[Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

Iranon · 2011-09-16 13:18:42

I want my desktop to be configurable, but to get out of the way when I stop playing around. This pretty much requires powerful text-based configuration, GUIs would become annoying long before they allow the fine-grained control I want.

I find FVWM a joy to use - powerful, stable, lightweight and very flexible in both functionality and appearance. More tricks and personalisation than KDE offers, the usability features I actually need rather than those the good people at Gnome push down my throat, running much lighter than either and sporting a deceptively clean and simple interface that I find prettier.
There is a price for making few assumptions about what the user wants though: fiddly configuration syntax that doesn't always do what I think it does, to the point where I'm not ruling out malice.

dhave · 2011-09-16 15:01:27

Iranon wrote:

There is a price for making few assumptions about what the user wants though: fiddly configuration syntax that doesn't always do what I think it does, to the point where I'm not ruling out malice.

Ha! Hilarious. I look forward to more posts from you, Iranon.

Last edited by dhave (2011-09-16 15:05:20)

lilsirecho · 2011-09-16 15:37:55

One general observation based on forum problems in the past three years.

Much ado about slow-downs and freezes with up-scale computers with large file transfers and USB hangups.

Perhaps these are related to x86_64 OS'es but multicore systems with TB drives seem prone to slow downs in archlinux but not in windows (perhaps).

So getting equipped with super-duper high-flying computer gear puts extra pressure on kernel requirements, Kde and Gnome get fatter.

There is a limit to everything and everything is in itself a limit!!!

I can picture the consternation in the development department when multicore hit the fan! What is in store, next? Perhaps 3D cores?

Perhaps everyone needs the IBM "Watson" computer to have the does all, knows all and breaks the bank all at the same time!!

lifeafter2am · 2011-09-16 16:08:10

Personally I do a lot on my machine that requires RAM/Processor horsepower (3D Rendering, compiling code, virtual machines, various cryptography fun); thus the less my machine uses, the more I have for these other things. Plus I just am a minimalist by nature, less is more to me.

I'm also one of "those" people running a Core i7 and a minimal setup.

Last edited by lifeafter2am (2011-09-16 16:09:04)

davidgurvich · 2011-09-16 16:32:16

I'm currently using KDE4 on some machines but find myself preferring LXDE. KDE4 looks better but LXDE is much more useful. Startup/shutdown is faster, latency is lower. Programs starting up is about the same but shutting down or switching between programs is faster on LXDE. I do miss some desktop widgets and the easy background switching on KDE4, but not that much.

Mr. Alex · 2011-09-19 18:19:53

Speaking of i7 and WM - you use WM and it requires very little of CPU. That's right. But then there comes YouTube! And it brings this big gross ugly slow buggy FLASH. And suddenly i7 is not too much any more. :-)

UPD: Oh yeah, there's also JavaScript. And when I open 75 tabs in Firefox where almost every tab contains JS/Flash, it's just about time for i7.

Last edited by Mr. Alex (2011-09-19 18:22:56)

inch · 2011-09-19 19:25:41

Because small and minimal software runs fast on low and faster on high end machines, which isn't the case with bigger software.

But yeah, I have 4GB RAM on my notebook and haven't even used half of it yet. I get your point somehow

sLLiK · 2011-09-20 16:03:40

Speaking form my own perspective, I found that all of my tastes and interests eventually gravitated towards a common goal. All of my work and home related projects were in a CLI-based world and I wanted to have remote access to them, but wanted to make sure my sessions were stateful and as snappy as if I was logged on locally. Using ssh and tmux were obvious paths to tread, and with embedded plugin-glorified vim 'IDE's and their own splits and tabs, I found that it all fit together nicely. After you start leveraging a tiling window manager, it becomes a natural extension of all the same concepts. Add some shell scripts and aliases, and you're golden.

I'd also been a long-time fan of NX (nomachine.com) as a VNC alternative and the performance was awesome, but even greater once I went with a minimalist setup. I could reconnect to my Linux's box's ongoing NX session and have a full twm setup and several tmux segregated sessions already waiting for me. But if I was on someone else's machine that didn't have NX installed, I could putty in and still reconnect to any of the tmux sesions, nav through them with Ctrl-A S, and still get things done. By the time you've reached that level of over-the-network minimalism, you're loathe to give it up for bells and whistles that almost certainly won't do you any good when connected remotely.

Awebb · 2011-09-20 17:15:50

I have an absolutely horsepower-agnostig reason not to use one of the major DE's. A little tale...

As a fan of compiz, I'm somewhere in the middle I guess. As long as I have access to compiz, a certain set of plugins and ccsm (I'm lazy), I can reproduce my GUI workflow on any machine I have to deal with. The most important part of this is the grid plugin for a certain way of manual tiling. I also "need" something like gnome-do or kupfer, sometimes at least. Another must is Terminator, tiling consoles in a single window might be redundant with the WM grid, but the ability to group consoles and send the same command to all of them at the same time is very useful (imagine having 10 servers connected via ssh and sync the date/time on all of them because the ntp server is down... I had this urge today).

I also sort of "need" transparency, especially transparent terminal windows are a must for me, because when there is only the terminal, I seem to forget everything around it and get lost in space and time. "Seing through" the terminal reminds me of the fact, that there are still other things to do.

I like the XFCE4 panel, it works well for me. I could do without a panel, but I also love putting applications like pidgin in the tray (I'm a bad person, I know) and there is dropbox, I don't like the icon-less approaches for dropbox. And, what the heck, if I have to waste some pixels for a tray, I can as well use some a panel. It's thin and on the right, so I don't mind. Thunar is my filemanager of choice, well actually I'd prefer Nautilus, but it's too much work to strip nautilus of it's Gnome fetishism, so Thunar will do it. Once you configured it properly, exo-open can be a little nicer to use than xdg-open... well, that's a lot of XFCE, isn't it?

I went and tried XFCE4. I had my panel, I had my filemanager, the mime-helper... Since I have to screens, I want a single big wallpaper. XFCE does not let me set one image file to be stretched over both screens, and since I wasn't in the mood to slice my work of art into pieces, I tried nitrogen, which failed for an unknown reason. The windowmanager lacked my lovely manual tiling. I tried a few solutions and ended up running compiz in XFCE. I replaced whatever xfce uses with terminator, replaced the runner with gmrun (it's just better...). Then, after a while and I'm not aware of having done anything, the session manager insisted on running terminator and firefox every on login. I found _something_ in the settings, but I couldn't make it leave my blank screen alone. I didn't do research on the internet, if I use a DE, I expect some things to be self-explaining, obvious and achievable by looking at the settings screen long enough.

After bending the system to my needs, all that was left of the glorious XFCE4 was the panel, the file manager and the exo-helper. I actually spent more time in understanding XFCE and making it play by my rules, than it takes me to create my desktop from the scratch. That's about the same reason why I use Arch instead of, say, Suse or Ubuntu. Their defaults differ too much from my preferences.

tl;dr
Most of the features most DE's offer keep getting in my way, so I deactivate them one by one. I feel more confortable with spending the same time in doing it from the scratch, then I really know what's going on on my machine. It doesn't matter how fast the rig is.

"Just because you're hung like a moose, doesn't mean you gotta do porn." - Kumar

Last edited by Awebb (2011-09-20 17:16:23)

zoqaeski · 2011-09-20 17:26:48

I started off with GNOME and fancy effects with Compiz etc (albeit on Ubuntu a few years ago). Then as the resources required by the DE (and OS) swelled, I simply went to a lighter system/DE/WM; I originally switched to Arch because Ubuntu was becoming rather slow. I should probably point out that I've been using pretty much the same hardware for the last six years, and it only got an upgrade when I found my old graphics card and bought some extra RAM. Hopefully I'm going to buy a replacement laptop soon.

My preferred WM is Openbox: it's simple to configure, and I've set it up with so many customisations I feel clumsy using any other system. I've contemplated switching to a tiling WM just to see what it's like, but really can't be bothered to set everything up again. The only features of GNOME I use are those that are required by GNOME applications I happen to like, such as Evince and Evolution. NetworkManager is useful—AFAIK it's got the best support for those stupid mobile broadband dongle modems made by Huawei (?) that seem to be deliberately designed to block Linux out—but I'd like to replace it with something simpler.

Last edited by zoqaeski (2011-09-20 17:28:45)

FreeTheBee · 2011-09-20 18:39:41

Personally I like simple interfaces without too much glitter. I used to use gnome2 with compiz but switched to xfce when gnome 3 was released. At the same time I also installed openbox and awesome. I thought it might be fun to play around a bit putting together an openbox environment by collecting components (e.g. dock, launcher etc..) . Awesome I used for a while already on a netbook. Both xfce and openbox work great, but lately I find myself in Awesome on my regular system more and more. On my netbook I chose awesome for its lightness and the thought that tiling would suit the small screen. On my main system the lightness is less important, but I guess tiling is addictive

muffinss · 2011-09-27 00:56:14

Lone_Wolf wrote:

for me the main question is :
is my computer power used for things I FIND IMPORTANT ?
everyone should answer that question for themselves, but for me the WM/DE is just a tool to manage/start things i find important , like applications.
That translates to the following groundrule :
WM/DE should not get in the way of my applications.

^^
Pretty much that. Why should a UI take a good portion of my systems resources? I'd rather have my resources being used on things I find more important than fancy graphics that serve no purpose other than looking "cool" and wasting resources that could be going towards a game, VM, and whatnot. I understand ram is abundant these days, and we live in the age of quad cores, but I didn't buy the hardware for it be drained on a taskbar, I bought it to run games, VM's, and awesome overall system performance. Whatever I throw at it, I know my system can handle it.

Even on my Windows 7 box, which has an Intel 2500K @ 4ghz, 8gb of DDR3 1866mhz, 128gb SSD, and a Nvidia 570, I have Aero turned off and use the classic theme. Whats shocking, I actually notice my system being more snappier with Aero off.

Last edited by muffinss (2011-09-27 00:58:31)

Iranon · 2011-09-27 16:02:29

I find it more irksome that the lardy things are very limited in some ways, compared to some lightweight ones.

The ideal would be "If I can unambiguously define what behaviour I want, I can implement it". Not attainable, but the full DEs don't even try.
I'd love to see a modern, pretty, polished and newbie-friendly desktop environment that exists merely as a configuration file/setup script for one of the old-school geek toys. There are some impressive one-person-efforts out there, but they could be so much more with more attention.

Unfortunately, most people who work on accessibility seem to think that text-based tools (command line, scripts, configuration files) are outdated and user-unfriendly and should be buried as deep as possible. Free software has little incentive to lock down functionality - it doesn't need to hold back to sell something trivial as a 'killer feature' later. I really think we could get more with less, instead of playing catch-up to commercially-exploitable follies.

s3kt0r · 2011-09-27 18:59:21

i agree with Lone_Wolf. i don't care i don't have title bars and nice animations, i work at fullscreen all the time, i just need apps to be available on the screen. everything is keyboard based. been using ratpoison and the same config file for like 2 years or more. amd phenom x4 965 x64+4gb ram+onboard graphics+2tb hdd.

sigma91 · 2011-09-29 18:20:53

MoonSwan wrote:

I subscribe to the philosophy that unspent/cached ram is wasted resources/ram

I subscribe to the philosophy that RAM used for eye-candy and features which I never use is wasted. Maybe I don't need ~60% of my RAM at 98% of the time, but there are some rare cases (e.g., when using virtual machines), where I need every last bit of it.

Arch Linux

#26 2011-09-16 13:18:42

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#27 2011-09-16 15:01:27

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#28 2011-09-16 15:37:55

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#29 2011-09-16 16:08:10

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#30 2011-09-16 16:32:16

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#31 2011-09-19 18:19:53

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#32 2011-09-19 19:25:41

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#33 2011-09-20 16:03:40

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#34 2011-09-20 17:15:50

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#35 2011-09-20 17:26:48

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#36 2011-09-20 18:39:41

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#37 2011-09-27 00:56:14

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#38 2011-09-27 16:02:29

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#39 2011-09-27 18:59:21

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

#40 2011-09-29 18:20:53

Re: [Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

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