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#101 2006-06-05 01:18:27

Gullible Jones
Member
Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

Testing is generally stable enough for desktop usage though. It can get very broken during large upgrades, when not all of the packages in it have been recompiled against some new library or something, but that state doesn't seem to last very long.

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#102 2006-06-05 07:56:50

Fatih
Member
From: Ankara-Türkiye
Registered: 2005-12-17
Posts: 67
Website

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

wael/gamin 0.1.7-1
    Gamin is a file and directory monitoring system defined to be a subset of
    the FAM (File Alteration Monitor) system.

You can install it from Wael's repo. Just add this line in pacman.conf

[wael]
Server = http://w.nasreddine.free.fr/i686

and do

pacman -Sy gamin

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#103 2006-06-05 16:46:18

mac57
Member
From: St. Somewhere
Registered: 2006-01-06
Posts: 302
Website

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

Thanks folks, much appreciated!


Cast off the Microsoft shackles Jan 2005

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#104 2006-07-11 22:50:16

Gullible Jones
Member
Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

Fatih wrote:

wael/gamin 0.1.7-1
    Gamin is a file and directory monitoring system defined to be a subset of
    the FAM (File Alteration Monitor) system.

You can install it from Wael's repo. Just add this line in pacman.conf

[wael]
Server = http://w.nasreddine.free.fr/i686

and do

pacman -Sy gamin

Sorry for the bump but this repo no longer works.

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#105 2006-07-12 21:42:22

bud
Member
From: swe
Registered: 2006-07-12
Posts: 74

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

nice list but shouldn't opera be there instead of firefox?
Firefox is a pain in the ass slow compared to opera smile


Hello, I am normal!

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#106 2006-07-12 21:50:26

baze
Member
Registered: 2005-10-30
Posts: 393

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

in case you haven't noticed, nearly all the apps in this thread are gtk2 applications. opera uses qt, so maybe that is why it is not listed.

i don't want to say gtk2 > qt here, or gtk2 is lighter than qt or anything like this, but you can notice that gtk2 apps are preferred by the users that posted in this thread and perhaps that is why not many of them use opera.
would be my guess, why opera is not listed instead of firefox.

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#107 2006-07-12 21:55:22

Gullible Jones
Member
Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

Neither Opera nor Firefox are particularly light.

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#108 2006-07-12 22:45:07

bud
Member
From: swe
Registered: 2006-07-12
Posts: 74

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

links ftw :>


Hello, I am normal!

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#109 2006-07-12 22:59:47

magnum_opus
Member
Registered: 2005-01-26
Posts: 132

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

it seems to me there's a lot more apps that use just gtk without gnome than just qt without kde (actually opera is about the only one i know). that and due to kdebase's monolithic approach it's much easier to get just a portion of gnome, versus all or nothing with kde.
so gtk comes up more often in this kind of thread, as opposed to a specific toolkit prefence in the posters

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#110 2006-09-19 06:26:41

marciorp
Member
From: Brazil
Registered: 2006-09-03
Posts: 12
Website

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

I must say that Thunar is NOT the same thing as pcmanfm.

pcmanfm is my new love. It is light and fast, clean interface, simple ideas implemented in a very effective way. And the tabs rock.

I also love a program called tilda, which is a terminal that jumps over the screen when you type F2, just like the console on Quake when you type ~ (ergo tilda). Very good way to start programs that escaped your menumaker.

There's a long time I search for an decent image viewer, but none seems to fit. The mirage and xv are going under testing, but ImageMagick's display is so awesomely geeky that I might just consider it... That said, I still think I might stick with xnview, which is not open-source, it seems, and has a strange little hang when flipping images, but suits my needs better.

Also liked a lot asunder, opera, tuxcmd and some of the others. That thread ROCKD!


----
Marcio

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#111 2006-09-19 07:19:50

benplaut
Member
Registered: 2006-06-13
Posts: 383

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

Best fast, light, and goddamn simple program i use:

#!/bin/bash
if wmctrl -l | grep "PopUp"
        then wmctrl -v -c "PopUp" && exit  
        else urxvt +sb -bl -geometry 127x30+2+0 -T "PopUp" -e screen -d -R popup
fi

Popup borderless terminal -- bind that script to a key and it will toggle.  Requires wmctrl from AUR (probably could be done some other way, but i don't know enough about identifiing windows).

Faster than tilda, too wink

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#112 2006-09-19 08:21:24

FUBAR
Member
From: Belgium
Registered: 2004-12-08
Posts: 1,029
Website

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

Can someone make a quick voting page for the different LnF apps? Would be nicer than static personal lists. If this has already been suggested, please excuse my laziness.


A bus station is where a bus stops.
A train station is where a train stops.
On my desk I have a workstation.

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#113 2006-10-01 10:30:06

superstoned
Member
Registered: 2006-09-04
Posts: 268

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

Let's throw a rock in the water here:

No argument about a system with 64 mb ram, which only supports one application at a time (or a few console apps).

But let's be a bit more realistic. You have 512 mb ram (or more). Normal today, isn't it? You run a chat application, of course. And an irc client as well, maybe, minimized to a tray or on your 6th desktop. You don't want to close your music player when you want to write a document. You'd like to use a webbrowser with a few tabs open, and you have 2 pdf's. A few locations open in your filemanager. A mail app in the background, maybe a news reader, and a calendar app. A weather applet on the desktop, maybe? Or shouldn't you want all this from a computer in 2006?

If you do, i think having all these seperate apps is not efficient. they should share more code, and the more the better. What is bloat? If you have 10 apps which each duplicate lots of code!

To keep it short, if you want a realistic workload, you should use KDE. Because it is less bloated than all these so-called 'light' apps. They duplicate lots off stuff, while in KDE, all this is shared between the apps, thus  it has a high requirement for K3B but it is creating a lower memory footprint for 10 apps. (this goes for KDE 4 a lot more than for 3.x, and as a result, it'll use aprox. 20% less memory compared to 3.x)

for a bit of measurement:
http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/


So my argument: on a 64 mb system, use these light apps, one at a time (or two). on a decent system (>512mb) you're better off using KDE (and to a lesser extend, gnome). Because it uses the same or less memory, but gives you better integration and cooperation between the apps and more features.

Of course, if you can live with a very small amount of features, buy a used Apple II or something. No argument here.

ps I don't have internet etc at this moment, so i won't be able to answer quickly I'm afraid, but I'll try. And I understand for some (64 mb ram anyone?) this is totally irrelevant. But I KNOW some of you use these 'light' apps on a AMD64 4000+ 2GB system. And I think it is silly, and you should think about it again. So tell me, why do you do it? Isn't it because you THINK it's faster? No measurement I guess...

I used to think Gentoo was fast, or Kubuntu, but Arch kicks both asses anytime, so I think a bit more thought into performance and memory usage, a bit more realism, wouldn't hurt.


-=] life sucks deeply [=-

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#114 2006-10-01 12:12:18

Kindred
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2006-03-25
Posts: 27

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

superstoned wrote:

Let's throw a rock in the water here:

No argument about a system with 64 mb ram, which only supports one application at a time (or a few console apps).

But let's be a bit more realistic. You have 512 mb ram (or more). Normal today, isn't it? You run a chat application, of course. And an irc client as well, maybe, minimized to a tray or on your 6th desktop. You don't want to close your music player when you want to write a document. You'd like to use a webbrowser with a few tabs open, and you have 2 pdf's. A few locations open in your filemanager. A mail app in the background, maybe a news reader, and a calendar app. A weather applet on the desktop, maybe? Or shouldn't you want all this from a computer in 2006?

If you do, i think having all these seperate apps is not efficient. they should share more code, and the more the better. What is bloat? If you have 10 apps which each duplicate lots of code!

To keep it short, if you want a realistic workload, you should use KDE. Because it is less bloated than all these so-called 'light' apps. They duplicate lots off stuff, while in KDE, all this is shared between the apps, thus  it has a high requirement for K3B but it is creating a lower memory footprint for 10 apps. (this goes for KDE 4 a lot more than for 3.x, and as a result, it'll use aprox. 20% less memory compared to 3.x)

for a bit of measurement:
http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/


So my argument: on a 64 mb system, use these light apps, one at a time (or two). on a decent system (>512mb) you're better off using KDE (and to a lesser extend, gnome). Because it uses the same or less memory, but gives you better integration and cooperation between the apps and more features.

Of course, if you can live with a very small amount of features, buy a used Apple II or something. No argument here.

ps I don't have internet etc at this moment, so i won't be able to answer quickly I'm afraid, but I'll try. And I understand for some (64 mb ram anyone?) this is totally irrelevant. But I KNOW some of you use these 'light' apps on a AMD64 4000+ 2GB system. And I think it is silly, and you should think about it again. So tell me, why do you do it? Isn't it because you THINK it's faster? No measurement I guess...

I used to think Gentoo was fast, or Kubuntu, but Arch kicks both asses anytime, so I think a bit more thought into performance and memory usage, a bit more realism, wouldn't hurt.

Well...  I'm not convinced that running my preferred apps of mpd, epdfview, thunar, irssi and sylpheed in openbox are going to approach the memory required by running the equivelant KDE apps under KDE, honestly though i'm not all that interested because I have other reasons which likely trump this in importance.

- I like not being tied to one DE/WM in particular, even if I use Gnome for a while i'll stick with my favourite GTK (DE agnostic) apps instead of switching to the 'Gnome' alternatives.  Light apps tend to have no Gnome or KDE dependencies.  Using KDE apps is the complete opposite of this approach.  This somewhat is tied to;

- I like modularity. KDE packages aren't split in Arch, there's no way I want extra junk on my system, I like clean and stripped down.  This is why I like Arch in the first place.  To me, KDE isn't clean or stripped down, or all that modular.

- I don't like KDE apps on the whole.  I'm a big supporter of the UNIX philosophy 'do one thing and do it well', something I think that KDE apps often tend to crap on.  Just my perspective of course.  You'll likely find that most of the apps listed in this thread follow this philosophy, it's a good one.

So those are a few reason why I personally 'do it', and yes on a modern fast machine.  Light apps tend to work nicely with all my criteria and all the better for it on a fast machine.  It's often more about philosophy than memory usage and speed.. but that's always a bonus.

Anyway, no one should really be justifying what software they use on here.  roll

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#115 2006-10-01 14:09:25

superstoned
Member
Registered: 2006-09-04
Posts: 268

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

Sorry, my post was a bit... ehm... aggressive. Not meant to be. Nobody should have to explain why they use something, sure.

It's definitely more about philosophy than speed or bloat, and esp about features vs memory, as a decent do-one-thing-do-it-good framework like KDE is would win that easily...

Yes, the argument that KDE isn't 'UNIXy' is really weird. KDE is all about small components working together. Kontact is just a 3-mb shell which uses kparts to show a PIM application - but these kparts can also be started seperately or embedded in other apps. every text inputfield in KDE  is just another Kpart - there is only one texteditor. Kmail's composer is a Kate Kpart, and kwrite and Kate are also just the same component - only with a different interface around it. Konqueror is 3 or 4 mb - khtml, smb, KioLocate, fish, they are in no way part of Konqueror but accessable from any app. isn't that way more 'unix' than all those seperate apps doing everything for themselves? Every of your apps has to build it's own toolbar + way of editing/changing it. Icon sizes differ, because they have to build it themselves. etc etc. while in KDE, you can change the size of toolbar icons for all apps in Kcontrol, and choose if you want text under them as well. Change it in an application, and it'll remember that setting for the specific app, but still honour all other general settings (give me name of an app/framework which does that).


-=] life sucks deeply [=-

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#116 2006-10-01 14:11:04

superstoned
Member
Registered: 2006-09-04
Posts: 268

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

Point was/is: all these ppl saying KDE is bloated or 'not UNIX' should have a second look - KDE is the opposite of both of these statements, and mixing WXWidgets/GTK/whatever, THAT's bloat.

edit:tough personally I don't like the fact there are over a hundred apps in my menu ATM because the KDE packages are not split in Arch. The new structure coming in KDE 4 might help, but hey, that's still months away... So you definitely have a point there.


-=] life sucks deeply [=-

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#117 2006-10-01 16:28:47

deficite
Member
From: Augusta, GA
Registered: 2005-06-02
Posts: 693

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

Superstoned, you wouldn't happen to be in the PR team of KDE or something would you? That sounded way too.....gimmicky

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#118 2006-10-02 09:53:43

superstoned
Member
Registered: 2006-09-04
Posts: 268

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

deficite wrote:

Superstoned, you wouldn't happen to be in the PR team of KDE or something would you? That sounded way too.....gimmicky

well, matter of fact, I kind'a am, but that's not the point. I was reading through the thread, and well - I think it needed a different idea. The world isn't black-n-white (except for the commandline maybe), and the whole 'light' idea often isn't that light. With some comments like 'DE's are bloated', it's not bad to hear a different sound, isn't it?

And it certainly isn't just about KDE, if you would run only WxWidgets or GTK/Gnome or apps which share the OO.o or Firefox toolkit (hint: they don't exist), you'd be able to say it's pretty efficient. But I think it's a rather factual statement to say that KDE is the environment which took the 'lets share some code' approach further than others.


-=] life sucks deeply [=-

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#119 2006-10-05 16:56:29

KerowynM
Member
Registered: 2006-06-04
Posts: 78

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

Light and fast aside I stay away from KDE because of QT.  The licencing on QT leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  Not so bad that I dont use k3b, but bad enough I don't really want to become dependent on it.

But, considering I use ratpoison as my WM, KDE feels horribly bloated to me.  I guess I just don't need a DE, I'm confortable enough CLI to handle my data and only use X because Screen doesn't handle apps like Firefox.

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#120 2006-10-05 18:28:39

superstoned
Member
Registered: 2006-09-04
Posts: 268

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

KerowynM wrote:

Light and fast aside I stay away from KDE because of QT.  The licencing on QT leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  Not so bad that I dont use k3b, but bad enough I don't really want to become dependent on it.

it's GPL... what's wrong with that? personally, i prefer it over BSD and Lesser GPL (like Gtk), as those allow proprietary stuff without any contribution. at least the fact Qt is GPL allows Trolltech to charge proprietary software vendors for it's use, and as this money is used to improve Qt, KDE and other free software, i prefer it that way.

KerowynM wrote:

But, considering I use ratpoison as my WM, KDE feels horribly bloated to me.  I guess I just don't need a DE, I'm confortable enough CLI to handle my data and only use X because Screen doesn't handle apps like Firefox.

well, then, you're the perfect ratpoison user, and indeed shouldn't even thinking about using KDE ;-)


-=] life sucks deeply [=-

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#121 2006-11-12 05:39:35

ravisghosh
Member
From: Intergalactic Spaces
Registered: 2006-10-12
Posts: 516
Website

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

There are few things that are missing from the list. I can remind of these few right now.

1. A finance manager like gnucash, jgnash, etc. I currently use gnucash. It is not lightweight or fast, but have been using it since RH7 days and dont know whether migrating to something else will be worth.
2. PIM. I dont use that but many guys out there do. I dont know which one is LnF.
3. A diary/journal. There is no such program in repos except logjam (guess that is for blogs) . This is a real need for people who like to record daily events and do some writting too but not publish on the web.
4. Real player. Again, real is not there in the repos, but its an absolute necessity to play songs online in sites like www.raaga.com or www.musicindiaonline.com. Is there any alternative to it?
5. Also, we need to recommend some torrent clients. (editing this line a few days after posting originally).

Also, mac57, it would be great if you keep your list on the first page updating, adding/replacing applications as they become available and/or replace others in their category in terms of being LnF.

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#122 2006-11-12 06:01:55

iphitus
Forum Fellow
From: Melbourne, Australia
Registered: 2004-10-09
Posts: 4,927

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

ravisghosh wrote:

4. Real player. Again, real is not there in the repos, but its an absolute necessity to play songs online in sites like www.raaga.com or www.musicindiaonline.com. Is there any alternative to it?

mplayer?

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#123 2006-11-12 06:06:51

ravisghosh
Member
From: Intergalactic Spaces
Registered: 2006-10-12
Posts: 516
Website

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

i have got mplayer installed but that does not work there. is there a way to make opera or firefox detect mplayer.

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#124 2006-11-12 08:05:12

stonecrest
Member
From: Boulder
Registered: 2005-01-22
Posts: 1,190

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

mplayer-plugin


I am a gated community.

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#125 2006-11-12 11:29:37

baze
Member
Registered: 2005-10-30
Posts: 393

Re: The Best Light and Fast Applications - 2006 LnF Awards

deluge is a nice new pygtk only torrent client based on libtorrent.
although it still has some bugs like opening torrent files from a web browser or a file manager does not yet work properly, it looks really nice, imho. replaced transmission for me.
i suggest the svn version for now, since there have been some important bugs fixed and improvements added since 0.3.1.

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