You are not logged in.

#1 2008-03-01 20:10:09

stefan1975
Member
From: 53 6e 65 65 6b
Registered: 2007-04-16
Posts: 195

E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

hi all,

i am still figuring out what the best and fastest DM is for me. WM's like opnbox are still a bit too hardcore for me and KDE and Gnome on the other hand of the spectrum too bloated.
So it comes down to two i believe either E17 or XFCE4.4. What i would like to know is how these compare performance wise, is XFCE faster/lighter then E17? And likewise is SliM lighter then Entrance?

It is a tough choice so far, XFCE feels snappier and has a faster real time app. start imo and I like Thunar for filemanaging and Ristetto for image viewing and with Composite enabled it has nice effects without going over the top. On the other hand E17 is flashy, seems faster then gnome at least and has all those nifty animations and eye for detail, the <alt>-<tab> switching, etc., just the filemanager sucks but I can still use thunar or xfe in E17. In  the way of looks they are both great so i guess it comes down to performance and stability. E17 feels really stable especially for a alpha DM on the other hand XFCE is far more conservative release wise but that makes 4.4 very, very stable.

so does anyone know how the middleweight DM's compare, speed, performance, resource wise? when i run 'top' on a just booted E17 system it uses 450m and xfce4 uses a little over 300m.

any tips opinions would be appreciated. or maybe even other suggestions. I might go the openbox way in a while but for now it just feels a little to 'bare' for me.

thanks very much,
stefan


"root# su - bofh"
OS: F10_x64, Arch, Centos5.3, RHEL4.7, RHEL5.3
Desktop Hardware: Dell Precision M65 laptop, core2duo, 2gb, 80gb 7200rpm
Registered linux user #459910 since 1998

Offline

#2 2008-03-01 20:41:15

bgc1954
Member
From: Edmonton, AB, Canada
Registered: 2006-03-14
Posts: 1,160

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

I have been using E17 on a 32 bit machine, a 64 bit machine and an older T21 Thinkpad.  I used to use Xfce4 but for me E17 just looks better.  I can have a totally invisible ibar on the bottom which looks slightly mac-os-like and the temp and battery modules look nice on the Thinkpad.  I don't notice a whole lot of difference in speed while operating but I think E17 starts up faster.  I don't use entrance and still rely on gdm--another personal choice.  I also use thunar as a file manager since I got used to using it in Xfce4.  My whole installation is just 2.2.gb so it's pretty light on hdd useage.  Well, that's my two bits worth.  I agree with you that openbox and fluxbox are a little too minimal for me also. Isn't it nice to have so many choices in linux?

After seeing several posts about slim, I gave it a try and for my purposes, it's going to work great.  I just changed the background to a custom Arch one I used in gdm.  These forums are great for getting new ideas.  I was stuck in a gdm mode as I hadn't tried out anything else besides xdm which I didn't care for.  It slimmed down my install to 2.18 gb too--not much difference!

Last edited by bgc1954 (2008-03-01 21:21:26)


Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

Offline

#3 2008-03-01 20:41:17

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

I'm using E17 with mostly GTK2 apps. After the first time GTK initializes, everything starts up almost instantly here. And I use Thunar as my file manager.

Honestly they're both great. They're both extremely fast and light (your 450M for E17 is going to be mostly cache).

Slim is going to be lighter than Entrance because, well, it's slim.

Offline

#4 2008-03-01 20:54:10

stefan1975
Member
From: 53 6e 65 65 6b
Registered: 2007-04-16
Posts: 195

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

one other thing i did notice is that all the hard work i put in getting my fonts look acceptable (yes gtk apps!) did not carry into E17. All E17 fonts for GTK apps look seriously huge and plain, i was under the impression that it would pick up the same settings from XFCE (.gtkrc-2.0) and it would still look good. But that is somewhat off topic and besides it is somethings that both suck at, in the way of font handling gnome is just the best there is and more forgiving for exteral apps (like qt kde apps). The other wm's all make GTK fonts look soo bad and huge.

another thing is that where E17 uses more memory on XFCE the load is higher and the app-start thing isnt consistent. firefox seems lots faster on xfce but abiword flies on E17

stefan


"root# su - bofh"
OS: F10_x64, Arch, Centos5.3, RHEL4.7, RHEL5.3
Desktop Hardware: Dell Precision M65 laptop, core2duo, 2gb, 80gb 7200rpm
Registered linux user #459910 since 1998

Offline

#5 2008-03-01 21:06:01

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

GTK fonts, as well as QT4, looks fine for me.

Offline

#6 2008-03-01 21:48:11

nbvcxz
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2007-12-29
Posts: 202

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

Definitely E17 -> it is 'lighter' (resources) and faster in responsiveness but lacks a lot of features so far. XFCE is 'not complete' Desktop Environment while E17 is called Desktop Shell (much more simpler). But using additional apps (eg. gqview for image viewing) you can handle almost full DE functionality.


Lenovo G50 | LXQT-git | compton | conky

Offline

#7 2008-03-01 22:33:46

tam1138
Member
Registered: 2007-09-10
Posts: 238

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

I don't know what crack you're smoking, but enlightenment is sitting at 19M resident memory usage right now.

I really like e17 because of its minimality and speed.  I have *never* had stability problems, and I compile straight from CVS.  I have not tried XFCE.

[ edit: there are a bunch of extra apps in the e17 "family" (ie, they use the same library set, EFL) that provide the functionality of eg, gqview can be replaced with exhibit ]

Last edited by tam1138 (2008-03-01 22:38:24)

Offline

#8 2008-03-01 22:36:04

stefan1975
Member
From: 53 6e 65 65 6b
Registered: 2007-04-16
Posts: 195

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

skottish wrote:

GTK fonts, as well as QT4, looks fine for me.

that is odd then. for me it only works in E17 when I start gnome-settings-daemon and that is really not what i would like in the first place. starting g-s-d in xterm also gives me an error same as epiphany does maybe that is part of the issue:

** (gnome-settings-daemon:28481): WARNING **: Unable to connect to dbus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-FH4psg0BTD: Connection refused

(gnome-settings-daemon:28481): GnomeKbdIndicator-WARNING **: Unable to connect to dbus: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-Elt3UNOsJo: Connection refused

(gnome-settings-daemon:28481): GnomeKbdIndicator-WARNING **: Not connected to dbus, will not register the object

** (gnome-settings-daemon:28481): WARNING **: Module GnomeSettingsModuleScreensaver could not be started
xrdb:  "*Label.background" on line 220 overrides entry on line 150
xrdb:  "*Text.background" on line 226 overrides entry on line 191
xrdb:  "*Label.foreground" on line 232 overrides entry on line 151
xrdb:  "*Text.foreground" on line 238 overrides entry on line 192

when i run g-s-d everything runs fine, all gtk apps are pretty. although epiphany will not start at all in Enlightenment.

One other thing i noticed is that when i run the XFCE terminal in E17 is starts really slow and the backgrounds transparancy is gone, i do prefer it over E17 xterm though so I would like to fix that as well, i am already running 'bling' and have enabled composite in E and in my xorg.conf.

stefan


"root# su - bofh"
OS: F10_x64, Arch, Centos5.3, RHEL4.7, RHEL5.3
Desktop Hardware: Dell Precision M65 laptop, core2duo, 2gb, 80gb 7200rpm
Registered linux user #459910 since 1998

Offline

#9 2008-03-01 23:31:54

bgc1954
Member
From: Edmonton, AB, Canada
Registered: 2006-03-14
Posts: 1,160

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

I use Eterm which is no longer supported in Arch.  It has transparency through esetroot.  You can download and compile it yourself from here: http://www.eterm.org/download/.  You need libast compiled first.  For transparency you can make a small script

#! /bin/bash

Esetroot -fit ~/wallpaper/name_of_background_pic.jpg

What I then did was make a new application called transparent and added that to the E17 configuration startup applications.  Eterm also has some stock backgrounds you can use.  It's not a very big app so takes no time to compile.


Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

Offline

#10 2008-03-01 23:58:13

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

Esetroot works for Terminal also, albeit very strangely.

Last edited by skottish (2008-03-01 23:59:12)

Offline

#11 2008-03-03 16:51:28

bgc1954
Member
From: Edmonton, AB, Canada
Registered: 2006-03-14
Posts: 1,160

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

skottish wrote:

Esetroot works for Terminal also, albeit very strangely.

I'm curious; what do you mean by strange??


Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

Offline

#12 2008-03-03 16:57:02

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

bgc1954 wrote:

I'm curious; what do you mean by strange??

The background moves around a bit; It's not static at all.

Offline

#13 2008-03-03 19:46:41

bgc1954
Member
From: Edmonton, AB, Canada
Registered: 2006-03-14
Posts: 1,160

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

I'm doing another complete turnaround--as usual.  After seeing so many posts about rxvt-unicode, I gave it another shot and now that I blew away Eterm and Esetroot am using feh.  The new line in my transparent.sh script is:
feh --bg-center ~/background_pic.jpg instead of Esetroot.  Feh seems to respond faster on my old thinkpad.  My .Xdefaults file contents are now:

# Rxvt-unicode Settings

urxvt*background: black
urxvt*foreground: white
urxvt*fading: 15
urxvt*tintColor: white
urxvt*shading: 35
urxvt*inheritPixmap: true
urxvt*scrollbar: false
urxvt*font: 10x20
urxvt*geometry: 90x30
urxvt*cursorBlink: true

Both rxvt-unicode and feh are in the Arch repos so now I don't have to fiddle with compiling or making new packages and I really like urxvt.  If you mean, scottish, that the background kind of jerks around when you move the xterm terminal window, it does that as well in urxvt but doesn't really bother me.


Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... - Louis Hector Berlioz

Offline

#14 2008-03-03 19:53:36

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

bgc1954 wrote:

If you mean, scottish, that the background kind of jerks around when you move the xterm terminal window, it does that as well in urxvt but doesn't really bother me.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

Offline

#15 2008-03-04 17:19:52

stefan1975
Member
From: 53 6e 65 65 6b
Registered: 2007-04-16
Posts: 195

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

well i have reinstalled Arch on my machine with just E17 and XFCE this time (and skipped kdemod and gnome), however it seems that I am settling down on XFCE for the moment. It feels snappier it looks less blurry on my system and it doesnt freeze as much. I really think that I would prefer E17 over XFCE but in the weeks that I have been trying it it froze at least a few times a day (yes I know it is beta-ish) and the fonts/apps/borders/mouse cursors are all a bit more vague on my system.

And I noticed that my favourite apps are nearly all xfce apps, like ristretto, brasero, thunar, terminal, wicd, slim (allright these two are not really xfce apps but better for now then the E counterparts) and XFCE seems really good at dual monitor setups as far as I noticed until now (just my dockingstation is still a T%# to set up).

What does strike me as odd is that when I boot XFCE my system uses +/- 300mb of memory and at the end of the working days this is nearly 1100mb, so I am wondering if it is a memory leak or that reserved memory pages aren't freed anymore? I have not looked further into this but it strikes me as odd. On fedora the gnome system always used nearly all memory by claiming/reserving pages at boot time.

stefan

Last edited by stefan1975 (2008-03-04 17:22:27)


"root# su - bofh"
OS: F10_x64, Arch, Centos5.3, RHEL4.7, RHEL5.3
Desktop Hardware: Dell Precision M65 laptop, core2duo, 2gb, 80gb 7200rpm
Registered linux user #459910 since 1998

Offline

#16 2008-03-04 20:36:19

pressh
Developer/TU
From: Netherlands
Registered: 2005-08-14
Posts: 1,719

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

stefan1975 wrote:

I really think that I would prefer E17 over XFCE but in the weeks that I have been trying it it froze at least a few times a day (yes I know it is beta-ish)

which video driver do you use? Do you have any exotic hardware? Did you use fancy modules like bling, snow and such? I haven't experienced an e17 freeze for a very long time.

stefan1975 wrote:

and the fonts/apps/borders/mouse cursors are all a bit more vague on my system.

I'm not sure if I understand it correctly, but if you mean that the mouse themes included in the e17 themes are incomplete, yes they are. You can use however your default x-cursor theme, so any mouse theme you use in xfce/gnome/kde. You can define them in ~/.gtkrc.mine or similar.

stefan1975 wrote:

And I noticed that my favourite apps are nearly all xfce apps, like ristretto, brasero, thunar, terminal, wicd, slim (allright these two are not really xfce apps but better for now then the E counterparts)

Only ristretto, thunar and terminal are xfce applications though, as they have minimal dependencies, they fit nicely in e17 too.

stefan1975 wrote:

What does strike me as odd is that when I boot XFCE my system uses +/- 300mb of memory and at the end of the working days this is nearly 1100mb, so I am wondering if it is a memory leak or that reserved memory pages aren't freed anymore? I have not looked further into this but it strikes me as odd. On fedora the gnome system always used nearly all memory by claiming/reserving pages at boot time.

I can't tell without information, but most likely most of that memory is cached. You should get some memory info via tools like 'free' and 'top' to see what is using it (or what part is cached).

Offline

#17 2008-03-04 20:59:42

stefan1975
Member
From: 53 6e 65 65 6b
Registered: 2007-04-16
Posts: 195

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

hello,

thank you for your reply. i am running pretty standard hardware i believe. it is a Dell precision M65 laptop and runs all linux/bsd/solaris distros just fine. I have the latest nvidia drivers for my quadro and am not running anything special besides bling and different wallpapers on myt two desktops, but then I also have Composite enabled in xfce.

What i meant about appearance is that everything just feels larger/broader in E. this is really subjective but I like minimal clutter and most E themes have broad borders, big cursors, lots of drag on the menu's and somehow the icons seem a little fuzzy. this is probably just a matter of themes but there aren't many good ones so far that are up2date with cvs and look crispy (like clearlooks but even less crowded and large).

In xfce i have a them Nova with minimal decorations and very straight like pixel wide scrollbars, this seems missing so far in E. There is also less consistency in E, some stuff isnt themed and then you get the standard horrible glodish bling stuff in return (like screenlock, etc.) and running XFCE apps in E isnt helping for consistency either. I think i would like a plain desktop with Openbox and no decorations but it is too spartan for me as yet.

This all might seem negative but in fact I am really charmed by E and is surely is one of the best performing but pretty DE's available and maybe it just needs stable releases (if ever?!), more themes and more apps and clear up the networkmanager/filemanger apps because they s*ck bollocks until now. If they fix up the loose ends I am sure it is better looking then KDE4 with super speed, i mean even entrance is much more pretty then KDM and GDM will ever be and still it is rather light in comparison, same as the dekstop effect and animations. no DE gives that kind of candy with such performance (yes that is you compiz).

stefan.


"root# su - bofh"
OS: F10_x64, Arch, Centos5.3, RHEL4.7, RHEL5.3
Desktop Hardware: Dell Precision M65 laptop, core2duo, 2gb, 80gb 7200rpm
Registered linux user #459910 since 1998

Offline

#18 2008-03-05 09:01:33

zenlord
Member
From: Belgium
Registered: 2006-05-24
Posts: 1,221
Website

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

The 'inconsistencies in e' you speak of are caused by the fact that there aren't many e-apps. So you have to find a GTK-theme that matches your e-theme and that'll make your desktop a lot more consistent (unless you use a lot Qt-apps, in which case you also need a matching Qt-theme - and I guess there are some other theming-engines around, so just watch out which apps you use.

Good themes I have experienced in e: the green one from the gOS-project and the detour-theme. Both can be checked out of their respective CVS-repo's (gOS and google code).

Zl.

Offline

#19 2008-03-12 21:23:54

proc
Member
From: Italy
Registered: 2006-11-27
Posts: 71

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

I use e17 with clearlooks theme and after using gtk-chtheme I have no problem with GTK+ applications.

Xfce is not slower/fatter on my hw but e17 seems to be the only de/wm with per monitor pager support! If you have a dual monitor setup I really encourage you to try e17.

Offline

#20 2008-03-16 18:33:53

stefan1975
Member
From: 53 6e 65 65 6b
Registered: 2007-04-16
Posts: 195

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

proc wrote:

I use e17 with clearlooks theme and after using gtk-chtheme I have no problem with GTK+ applications.

Xfce is not slower/fatter on my hw but e17 seems to be the only de/wm with per monitor pager support! If you have a dual monitor setup I really encourage you to try e17.

I have noticed that both XFCE and E17 are really good at supporting dual monitor setups. Much better then Gnome or KDE are. I really like the XFCE touch where you get extra menu options for your second screen.

For now it seems I have settled down with XFCE, SLiM and netcfg2. together it feels really lightweight and snappy but not are spartan as openbox (yet...). for me GTK+ apps seem a bit better and I like brasero, ristretto and thunar (nautilus is no match whatsoever there) to death. Not to mention some of the more basic XFCE themes like Elegant or Fawn.

I will probably install gnome 2.22 next to XFCE for the new GTK apps it will bring my XFCE setup like epiphany with webkit backend (will Arch epiphany run with webkit by deafult over gecko?).

Even compiz 0.7 does not seem to slow down my XFCE setup just as preload seemed to do wonders for my slower but frequently used apps like Evolution, GIMP and OOo.

I still have a soft spot for E17 though and when / if it goes stable I will be the first one to run it, or with a setup that installs it the way it is actually usable (like elive or gOS do).

thx,
stefan


"root# su - bofh"
OS: F10_x64, Arch, Centos5.3, RHEL4.7, RHEL5.3
Desktop Hardware: Dell Precision M65 laptop, core2duo, 2gb, 80gb 7200rpm
Registered linux user #459910 since 1998

Offline

#21 2008-03-16 19:41:55

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

stefan1975 wrote:

I like brasero... I will probably install gnome 2.22...

You pretty much have Gnome 2.20 on your system now! Brasero brings in most of Gnome. Try running 'nautilus' from the command line. You'll probably end up with the Gnome desktop in its own window.

Offline

#22 2008-03-16 20:30:19

stefan1975
Member
From: 53 6e 65 65 6b
Registered: 2007-04-16
Posts: 195

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

skottish wrote:
stefan1975 wrote:

I like brasero... I will probably install gnome 2.22...

You pretty much have Gnome 2.20 on your system now! Brasero brings in most of Gnome. Try running 'nautilus' from the command line. You'll probably end up with the Gnome desktop in its own window.

well true. starting nautilus even makes XFCE stop managing its own desktop. I'd go for xfburn I suppose but it depends on xfce-svn and that isnt maintained anymore i have heard. It still is better then k3b though imho which pulls in all this QT kde stuff, so i guess I am stuck with brasero and it does work okay just leaving the other gnome besides epiphany untouched.

Stefan


"root# su - bofh"
OS: F10_x64, Arch, Centos5.3, RHEL4.7, RHEL5.3
Desktop Hardware: Dell Precision M65 laptop, core2duo, 2gb, 80gb 7200rpm
Registered linux user #459910 since 1998

Offline

#23 2008-03-16 20:33:50

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

stefan1975 wrote:

I'd go for xfburn

Non subversion xfburn:

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=15502

--EDIT--

On second thought, xfburn is a hassle to set up right now. Maybe graveman will work for you?

Last edited by skottish (2008-03-16 20:52:19)

Offline

#24 2008-03-16 21:44:02

kiepmad
Member
Registered: 2007-12-26
Posts: 41

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

I really don't understand what is too bloated with gnome. wink My PC has been on all day, I've been browsing through the net, reading mails, using openoffice, amsn, flash, etc.
Memory usage is 265mb ram. Apps start pretty fast and functionality is great.

Anyway it's off topic. wink
I tried Xfce once but was not convinced. I'd like to try out E17 someday, probably after exams in June tongue


[edit]
2 firefox windows
1openoffice
skype
blender
gimp
thunderbird
amsn
--------------
380mb ram pretty acceptable. wink
[/edit]

Last edited by kiepmad (2008-03-16 21:47:27)

Offline

#25 2008-03-16 23:55:57

ph0tios
Member
Registered: 2008-02-23
Posts: 126

Re: E17 versus XFCE ?! advice needed.

I am running xfce with compiz-fusion right now. firefox3 beta 4 open with 8 tabs, pidgin with 3 convos going, and a terminal open. 318mb of ram used.

I used e17 for a while--I liked it a lot. But for me personally, there were times when it did buggy things...especially on my desktop which I rarely reboot. Obviously, it is in development, so that is expected. So for now, I endorse xfce.

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB