It's opening faster that's for sure.
I've been measuring startup times of Firefox in IceWM and KDE. It started faster, around 2-4seconds faster in IceWM than it did in KDE. Firefox was the only app running when I was testing this.

Yesterday I configured my Virtual Machine (Another one) to run Slackware 12, because I wanted to try KDE4 out. First I had problems with cxxlibs, because it was an old package and also with gcc, after upgrading those two I have to say things started working, a bit slow though, because it was on a virtual machine with only 300MB ram assigned to it, but I just had to see what all the fuzz is about. After only 1 hour playing with it yesterday night I have to say I was pretty amazed, will have to test it more before it will go on my production laptop. But it's looking good(not just looking good as in good for the eyes, but also looking good for usability and stuff).

Just the other day I noticed a project called 'xfware' which is a build system for xfce which includes a very minimal number of gnome libs and apps which complement xfce. For those who are searching for a viable alternative to KDE/GNOME but still want good integration and completeness, it looks like it might be agood way to go.
The project is on sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...roup_id=205283

Blaah... Just use anything except KDE, GNOME, or Xfce and you'll be a man

I switch between Xfce, Openbox, Awesome, ratpoison, and wmii. Over the past few years, I have tended to prefer tiling window managers.

I've got to admit that while I do like minimal DEs/WMs, sometimes discussions about them remind me a little of this sketch

When I were a lad, my keyboard had two keys, the monitor had 4 pixels, the mouse was a bubonic rat, and I had to sit on a spike...

Very interesting. Thanks for the link. For now, I really like the speed and flexibility of Fluxbox and Openbox. Fluxbox also has this auto-arrange feature that gives me some tiling action when needed.

lol, that's a good one

ah, well when I was a lad, we didn't have no monitors or keyboards or mice, just a plastic card, we had to chew on it to make holes in it then stick it in the machine, and when I got home my dad would slice me with it and shove it down my throat, then I had scavenge it out of the toilet the next day and go back to work, this was all inside a dumpster of course.

Been using IceWm for a couple of months now and am very pleased with it (on my P3) because it's so fast. On my P4 still using KDE, there's hardly any performance gain on that one by using Xfce or IceWM...

One thing about IceWM that I like very much is the ALt+Ctrl+Spacebar combination that let's you launch apps very quickly.

Well I have old hardware, so I use xfce, I have a PIII(800MHz) 128Mb RAM, and HD 20Gb

I think XFCE is simple, fast, curious, and very flexible.