EVER significantly reduced my dependence on a command line. Nothing else has even come close. But you might take a look at DFM (http://dfm.online.de/dfm.html) or the ROX desktop. (Search for ROX Filer on freshmeat.)

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