I am presently using Libranet 2.8 I mostly use KDE 3.1.3 but would like to switch over to something lighter. Now that Firebird and Thunderbird have replaced Konqueror and kmail on my box, I find that I don't use KDE apps as much any more.

I have tried Fluxbox and Windowmaker and like them, but working with the menus is not as easy as in KDE. I like my menus to be sorted to my preference.

Any ideas on a lightweight WM/DE that doesn't look like Win 9x?

I use icewm on my laptop and like it very much. I don't think you'll find the menu altering capabilities of kde in any lightweight window manager per se. However, I still have kde on my laptop and IIRC, the menu changes I make in kde are reflected in the icewm menu.

I don't understand what you mean by sorting menus - the menu in flux can be exactly how you want it. If you mean some kind of automatic sort, you might try this script. I don't know if it works or not but it might be what you want.

What I meant about the menu is that with KDE, I could fire up the menu editor and "fix" the menus to my liking. It's somewhat more difficult with the others.

I didn't know that if I made changes in KDE it would reflect in IceWM. That is just too cool. Has anyone tried XFCE? Is it any good? What is this version 4 that some are raving about? Is it lightweight?

Well, the great thing about flux menus is that any text editor is your menu editor. As far as KDE/Ice, I think there's some perl script floating around certain window managers or distros that integrate menus. XFCE is 'the low-cholesterol desktop environment' - a lot of people like it a lot, though it's never done anything for me. It does provide a somewhat KDE-ish environment while being fairly lightweight. I haven't used 4 but the version jump seems evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

I'll go away now - hopefully some actual KDE/XFCE users will post.

I don't know about libranet, but in mandrake 9.1 and 9.2 menu editing is definitely integrated in the kmenu configuration tool called "menudrake". In fact in menudrake, you can separately edit the menus for for every DE installed on your system or have your kde menu globally apply to all DEs.

I've found XFCE4 to be a wonder desktop setup. It's nice and lightweight in its default setup, though menu editing and such (when compiled from the official sources) requires going in and editing an xml file.

All in all though, it's a very nice, smooth environment from what I've seen. And it has some very nice themes to spice things up :-)

Hez

check out menumaker, which supports xfce4 and a few other wm's.

I've been using Pekwm, http://www.pekwm.org for awhile now and really like it. You might want to give it a shot

Of course, like most light weight window managers your menus are defined in a text file, but the syntax is pretty straight forward.

Mike

Hi,
I recently tried a really little WM called windowlab
under 40k download.
from http://www.nickgravgaard.com/windowlab/

I'm using it for a limited number of applications,
as a really quick, light development environment.

also grab vdesk
( a massive 64k download )
to give switchable windows