Best Windows manager on slow pc's

ClrScr · 08-06-2007, 11:49 PM

Hi!

I have approx 6pc, of which 2 are P3's.

I have to set them up for a school in Madagascar. So apprt from having to do it in French, I need to change the windows manager to something smaller than GNOME/KDE (Suse 10.2) so that the PC's can work reasonably well.

I would also prefer something that looks like xp (sorry for using bad language) because if my studetns have had ANY experience with pc's it would have been on XP

Thanks
CLRSCR

PatrickNew · 08-07-2007, 12:02 AM

www.xwinman.org is pretty much the definitive reference on window managers.

fvwm95 is pretty lightweight and looks darn near identical to Windows 95, which looks like an ugly XP. However, xwinman rates its activity as low, which could mean unmaintained.

Fluxbox is a great WM, I'm partial to it myself. It's very light, but unfortunately it doesn't look like XP at all.

thloh85 · 08-07-2007, 01:25 AM

The ones that looks most familiar with XP is fvwm95 and KDE...
I would not suggest both though...
If your pc is not too old... Try xfce
Or else go for fluxbox

MNKyDeth · 08-07-2007, 01:28 AM

Enlightenment is very clean C code, runs very fast and is very light aswell.
It's a bit different than some of the others but it still looks sexy for how old it is and it barely uses any ram. Typically less than 64mb from a fresh boot.

maroonbaboon · 08-07-2007, 02:46 AM

Gnome/KDE aren't just window managers - they're complete desktop environments. The leading lightweight replacement would be XFCE.

You can try it out on your old PCs with a Zenwalk live CD

http://www.zenwalk.org/

Zenwalk claims to run on a P3 with 128Mb RAM and a 2GB disk.

It looks like there is plenty of multilingual support for XFCE, so a French version should be no problem.

Never used XP

so not sure how how similar it is. Clean and simple tho'.

Hern_28 · 08-07-2007, 08:06 PM

Xfce runs great on my p3's and can be set up to reasonably approximate windows xp if you want to take the time to set up the desktop.