Re: Best WM for slow machine?
And yo was Andrew Perrin heard to yodel: I run fvwm2 on two slower machines: a P200 with 96MB of RAM and a P90 with 16M. Works great on both! I've been happy with Windowmaker on a Pentium 120 notebook with 32M RAM. -- I'm not advocating that anyone take up emacs. Not even me: at my age, I'd be more likely to try bungee-jumping. It's easier, and has less risk of causing permanent brain damage. ** A posting on ZDNet forum
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 07:45:31PM -0400, Daniel Hoffman wrote: I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want to put Debian on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very slw and unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? As long as we're going down this road, I might as well chime in for fvwm2. It gets a lot more functionality per ram usage than anything short of twm, and in real world usage it's a great deal more agile than most. The only real disadvantage is the huge learning curve, but there's stuff like dotfile-fvwm2 to help, though I've never had call to use it.
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 08:31:47PM -0400, Carl Fink wrote: On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 07:45:31PM -0400, Daniel Hoffman wrote: . . . What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? As long as everyone else is jumping in, icewm is light and very configurable. The only knock on it is that it doesn't work correctly with WordPerfect 2000 (due to bugs in WP). That's interesting. I had problems with WP8 and icewm, although WP7 and WP8.1 both worked fine. Bob
Re: KDE on a slow machine (was: Best WM for slow machine?)
On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Margarete Hans wrote: Mmh. My laptop has 20 MB of RAM. I don't think that I'll be using it very extensively - it is rather a test to decide if I'm going to install debian on my main computer, which by now is also starting to get old (166 with 32 MB of RAM and 3 GB HD - still running windows With 20M (or even 24) you would want to keep an eye on how much and what is being swapped, just so you can tell the difference between poor system performance and an overtaxed system. I usually run top on a 132x60 text console, or do something like alias snap=top -n3 -d1 ~/top.txt to keep an eye on this stuff. ( ). Does gnome use as much memory as KDE? shrug... Besides, what does KDE give you more than these smaller WMs? Most noticeable would be the Control Center style configuration handling of the KDE and kapps, the apparent embedding of one app in another (e.g., previewers in konqueror), and a framework for doing the desktop shortcuts and mimetype magic things you want. Aside from the embedding stuff, you can probably do everything KDE does via xsession, etc., with a non-DE window manager. ...I ran a little experiment. Procedure: for wm in none,twm,blackbox,kde2 reboot text login top -n3 -d1 ... start wm wait top -n3 -d1 ... then for wm in none,twm,blackbox,kde2 reboot start wm wait text login top -n3 -d1 ... Results (representative): --first top after a reboot 23:15:20 up 2 min, 1 user, load average: 0.35, 0.36, 0.15 30 processes: 29 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: 35.9% user, 12.9% system, 0.0% nice, 51.2% idle Mem: 62864K total,35172K used,27692K free, 1344K buffers Swap:55664K total,0K used,55664K free,22112K cached --twm 23:19:26 up 3 min, 2 users, load average: 0.01, 0.18, 0.12 32 processes: 31 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: 19.3% user, 7.5% system, 0.0% nice, 73.2% idle Mem: 62864K total,38984K used,23880K free, 1440K buffers Swap:55664K total,0K used,55664K free,23804K cached --blackbox 23:30:40 up 3 min, 2 users, load average: 0.13, 0.21, 0.13 32 processes: 31 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: 20.1% user, 8.0% system, 0.0% nice, 71.9% idle Mem: 62864K total,37464K used,25400K free, 1396K buffers Swap:55664K total,0K used,55664K free,23232K cached --kde2 00:04:50 up 8 min, 2 users, load average: 0.53, 1.19, 0.67 50 processes: 49 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: 58.1% user, 9.8% system, 0.0% nice, 32.1% idle Mem: 62864K total,61432K used, 1432K free, 2048K buffers Swap:55664K total,8K used,55656K free,32416K cached Notes: The uptimes show the time taken to startup the X environment via kdm, switch to a tty, login, then do a top command (with a 486DX2-25); I ended up doing kde2 4 times 'cause I got hit with `maximal mount count reached...' twice, both times no swap was used. Conclusions: Compared to twm or blackbox, KDE2 takes about 6 times longer to startup and needs about 64M of RAM to avoid swapping, plus whatever your apps need if you want to actual use KDE without swapping (although, from experience, switching between apps usually only takes a few seconds and switching desktops or giving focus to large apps that got swapped out, takes quite a few seconds, even at 25MHz). Not for the impatient, but what do you expect from something that was probably rescued from the scrap heap or landfill. HTH, Bruce
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
Bob Nielsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 08:31:47PM -0400, Carl Fink wrote: On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 07:45:31PM -0400, Daniel Hoffman wrote: . . . What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? Blackbox! Fast, clean and gorgeous ;-) Chase up some of Chthulhain's themes to go with it. http://lordzork.com/blackbox/ There are gtk and gkrellm themes to match most of them. Glyn -- so here we are then http://members.tripod.co.uk/Christchurch2000uk Running Debian/Gnu Linux 8:44am up 2:05, 3 users, load average: 0.25, 0.23, 0.15
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
Daniel Hoffman wrote: I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want to put Debian on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very slw and unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? __ Daniel Hoffman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) I run icewm on my Pentium133 with 80Mb RAM and it's a very nice wm: themeable, taskbar, easy to configure ... and fast. Bu tyou've already got a huge selection of wm's, so now it's your turn to find the right one for you. Frank
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
Daniel Hoffman wrote: I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want to put Debian on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very slw and unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? __ Daniel Hoffman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) I run icewm on my Pentium133 with 80Mb RAM and it's a very nice wm: themeable, taskbar, easy to configure ... and fast. Bu tyou've already got a huge selection of wm's, so now it's your turn to find the right one for you. Frank
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
I run fvwm2 on two slower machines: a P200 with 96MB of RAM and a P90 with 16M. Works great on both! -- Andrew J Perrin - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin Asst Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 269 Hamilton Hall, CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Daniel Hoffman wrote: I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want to put Debian on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very slw and unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? __ Daniel Hoffman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Guy Fawkes: The last man to enter Parliament with honest intent! If you find a solution and become attached to it, the solution may become your next problem. ©2001 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 10:16:14PM -0500, Hall Stevenson wrote: | * D-Man ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [010610 20:05]: | | I like sawfish (formerly called sawmill) a lot, and it is | lightweight. There are some things that sawfish won't do, such as | set the background of your display. It doesn't because that is the | desktop's job (GNOME or KDE) and not the window manager's job. This | design philosophy is one of the reasons it is quite lightweight. | | Before we had Gnome and KDE, On my linux box, the before was the console ;-). | what did you use to set the background, xsetroot ?? On the Solaris systems at school they didn't have CDE my first year. The default was mwm and xsetroot was used to set the background. I eventually learned that 'xv' could be used to set an image as the background. Now they have CDE (in addition to the old stuff), and I just use the defaults. I don't use a dekstop from those machines very often -- while I was living on-campus I would use a remote X session to login to my Linux box (GNOME+Sawfish), then ssh back to the lab machine to do the work. It was a bit odd, but it worked very well and gave me just as much comfort as sitting in my room using my linux desktop. I haven't been to the labs much since I moved back home (its not very far), but I can't run mwm or fvwm2 anymore for some reason (I liked to hack my .cshrc so that I get bash run after I login, but I think I broke the normal X startup stuff ;-)). | I guess in a strict sense of window manager, yeah, it shouldn't set | the root *background*... That's the idea behind sawfish so that it is lightweight and cooperates well with the desktop. Some WMs (such as WindowMaker or Afterstep) don't cooperate well with the desktop because they have their own background and dock (aka panel). (To be fair, those were designed before GNOME/KDE and they work well when the dekstop isn't present, such as on Solaris systems without CDE) -D
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
on Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 07:45:31PM -0400, Daniel Hoffman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want to put Debian on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very slw and unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? My pref is WindowMaker. I just installed it on a system very similar to what you describe: P133 16MB. Before frying the mobo, WindowMaker was running nicely, though colors are dithered at 8bpp with the pitiful on-board video this box had (1MB S3V driver). If your card will support 16 bpp color depth at your desired resolution, wmaker's highly recommended. Mobo friage appeared to have happened while trying a new video card on the box HP Pavilion's suck, completely nonstandard. -- Karsten M. Self kmself@ix.netcom.comhttp://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of Gestalt don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org Disclaimer: http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/ pgpxc0I2Q807X.pgp Description: PGP signature
Best WM for slow machine?
I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want to put Debian on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very slw and unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? __ Daniel Hoffman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Guy Fawkes: The last man to enter Parliament with honest intent! If you find a solution and become attached to it, the solution may become your next problem. ©2001
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
On Sunday 10 June 2001 04:45 pm, Daniel Hoffman wrote: I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want to put Debian on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very slw and unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? Windowmaker's pretty light, but with 16 megs I'd throw on blackbox. It's superlight and still a really nice WM. - David Nusinow [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 07:45:31PM -0400, Daniel Hoffman wrote: | I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want to put Debian | on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very slw and | unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) | window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? IMO Enlightenment is NOT lightweight, and WindowMaker isn't very light. I like sawfish (formerly called sawmill) a lot, and it is lightweight. There are some things that sawfish won't do, such as set the background of your display. It doesn't because that is the desktop's job (GNOME or KDE) and not the window manager's job. This design philosophy is one of the reasons it is quite lightweight. -D
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Daniel Hoffman wrote: I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want to put Debian on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very slw and unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? I haven't tried it on a really slow machine, but XFce is pretty lightweight and it still has a lot of functionality. It's not the prettiest WM, being based on *kack* CDE, but it is very functional. FVWM and some of the FVWM variants are also pretty good on slow/low mem machines. Take care, Zonker -- Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier -=- [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.ZonkerBooks.net/ =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. -- Douglas Adams
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 07:45:31PM -0400, Daniel Hoffman wrote: I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want to put Debian on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very slw and unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? I would recommend PWM - http://www.students.tut.fi/~tuomov/pwm/ kent -- From seeing and seeing the seeing has become so exhausted First line of The Panther - R. M. Rilke
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 07:45:31PM -0400, Daniel Hoffman wrote: . . . What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? As long as everyone else is jumping in, icewm is light and very configurable. The only knock on it is that it doesn't work correctly with WordPerfect 2000 (due to bugs in WP). -- Carl Fink [EMAIL PROTECTED] Manager, Dueling Modems Computer Forum http://dm.net
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
The list so far: BlackBox IceWM fvwm2 fvwm95 sawfish XFce PWM Thanks for the great (and very quick) response so far--any others i should add to my shopping list? __ Daniel Hoffman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Voice come from cow on wall. If you find a solution and become attached to it, the solution may become your next problem. ©2001 - Original Message - From: ktb [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: debian-user@lists.debian.org Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2001 8:10 PM Subject: Re: Best WM for slow machine? On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 07:45:31PM -0400, Daniel Hoffman wrote: I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want to put Debian on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very slw and unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? I would recommend PWM - http://www.students.tut.fi/~tuomov/pwm/ kent
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
uwm ('ultimate window manager') is very interesting. not much to look at,
but really really neat and different.
did i just type 'neat'?
glenn becker
On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Daniel Hoffman
wrote:
The list so far:
BlackBox
IceWM
fvwm2
fvwm95
sawfish
XFce
PWM
Thanks for the great (and very quick) response so far--any others i should
add to my shopping list?
__
Daniel Hoffman ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Voice come from cow on wall.
If you find a solution and become attached to it, the solution may become
your next problem.
©2001
- Original Message -
From: ktb [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2001 8:10 PM
Subject: Re: Best WM for slow machine?
On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 07:45:31PM -0400, Daniel Hoffman wrote:
I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want to put
Debian
on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very slw
and
unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully
functional!)
window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker?
I would recommend PWM -
http://www.students.tut.fi/~tuomov/pwm/
kent
--
++
http://www.burningclown.com
Everyone's Portal to Nothing At All
++
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Daniel Hoffman wrote: I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want to put Debian on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very slw and unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still fully functional!) window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker? Blackbox. I used it extensively on a 486-33 for about two years... Never noticed a slowdown because of the WM. __ Daniel Hoffman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Guy Fawkes: The last man to enter Parliament with honest intent! If you find a solution and become attached to it, the solution may become your next problem. ©2001 -- Galt's sci-fi paradox: Stormtroopers versus Redshirts to the death. Who is John Galt? [EMAIL PROTECTED], that's who!
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
Woops... I was just planning on installing KDE on my old computer
(486, 40kHz CPU). I guess I'll try something else if there are already
problems running it on a 166...
uwm ('ultimate window manager') is very interesting. not much to
look at,
but really really neat and different.
did i just type 'neat'?
glenn becker
On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Daniel Hoffman
wrote:
The list so far:
BlackBox
IceWM
fvwm2
fvwm95
sawfish
XFce
PWM
Thanks for the great (and very quick) response so far--any others
i should
add to my shopping list?
__
Daniel Hoffman ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Voice come from cow on wall.
If you find a solution and become attached to it, the solution
may become
your next problem.
©2001
- Original Message -
From: ktb [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Sent: Sunday, June 10, 2001 8:10 PM
Subject: Re: Best WM for slow machine?
On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 07:45:31PM -0400, Daniel Hoffman wrote:
I've got an older Pentium 166 with 16 megs of RAM that I want
to put
Debian
on. I already tried once, and put KDE on it, but that was very
slw
and
unresponsive. What's your favorite lightweight (but still
fully
functional!)
window manager? FVWM? Enlightenment? Windowmaker?
I would recommend PWM -
http://www.students.tut.fi/~tuomov/pwm/
kent
--
++
http://www.burningclown.com
Everyone's Portal to Nothing At All
++
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
* D-Man ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [010610 20:05]: I like sawfish (formerly called sawmill) a lot, and it is lightweight. There are some things that sawfish won't do, such as set the background of your display. It doesn't because that is the desktop's job (GNOME or KDE) and not the window manager's job. This design philosophy is one of the reasons it is quite lightweight. Before we had Gnome and KDE, what did you use to set the background, xsetroot ?? I guess in a strict sense of window manager, yeah, it shouldn't set the root *background*... Hall
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
I think afterstep has been omitted from the list. Its very configurable and stable. Here's the top output: 12477 scorpio9 0 1636 1636 1152 S 0 0.0 0.6 0:00 afterstep I've used it as my wm ever since I've had Linux, which started out on a 486-DX4 system with 32M ram. Andrei -- First there was Explorer... Then came Expedition. This summer Coming to a street near you.. Ford Exterminator. -- Andrei Ivanov http://arshes.dyndns.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] 12402354 --
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
HI,
Another vote for blackbox! After using WindowMaker
almost exclusively and the transition is very easy.
It's themable. I run it on a P90 w/ 96Mb and a P150 w/
64Mb.
Another I migfht have input on (after a while) is
amiwm(I've dabbled w/ enlightenment, fvwm, and am now
going to try amiwm {due to MY lockup problems and the
recommendation of David Nusinow that lockups in X were
attributed to WindowMaker.too badmy favorite]).
=
Regards- Tim Stetson Whiskey Sour Nuhn O. Yobiznez
Licq # 14373626
Why?.Why not?..Why not try?
The rule of an inquisitive mind.
__
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35
a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
On Sunday 10 June 2001 07:45 pm, Nuhn Yobiznez wrote:
Another I migfht have input on (after a while) is
amiwm(I've dabbled w/ enlightenment, fvwm, and am now
going to try amiwm {due to MY lockup problems and the
recommendation of David Nusinow that lockups in X were
attributed to WindowMaker.too badmy favorite]).
Yeah, it was my favorite too. The WM developers said it was a problem with X,
not WM, so I'm still waiting on that one.
- David Nusinow
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
KDE on a slow machine (was: Best WM for slow machine?)
On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Margarete Hans wrote: Woops... I was just planning on installing KDE on my old computer (486, 40kHz CPU). I guess I'll try something else if there are already problems running it on a 166... The problem is not the 166, it is the 16 (Meg of RAM). I'm running KDE on a 486DX2-25 and it works fine... once it gets running. KDE startup is, and some apps (e.g., konquorer in a largish dir) can be, very slow. I wouldn't try it with less than 32M of RAM, and if I had less than the 64M I have I would probably use something else (KDE would run, but it would be too painful to run the 4 or 5 apps I usually have going at the same time). Someone just interested in checking out KDE to see what is there could get by with 24M of RAM. - Bruce
Re: Best WM for slow machine?
It's confirmed. Blackbox has it over amiwm. Ami is cute (somewhat apple like) and I COULD work w/ it but No window shading, NO MENUS, no configuration utility, etc.I can deal with these but if I'm going to have a window manager, I want the bells and whistles. Blackbox still has some wishlist items IMHO (custom background utility, borderless windows, etc.) but it is small, fast, and easy to work with. This is what I want in a windowmanager so I can spend time doing other thing besides research and customization on the thing that's supposed to make things easier. = Regards- Tim Stetson Whiskey Sour Nuhn O. Yobiznez Licq # 14373626 Why?.Why not?..Why not try? The rule of an inquisitive mind. __ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
Re: KDE on a slow machine (was: Best WM for slow machine?)
Mmh. My laptop has 20 MB of RAM. I don't think that I'll be using it very extensively - it is rather a test to decide if I'm going to install debian on my main computer, which by now is also starting to get old (166 with 32 MB of RAM and 3 GB HD - still running windows ( ). Does gnome use as much memory as KDE? Besides, what does KDE give you more than these smaller WMs? On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Margarete Hans wrote: Woops... I was just planning on installing KDE on my old computer (486, 40kHz CPU). I guess I'll try something else if there are already problems running it on a 166... The problem is not the 166, it is the 16 (Meg of RAM). I'm running KDE on a 486DX2-25 and it works fine... once it gets running. KDE startup is, and some apps (e.g., konquorer in a largish dir) can be, very slow. I wouldn't try it with less than 32M of RAM, and if I had less than the 64M I have I would probably use something else (KDE would run, but it would be too painful to run the 4 or 5 apps I usually have going at the same time). Someone just interested in checking out KDE to see what is there could get by with 24M of RAM. - Bruce
Re: KDE on a slow machine (was: Best WM for slow machine?)
On Sunday 10 June 2001 08:23 pm, Margarete Hans wrote: Mmh. My laptop has 20 MB of RAM. I don't think that I'll be using it very extensively - it is rather a test to decide if I'm going to install debian on my main computer, which by now is also starting to get old (166 with 32 MB of RAM and 3 GB HD - still running windows ( ). Does gnome use as much memory as KDE? Besides, what does KDE give you more than these smaller WMs? KDE is a whole desktop environment. It's got it's own file manager, web browser, terminal emulator, game collection, etc. etc. etc. It's got pretty much everything you need. Same goes for Gnome. They're very ambitious projects to provide the whole desktop widget. The other WM's we've listed are just that. Window managers. They draw the windows. They let you drag them around. They pop up a couple of menus. They manage virtual desktops (a major advantage over windows, IMHO). They let you minimize windows and pop them up again. And that's pretty much it. Some have dockapps that will do things like show you CPU usage, but those are extraneous. They're toolkit independant, and are basically very minimalist. KDE is by no means light. I've got 128MB on my desktop here, and KDE regularly sucks up all of it. Gnome's a little lighter until you fire up a browser. Nothing will make you hate your Debian experience more than constantly hitting the swap, and if you've only got 20MB, I seriously recommend using something very lightweight. - David Nusinow [EMAIL PROTECTED]
