What DE/WM?

Jayem · 2008-09-16 15:18:38

I'm going to be reinstalling Arch Linux as my primary operating system, at the moment it's just on a seperate partition for testing purposes. I currently use GNOME as my DE but in my opinion it runs sluggish if you know what I mean. I don't know if this has anything to do with the fact I use onboard graphics (GMA 950) but it's just rendering a DE. I've even optimised it using a tutorial on the Arch Wiki. Or maybe it's just my computer overall.

I was looking for something very snappy and fast and still look beautiful. Please list everything you recommend (that means if you suggest a WM, could you please recommend some panels and things like that).

I want Arch to run as fast as it can possibly can on my laptop, cheers!

dhave · 2008-09-16 15:22:35

While I've mainly been using KDE or Xfce the past couple of years, I'm always in awe of E17 for beauty and speed. I don't know how the dev(s) squeeze so much out of their code.

Check out the OpenGEU live CD. It's running Ubuntu, but it will give you a good look at E17, then, if you like, you can install E17 on Arch using the Arch packages.

Jayem · 2008-09-16 15:29:10

dhave wrote:

While I've mainly been using KDE or Xfce the past couple of years, I'm always in awe of E17 for beauty and speed. I don't know how the dev(s) squeeze so much out of their code.
Check out the OpenGEU live CD. It's running Ubuntu, but it will give you a good look at E17, then, if you like, you can install E17 on Arch using the Arch packages.

I just looked at this and I will definetely be trying this out! Will download that live CD right now and hopefully it will be as good as I expect!

Berticus · 2008-09-16 16:05:02

I've used GNOME for pretty much my entire Linux experience (since 2001). I sought out a new way of doing things because I too thought it was quite sluggish. I've been using Xmonad for the past 4 months and absolutely love it!

sm4tik · 2008-09-16 16:14:55

Openbox seems to be quite popular around here. You should look at the screensots threads for different setups, incl. panels and such. As a panel I can recommend tint2 and for a systray stalonetray's been working quite well here. Tint2 is supposed to get a tray at some point, but it's not yet there..
E17 has been one of those "gotta try it out one day", but I'm just stuck with fvwm
As for "light and fast" you really should check http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=41168 A lot of stuff there, incl. wm's/de's..

haxit · 2008-09-16 19:02:28

Try testing yourself. See which one you like,

froli · 2008-09-16 19:12:14

Try Openbox, with pypanel. Openbox is fast and lightweight.

Openbox can look like this:

There's much more screenshot on this thread: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=45692

jolts · 2008-09-16 19:18:41

froli wrote:

Try Openbox, with pypanel. Openbox is fast and lightweight.
Openbox can look like this:
http://pix.nofrag.com/1/e/7/55038601695 … 85be8t.jpg
There's much more screenshot on this thread: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=45692

Very clean May i ask what mp3 player youre using?

Roberth · 2008-09-16 19:33:27

jolts wrote:

froli wrote:
Try Openbox, with pypanel. Openbox is fast and lightweight.
Openbox can look like this:
http://pix.nofrag.com/1/e/7/55038601695 … 85be8t.jpg
There's much more screenshot on this thread: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=45692
Very clean May i ask what mp3 player youre using?

MPD with the sonata frontend.

kevin89 · 2008-09-16 19:57:29

My vote goes to Openbox aswell.
Panel : Tint
System tray: trayer
File Manager: pcmanfm
Image Viewer: mirage
Text Editor: geany

For music, I recommend mpd + ncmpc or mpd + sonata if you fancy more eye-candy.
Take a look at the page froli recommend, there are really good shots over there

Zeist · 2008-09-16 21:41:07

Personally I'm hooked on Awesome which is lightweight... but everyone don't really like tiling window managers. Before I started using Awesome I used PekWM which is a really nice WM.

wirenik · 2008-09-16 23:15:25

Another vote here for Openbox. Loads instantly, never laggy, still looks awesome.

Renan Birck · 2008-09-16 23:58:20

I enjoy Fluxbox.

hussam · 2008-09-16 23:59:09

I run gnome and haven't tried KDE4 yet, but if I remember correctly from KDE 3.4.3, KDE3 was extremely fast.
If there are still archlinux KDE3 packages, I recommend you try those
A full well integrated KDE3 is better than of a mixture of window managers, panels and file managers from different components.

wirenik · 2008-09-17 00:25:27

A full well integrated KDE3 is better than of a mixture of window managers, panels and file managers from different components.

I disagree. When I was using GNOME, there was a ton of excess software I never used. With Openbox, I get to choose the best/my favorite tools for the job, and there's no bloat whatsoever.

Berticus · 2008-09-17 01:42:32

hussam wrote:

A full well integrated KDE3 is better than of a mixture of window managers, panels and file managers from different components.

Huh? That's what a desktop environment is... a mixture of window managers, panels and file managers from different components. It's just in the event of a desktop environment the programs are chosen for you.

So in GNOME you have the metacity window manager, nautilus file manager, gnome panel for the panel, gnome system-tray-applet as the system tray. It even goes further than that to include evolution as the email client, epiphany as the web browser, evince to view pdf's, eye of gnome to view images, abiword word processor, and many other programs.

In KDE you have KWin window manager, Konqueror file manager, kicker for the panel. Like most other desktop environments it includes additional software such as kmail as the email client, kpdf to view pdf's, showimg to view images, koffice office suite, and many other programs.

In XFCE you have xf4wm window manager, thunar file manager, xf4panel for the panel. Continuing with the flow from the other two DE's, you have Midori web browser, Ristretto image viewer, and some other programs.

most desktop environments contain excess software you will never use.

When you're choosing a window manager, you're essentially creating your own desktop environment.

So my own "desktop environment" is xmonad window manager, ls/cd/mkdir/mv/rm to manage my files, dzen2 as my panel, mutt email client, epdfview to view pdf's, feh image viewer, vi+TeXLive for text processing, etc.

The difference is I got to choose what I wanted to put in it, and they're as tightly integrated with each other as the KDE, XFCE, and GNOME projects are.

dhave · 2008-09-17 06:27:24

Berticus wrote:

The difference is I got to choose what I wanted to put in it, and they're as tightly integrated with each other as the KDE, XFCE, and GNOME projects are.

Is this really the case? I had always assumed there was some higher degree of integration in the K-family, G-family or Xfce-family of apps and applets -- shared code beyond standard libraries? interprocess communication? -- I'm out of my tiny area of expertise here and need some instruction.

On the other hand, I just read up a bit on dbus, and I see that it has replaced kcop in KDE4 and much of bonobo in Gnome, so maybe these DE-specific components are being superceded by generic code. If so, that levels the playing field, at least as far as IPC goes. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

Last edited by dhave (2008-09-17 06:28:23)

firecat53 · 2008-09-17 20:52:16

LXDE is a good way to run openbox without having quite as much to set up initially. And it looks good and is very fast, too!

Scott

pseudonomous · 2008-09-18 00:07:57

dhave wrote:

Berticus wrote:
The difference is I got to choose what I wanted to put in it, and they're as tightly integrated with each other as the KDE, XFCE, and GNOME projects are.
Is this really the case? I had always assumed there was some higher degree of integration in the K-family, G-family or Xfce-family of apps and applets -- shared code beyond standard libraries? interprocess communication? -- I'm out of my tiny area of expertise here and need some instruction.
On the other hand, I just read up a bit on dbus, and I see that it has replaced kcop in KDE4 and much of bonobo in Gnome, so maybe these DE-specific components are being superceded by generic code. If so, that levels the playing field, at least as far as IPC goes. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

It really depends on the particular application itself, I think particularly the KDE apps do this, like Kile depends on having a bunch of stuff, in particular Kdvi, Kpdf, and Kghostview, as well the KDE3 library to work. Other stuff less so, supposedly the KDE stuff integrates well enough to sufficiently improve performance, this is old of course but:

http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/deskt … hmark.html

is a reference.

By definition, a given DE's native apps are going to integrate better together than Apps from rival DE's if for no other reason that they're all going to be using the same libraries, so you don't have to have the GNOME libraries and the KDE libraries (or XFCE libraries, but these are pretty damn small). Plus w/ KDE and anything else there's an issue of having both gtk and qt libraries, on the other hand, if you've got lot's of disk space this is not so much of an issue, what's more of an issue is memory usage using apps that are calling different libraries at the same time.

On the other hand, the DE's are memory hogs. (You can see that from the benchmarks, look at how light Windowmaker is) I honestly don't think XFCE4 is that bad, though, in my experiance on P4 w/ 512 mb Ram this is almost as fast as fluxbox (which is like lightening), the trouble iwth XFCE4, from my perspective, is that it doesn't provide much in the way of services either. So you need a bunch of 3rd party apps, just like you need in fluxbox. On the other hand, KDE3 does just about everything I want it to, and it's fast enough that I can use it on my P4, and it's got some killer apps (I mean, Kile is actually the reason why I use KDE). Btw, if you want to use KDE3, the best way is probably to get the legacy version from KDEmod ... the advantage here is you can install the bare base system and just the KDE components you want and ignore the others. Do you need three text editors? Kate, Kedit, Kwrite? Probably not. If you use emacs or vi, you probably don't need any. I've actually got them all ('cause I did the 'vanilla' install and have got Hard disk space to burn) but if you don't need them then why have them (i know ask myself ... hmmm)

Ah ... anyway, I think the point is that the DE's DO integrate better and provide more functionality (which you might not want anyway), but if you use lighter apps on a bare window manager, you're probably going to have a much lighter system, even if you don't get any synnergy from drawing on shared libraries.

Sorry for writing an essay with all this tangential crap.

I guess another pseudo desktop is www.gnustep.org, I've never tried it myself, though. I don't know, you've already got a plethora of choices, as to WM, if you want a comprehensive list, take a look at Wikipedia (I think it's got a table with features) or look at:

http://xwinman.org/

CDE, is one choice you can pretty much eliminate though ... it's not free, as in Freedom, and I'm not sure if you can get it for free (as in beer) short of installing the free (as in beer) version of Solaris (I don't think it's available even in Open Solaris, you need the commercial version of Solaris).

sm4tik · 2008-09-18 07:06:04

Hmm.. about the DEs tight integration. I'm not that familiar with all the technical stuff about libraries and such, but when I think of integration I think of all the apps working tightly together. So a DE opens url's with it's own browser, mail with it's mail-client, pictures with it's picture viewer and so on. All of this is done out of the box. DEs have their own config tools to set it up the way you want it to look n feel - and some config tools to even set up your system wide stuff. In some cases many of these things are nice, especially when one has no experience in linux.
Now to the WM part. I'd say a self constructed DE (talking about picking up the whatever WM, panel, pdf reader, browser etc.. one want's) can be as tightly integrated application wise as a ready-to-go DE, but this means a bit more effort setting all the things up. Some apps may not launch your browser by default when clicking an url, the browser may not handle mailto: links so that it opens up the mail client you're using and so on.
After all this jaddajadda... I'd really like to learn how to set such an environment up efficiently from the ground up ..you know.. the arch way I've been unsing FVWM for a couple of years now and tried a bunch of different apps to make my life easier when sitting here and little by little I've setteled with the setup I'm currently having. I know there are ways to set the system up so that once I decide to change the default browser, I can change just one setting somewhere instead of all the other apps settings to send urls to-the-other-browser. Get the point..?
Now, if you know some good reading, please throw a link at me! (or just a bunch of keywords to start googling would be a start too)

dav7 · 2008-09-18 07:41:27

+1 for openbox here. I've actually edited a bit of openbox's sourcecode to suit myself better - changing a bit of the menu behavior (that I don't use and forgot about long ago anyway) and nulling the function that changes the mouse cursor when around the edges of the windows, since I don't use the edges of windows to resize them (and haven't for a very long time).

And I use tint2 for a panel.

The combo suits me perfectly

-dav7

Berticus · 2008-09-18 20:00:20

sm4tik wrote:

Hmm.. about the DEs tight integration. I'm not that familiar with all the technical stuff about libraries and such, but when I think of integration I think of all the apps working tightly together. So a DE opens url's with it's own browser, mail with it's mail-client, pictures with it's picture viewer and so on. All of this is done out of the box. DEs have their own config tools to set it up the way you want it to look n feel - and some config tools to even set up your system wide stuff. In some cases many of these things are nice, especially when one has no experience in linux.
Now to the WM part. I'd say a self constructed DE (talking about picking up the whatever WM, panel, pdf reader, browser etc.. one want's) can be as tightly integrated application wise as a ready-to-go DE, but this means a bit more effort setting all the things up. Some apps may not launch your browser by default when clicking an url, the browser may not handle mailto: links so that it opens up the mail client you're using and so on.
After all this jaddajadda... I'd really like to learn how to set such an environment up efficiently from the ground up ..you know.. the arch way I've been unsing FVWM for a couple of years now and tried a bunch of different apps to make my life easier when sitting here and little by little I've setteled with the setup I'm currently having. I know there are ways to set the system up so that once I decide to change the default browser, I can change just one setting somewhere instead of all the other apps settings to send urls to-the-other-browser. Get the point..?
Now, if you know some good reading, please throw a link at me! (or just a bunch of keywords to start googling would be a start too)

I was thinking of integration in the same manner as well.

imag1narynumber · 2008-09-18 22:13:54

I'd just like to put out a +1 for PekWM. It's noticeably faster than the 'boxes I've tried and is easy-to-use. Looks great IMO and I have no tray or anything, no need! Lean and mean!

afonic · 2008-09-19 00:13:09

Actually it is quite sad that Gnome/KDE are not really considering resource usage and speed, at least it is not that high in their agenda.

I love Gnome, I've been using it since the Redhat 9 days and I only had a few months I was using KDE two times, once with SUSE 9 and then with Kubuntu 6.06. Given my current system (in my sig) it runs absolutely awesome in Arch, no delays, Compiz effects that catch your eye, everything working really stable and fast. But when I had to use it on a Pentium 4 2.8GHz with an 6600GT, oh well. It was clearly slow, so much that I removed it and installed XFCE. Thing is, I don't think a P4@2.8 is considered *slow* so Gnome should have performed much better. Of course nothing unusable, but I could "feel" the lag in the system responses especially when comparing with my PC. KDE4? Even worse.

I think the "major" DE, Gnome and KDE, need to improve in this area asap. The market of the users that have a PC one or two generations old is very warm towards Linux as their only other modern choice is Windows Vista, maybe the slower OS ever build (heck it doesn't work without lag even in my system). They should given a choice of a modern, fast DE!

kclive18 · 2008-09-19 00:17:08

XFCE; it's the easiest to configure and has lots of function while being lean and efficient. The *box DE's lack in function and ease, but XFCE is the best of both worlds. Plus it's based on GTK so your GTK apps will look very nice in it, just like they do in GNOME. Only they'll load up faster

Arch Linux

#1 2008-09-16 15:18:38

What DE/WM?

#2 2008-09-16 15:22:35

Re: What DE/WM?

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