Lightweight apps

[madddonkey255]

I have an old desktop that I run with Xubuntu and I was just wondering if anyone had any lightweight programs they'd recommend for it. Maybe if I got enough suggestions I could try and catalogue them for others who have slow machines.

Right now I use:

Distro
Xubuntu, made for slower machines so it works out nicely. There also is Fluxbuntu and UbuntuLite as alternatives.
Icewm seems popular as a window manager instead of Xfce.
Openbox
Rox filer as a file manager.

Office
Abiword as a word processer, fuctional enough for me and much lighter than OpenOffice.
Gnumeric Spreadsheet because it's fast and I also read somewhere that it's more functional then Excel.

Web-browsing
Opera, firefox is too slow, and I couldn't install Swiftfox through automatix so I gave up. It works fine just took a little getting used to after years of firefox.
Dillo, good for slow machines but it lacks the functionality that opera has, it is much faster though.
Galeon
Epiphany
Lynx
Links
E-links
Links2

Email
Thunderbird, there's probably a lighter one out there but I don't keep it running in the background so it doesn't bother me.
Started using sylpheed because of this thread and it works quite well
Sylpheed-claw
Mutt
Claws Mail

Video
Gxine, came with Xubuntu and works just fine for me, haven't really checked for any faster ones.
VLC was suggested but it seemed to be slower than gxine when I used it, it should be said that VLC supports everything though.

Audio
Haven't looked at all but DSL uses XMMS and it's in the repositories so that seems to fit the bill.
Beep media player (BMP)
Audacious


Bittorrent
Used Deluge for a while which worked fine but it locked up a few times and so I switched over to qtorrent which is nice and simple for me, also seems to download extremely fast.
QBittorent

I've added ones from what others have said; I've commented on the ones I've experimented on and the others I haven't used. Please add to the list and correct the mistakes I have undoubtedly made.
Thanks,
Nolan

[juxtaposed]

Openbox =)

[carlosqueso]

Sylpheed for e-mail.

[PatrickMay16]

Icewm, rox filer, dillo, links2 (run with -g option), xmms.

[aysiu]

Distro
Xubuntu, made for slower machines so it works out nicely. There also is Fluxbuntu and UbuntuLite as alternatives. I recommend IceWM as well.


Web-browsing
Opera, firefox is too slow, and I couldn't install Swiftfox through automatix so I gave up. It works fine just took a little getting used to after years of firefox. Galeon, Dillo, and Epiphany are worth looking at, as is Lynx.


Email
Thunderbird, there's probably a lighter one out there but I don't keep it running in the background so it doesn't bother me. Sylpheed-Claws.

[Rhox]

Links 2

[compiledkernel]

I think Flock is pretty lightweight.

Links, elinks, elinks-lite, dillo, and lynx are VERY fast, but text only.

[Rhox]

I think Flock is pretty lightweight.
not really

Links, elinks, elinks-lite, dillo, and lynx are VERY fast, but text only
Links2 isn't text only.
edit: neither is dillo

[Extreme Coder]

For mail, Sylpheed Claws, or Claws Mail should work well for you.

For video, you might use VLC(supports all formats),and it doubles as a video/audio converter.

For audio, you could use BMP (Beep Media Player) or Audacious(supports WinAMP skins!), both are forks from XMMS.

For bittorrent, you could use QBittorrent, it has more features than Qtorrent, and is more developed.

Extreme Coder

[Onyros]

Mutt has become my favourite email client, in time.

It's not that hard to setup (I use mainly Arch Linux's excellent wiki on the subject), and it's as light as light can be.

Plus, what's cooler than reading and writing your email on the terminal? :P

[Knowles]

for mp3's and such I use Xfmedia, which is a very lightweight media player <-- xubuntu user here too

[rolando2424]

Distro
Xubuntu, made for slower machines so it works out nicely. There also is Fluxbuntu and UbuntuLite as alternatives.

Hum... I've heard the XFCE is pretty light, but I've never tried it.



Office
Abiword as a word processer, fuctional enough for me and much lighter than OpenOffice.
Gnumeric Spreadsheet because it's fast and I also read somewhere that it's more functional then Excel.

I still prefer Gedit to do my texts... (Or you can use plain good old nano, or vim... * runs * )



Web-browsing
Opera, firefox is too slow, and I couldn't install Swiftfox through automatix so I gave up. It works fine just took a little getting used to after years of firefox.

Hum... I haven't tried Opera on Linux yet... I've only used Firefox and Links2.



Email
Thunderbird, there's probably a lighter one out there but I don't keep it running in the background so it doesn't bother me.

I've never tried Evolution to see if it's faster than ThunderBird.



Video
Gxine, came with Xubuntu and works just fine for me, haven't really checked for any faster ones.

I use VLC for video. Seen light to me.



Audio
Haven't looked at all but DSL uses XMMS and it's in the repositories so that seems to fit the bill.

For audio, I use Ncmpc. It's a console frontend for the mpc player.



Bittorrent
Used Deluge for a while which worked fine but it locked up a few times and so I switched over to qtorrent which is nice and simple for me, also seems to download extremely fast.

I haven't used Bittorrent for a long time...

But there is a console torrent client called Rtorrent (I think) that seemed pretty good.

[Sunflower1970]

Other fast, light WM's
Enlightenment
Blackbox
FVVM
FVVM-Crystal

[Dragonbite]

I'm running Edubuntu but I installed Xubuntu too and find it working nicely on my P3 500MHz w/256ram (max).

I've used Fluxbox and Xfce and I prefer Xfce because it provides utilities though Fluxbox seemed faster and is very customizable if you know what you're doing. It takes hand-coding for customizing but it is fairly easy to figure out.

Office

Yeah, first thing I did was rip out OpenOffice and inastalled Abiword and Gnumeric. Unfortunately Abiword was not compatible with a Word document I received. gEdit does do pretty good for basic word processing and Mousepad is a very light text editor.

Web-browsing

Opera I found slow even for browsing webpages. I notice this partially because I'm on dial-up so what broadband does in a fraction of a second, dial-up may take a full second or two. Anything that speeds it up is a help. Only advantage I see with Opera is that you can choose to not load images on a page and then selectively load images.

Galeon I just removed because that thing crashed often when I would either have multiple tabs open, or if a site used something (Java? certain javascript? Flash? I dunno). At least each time it crashes, when you restart it you get the option of resuming (roughly) where you crashed, and it will try and reload all of the tabs you were in.


With Epiphany I haven't noticed any significant speed boost for loading than Firefox, and Firefox has so far been the most stable and fully-functional browser yet. I'm hoping to set up Epiphany to NOT play Flash or Java and hopefully make the page render a little faster.

I don't see it listed on the Gnome site, but I remember there being a browser called Pine which was fairly lightweight, but wasn't the most stable.

Email

Thunderbird is faster than Evolution, but only by a bit.

There is also Balsa as a lightweight email client

Video

I second using Xfmedia. I keep Totem and Rhytmbox in case Xfmedia doesn't work (I think I had issues with .wvm files)

Audio

I've just kept with Rhytmbox. Banshee has some nice features and runs comparative to RB. Also Xfmedia can play audio, but it is a little more bulky if you want something that manages the music too.

[Kvark]

What is the fastest browser that displays pretty much all websites exactly as they where meant to look even if they are full of fancy css, complicated javascript and horribly incorrect non standard HTML?

[ckaya]

What is the fastest browser that displays pretty much all websites exactly as they where meant to look even if they are full of fancy css, complicated javascript and horribly incorrect non standard HTML?

Have you ever tried Kazehakase? It's a browser without GNOME nor KDE dependencies and it uses the same rendering engine (Gecko) with Firefox.

[misfitpierce]

Try transmission for a torrent client... Lightweight.... http://transmission.m0k.org

[fuscia]

links2 -g will get you a graphical version of links2. it's pretty lightweight, fast and has more features than dillo.

is mplayer light? it plays everything and you can use it in the terminal.

dolphin is lighter than thunar.

[RedSquirrel]

Distro
Xubuntu, made for slower machines so it works out nicely. There also is Fluxbuntu and UbuntuLite as alternatives.

UbuntuLite is defunct.

Ubuntu server + Fluxbox is a nice combination.

What about ripping? crip and abcde are some possibilities.

[trippinnik]

Looks like a pretty good list. I didn't really like Xfce, but fluxbox is so light and fast. Enlightenment is also quite fast but you don't have to give up a lot of extras. e17 is still in development but moving along pretty nicely. For email you didn't mention Evolution, it's pretty lightweight especially if you already have GTK+ libraries loaded. Also totem-xine is the lightest video app I've found. maybe gxine is almost the same. on my pIIIm 733 laptop videos skip or stutter with almost everything else. And plain mozilla is lightning fast for browsing and can handle all the normal stuff, it just doesn't get bogged down with all the extensions and whatnot.

[moore.bryan]

as a light-weight user, i use and highly recommend:

1. distro
openbox on feisty, with pypanel for ease of use and xfe for low-resource file manager. i hate xfce,
icewm, and fluxbox because they didn't prove very light on my machine and took forever to customize.
2. office
i tried abiword, but it just sucks. for me, word processing is important, so i need openoffice, even though
there's bloat.
3. web-browsing
opera is fairly light on my machine, but if you're looking for light+functional, i'd hit-up kazehakase.
4. email
hands-down, sylpheed-claws-gtk
5. video
xine, straight-up, no gnome-dependencies.
6. audio
audacious instead of xmms. no extra bloat and it uses gtk2. realize, if you install xine, you don't need an
additional music player because it does it all.
7. bittorrent
out of all the low-resource programs, bittornado worked best for me.

but, as usual, it's all up to you... it's all about personalization and customization here! ;-)

for me, the balance was always between light-weight and functionality. too many times i was trying to use something low-resource that sucked instead of just closing programs and using a better program. all the programs are in the repos, afaik. cheers...

[Obor]

If you are using Opera anyway why not use it as email client as well? It does the job pretty well and you only need 1 app running for both browsing and emails.

[moore.bryan]

If you are using Opera anyway why not use it as email client as well? It does the job pretty well and you only need 1 app running for both browsing and emails.
i'm running opera for both email and web now, but it's mail client leaves MUCH to be desired... sylpheed is exponentially better; however, i am trying to play with some of the opera configs...

i was actually suggesting use kazehakase+sylpheed-claws-gtk instead of opera because those two programs use almost 1/2 of what opera uses on my machine.

[RedSquirrel]

i'm running opera for both email and web now, but it's mail client leaves MUCH to be desired... sylpheed is exponentially better; however, i am trying to play with some of the opera configs...

i was actually suggesting use kazehakase+sylpheed-claws-gtk instead of opera because those two programs use almost 1/2 of what opera uses on my machine.

Why are your posts in italics? :confused:

[moore.bryan]

no particular reason. i'm sure, philosophically, the question could be posed why aren't yours in italics?
;-)

[RedSquirrel]

no particular reason. i'm sure, philosophically, the question could be posed why aren't yours in italics?
;-)


I find long sections of text in italics harder to read than normal text. It's usability/accessibility thing for me. I'm setting an example by not using italics too often. :)

[moore.bryan]

it's opposite for me; italicized text is much easier for to read. out of mutual respect, this is non-italicized.

[Tundro Walker]

Alex Trebeck...


...crawl, zangband, omega, nethack...Me...


What are...lite-weight terminal games that take forever to win?

[RedSquirrel]

it's opposite for me; italicized text is much easier for to read. out of mutual respect, this is non-italicized.

I guess everyone has different tastes and preferences, even for italic vs. regular. Thanks for the enlightenment. :D

[alex2035]

For my PII 300 laptop I always needed light apps, I just tried Balsa, its faster than Sylpheed (I used both, Claws and Sylpheed), and it integrates well with my Palm. Jpilot for it, there is nothing faster, Evolution and Kontact are way too slow here.
XMMS , Swiftfox or Dillo, Abiword. Gkrellm for monitoring and finally I run on Enlightenment DR16, it is faster than Fluxbox in my box and looks cool.