Is it possible to have eye candy without using too much ram?

[Happy_Man]

I second Conky, and also recommend that you get rid of the giant sidebar, as it's probably the most RAM-hungry thing there. Metacity's compositing engine isn't too bad, it can run AWN, but not Emerald, nor does it have very many snazzy effects. It's worth a shot, though.

[MattBD]

One way to get eye candy while maintaining a lightweight system would be to switch from using Gnome to E17 - it's possible to install this in Ubuntu, but a dedicated distro like OpenGEU is probably a better bet.

[rainwalker]

Also, although I'm not sure how effective this would be at freeing up memory, getting rid of either the panel at the top or AWN at the bottom would save some screen real estate (plus, it's kind of redundant to have both).

[halln]

i installed ubuntu on my friends lappy including eye candies (screenlets and awn) but start up is awfull, it took ages for it to load. What i did is, remove awn and use cairo-dock instead. Remove screenlets and use conky, after that booting time became a bit quicker.

[bijeeshvs]

Azureus is also taking considerable amount of ram, i think...............

[rainwalker]

Azureus is also taking considerable amount of ram, i think...............

Try Transmission; It's simple but very useful.

[klange]

OP: You need to define "too much RAM". All of my fancy effects (Compiz, Emerald, Cairo-Dock, and Screenlets) combined take only ~100MB of RAM. Cut my overuse of monitoring Screenlets out of the mix and it plummets to ~60MB (Compiz taking only ~20, with a boatload of plugins).

Metacity's compositing engine isn't too bad, it can run AWN, but not Emerald

It's not that the compositing engine won't run Emerald, it's that Metacity itself is a window decorator, so you can't run another one. I'm sure it's probably possible to code out the decorations from Metacity and then run Emerald, but that probably wouldn't be a good idea.

[gameryoshi600]

I used to have AWN and screenlets, for me i used alot and they ate up alot of ram. just get rid of some or uninstall awn and screenlets which is what i did. do you have a decent graphics card for compiz, + all the eye candy?

[fabounet]

if you want to save memory/cpu you can use Cairo-Dock for both dock and desktop widgets, it saves you 1 program.