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CoriolisSTORM
June 28th, 2005, 10:56 PM
Guys, I'm considering messing around with my Ubuntu here (since the winmodem still isnt working and everything. I also have nothing important in my Ubuntu partition yet.) Anyway, I'm looking at other desktop or window managers besides Gnome (what is it technically?) Right now the ones I know about are Gnome, KDE, Blackbox, and Fluxbox. What others are there? I also need another one separate from these because I'm going to do a minimal install on an old PC of mine, and try to use blackbox or something as the interface. Which ones would you recommend?
poofyhairguy
June 28th, 2005, 11:04 PM
Guys, I'm considering messing around with my Ubuntu here (since the winmodem still isnt working and everything. I also have nothing important in my Ubuntu partition yet.) Anyway, I'm looking at other desktop or window managers besides Gnome (what is it technically?) Right now the ones I know about are Gnome, KDE, Blackbox, and Fluxbox. What others are there? I also need another one separate from these because I'm going to do a minimal install on an old PC of mine, and try to use blackbox or something as the interface. Which ones would you recommend?


I recommend XFCE. Its light but still looks good.

Look here:

http://xwinman.org/
papangul
June 29th, 2005, 07:37 AM
My favourite is IceWM. It is more lightweight, fast and intuitive than xfce. It has a nice control panel also , but you may need to install that separately.
munkay
July 5th, 2005, 06:13 AM
Guys, I'm considering messing around with my Ubuntu here (since the winmodem still isnt working and everything. I also have nothing important in my Ubuntu partition yet.) Anyway, I'm looking at other desktop or window managers besides Gnome (what is it technically?) Right now the ones I know about are Gnome, KDE, Blackbox, and Fluxbox. What others are there? I also need another one separate from these because I'm going to do a minimal install on an old PC of mine, and try to use blackbox or something as the interface. Which ones would you recommend?

There's a fork of Blackbox called Openbox [http://www.openbox.org] as well. It's very slow in development, but its really fast, and easy to configure using xml config files. Also supports keybindings and anti-aliased fonts standard. Check it out if you're in the market for something simple and fast.
knewbix
July 5th, 2005, 11:34 AM
Enlightenment (http://www.enlightenment.org/) looked quite good when I tried it on another distro, but it still was a bit too buggy to use in my particular case.
papabean
July 5th, 2005, 11:56 AM
Enlightenment (http://www.enlightenment.org/) looked quite good when I tried it on another distro, but it still was a bit too buggy to use in my particular case.

Depends on which version Enlightenment 16 is quite stable and fairly easy to configure. Plus, it's gorgeous.

If you're looking for lightweight, but still pleasing to the eye, XFCE4 (as someone else also suggested) is a solid choice.

If you're not too concerned about graphical appearance, there's always the minimalist WMs: WMI & ratpoison.

Of course, there's always TWM, the default window manager. It's ugly, but it's quick.
knewbix
July 5th, 2005, 01:36 PM
Depends on which version Enlightenment 16 is quite stable and fairly easy to configure. Plus, it's gorgeous.

Thanks for the enlightenment, papabean. (bad pun intended!)

I am curious though, I am still quite new to this stuff so I got Enlightenment via apt-get install enlightenment. Is there a way to specify that I want Enlightenment 16 when I apt-get it? (I tried apt-get install enlightenment16 but no joy) Thanks.
Stormy Eyes
July 5th, 2005, 04:36 PM
Anyway, I'm looking at other desktop or window managers besides Gnome (what is it technically?) Right now the ones I know about are Gnome, KDE, Blackbox, and Fluxbox. What others are there?

Try Openbox. You can use it for a minimal install. Just refer to the HOWTO link in my signature.
papabean
July 5th, 2005, 07:44 PM
Thanks for the enlightenment, papabean. (bad pun intended!)

I am curious though, I am still quite new to this stuff so I got Enlightenment via apt-get install enlightenment. Is there a way to specify that I want Enlightenment 16 when I apt-get it? (I tried apt-get install enlightenment16 but no joy) Thanks.

Right now, Enlightenment 17 is still alpha-quality and isn't in the main distribution. In order to get that, you'd have to follow one of the howto's in the forum. If you got enlightenment from the main repositories, you've got E 16.
Big Venus
July 5th, 2005, 08:30 PM
Enlightenment (http://www.enlightenment.org/) looked quite good when I tried it on another distro, but it still was a bit too buggy to use in my particular case.
Agreed and if I hadn't been such a GNOME advocate, I use it as my primary desktop manager...
Sye d'Burns
July 5th, 2005, 11:06 PM
I recommend XFCE. Its light but still looks good.

I second XFCE. I originally installed it on this box to free up ram while running vmware. It's just so perky I can't stop using it.
crashtest
July 5th, 2005, 11:35 PM
What? No votes for FVWM2?
Big Venus
July 6th, 2005, 03:27 AM
Sorry but FVWM2 I never tried and until now I never even heard of...
crashtest
July 6th, 2005, 04:10 AM
Sorry but FVWM2 I never tried and until now I never even heard of...

It's an older window manager. Lightweight, fast, and invinitely configurable
]Nbx*cmD[
February 9th, 2006, 10:30 AM
I vote for ratpoison.
bonzodog
February 9th, 2006, 01:35 PM
Don't forget about WindowMaker (sudo apt-get install wmaker). WindowMaker is a NextStep derivative desktop with right click dynamic menu's. In my opinion it is one of the better ones out there. If you want Xfce4, which is also highly recommended, do:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

Xfce is becoming so popular as a lighter desktop that it now has it's own ubuntu flavour called xubuntu, which hopefully will be available as a CD ISO image on the release of dapper.
fuscia
February 9th, 2006, 03:27 PM
knock yourself out - http://www.plig.org/xwinman/ lots of descriptions and links, etc.
xequence
February 9th, 2006, 03:28 PM
I probably wont understand why you people seem to think XFCE is light! It is a bit lighter then gnome, and alot faster switching themes, but when you get some programs opened up it goes slower.
Stormy Eyes
February 9th, 2006, 03:34 PM
There's a fork of Blackbox called Openbox [http://www.openbox.org] as well. It's very slow in development, but its really fast, and easy to configure using xml config files. Also supports keybindings and anti-aliased fonts standard. Check it out if you're in the market for something simple and fast.

Development on Openbox is slow because it's pretty much done. Most of the mailing list traffic I see is either questions from newbies, theme announcements, or feature requests. It's a bitchin' good window manager; I use it myself and helped test it when version 3.0 was still in early development. I might try other WMs, but I always come back to Openbox.