All,

Well, I suppose I wouldn't mind hearing people's overall opinions of why they prefer one or the other.

However, my bigger concern is which is more or less of a memory/disk space/CPU hog.

My current system shouldn't have too much of an issue with this, but I may install on one or two, um, let's just politely say "vintage" systems.

I do remember once where I worked we installed Linux on a P100 with 32MB RAM and had Gnome running over Enlightenment, and it seemed to be a bit slow here and there. That may have been a particular thing with Enlightenment, however.

Right now, I'm just using FVWM2, and I'm thinking that, while I'm doing it just as a learning experience, I may want to run Gnome over FVWM2 or KDE (haven't decided if I'd specifically use kwm for the latter or not, though).

Ok, I guess I got all my questions out.

So which is faster/slower/lighter-weight, etc?

Neither! Actually I would prefer IceWM or WindowMaker over KDE and Gnome. They seem to use fewer resources and work just as well. FluxBox is pretty cool also.

In my opinion, fvwm is the be all and end all of the WM question.

I have been running it since forever. Its footprint is considerably smalled that both KDE and GNOME.

But I was under the impression that KDE and Gnome were not window managers per se, but more like complete desktop environments, even affecting how the various X applications themselves look, not just how the desktop and window borders look.

To wit, a sort of windows-ification of the X system, to use my own bastardized term.

But if I were to stick with just a window manager, it'd be fvwm. Lightest weight from what I understand, incredibly flexible (though I'm still just learning the basics!)

Even though KDE and Gnome are called desktop environments, all they really are is severely bloated windows manager, hence the reason they are so slow. Alot more functions and options etc., but in the end you all you have is a huge resource sucker. If you have enough memory, then who cares right? I like KDE, but if I want to strip it down I just start Fluxbox instead (my personal pref.). You can still use all of the apps from kde and gnome without the memory drain.

Between Gnome and KDE its a tough choice. KDE is faster in loading things, but gnome probably wins the choice for eye candy. Well unless you put some nice themes on KDE.

Personally, i would have to go with Fluxbox, its better than all the other WM i have tried. I tried em all.

If you want you can take a peek at my Fluxbox desktop with KDE kicker. It looks almost the same now except that i have more icons now

here is the LINK

Then based on your posts, I guess that KDE and Gnome really don't do a whole lot more than can be done with a regular old window-manager, just that it's a bit more work to do it with a window-manager, with the tradeoff that you don't get the bloat.

In that case, for now I'll stick to learning the ins and outs of fvwm2, and see what I decide to do from there.

But, given what I'm hearing here, I will pass on either Gnome or KDE then. Even though resources shouldn't be a problem on my current machine, it'll be an issue with some of the older/slower boxes, so I might as well learn how to get by without a "desktop environment".

Thanks for the info . . .

well generally gnome and kde do provide shedloads of stuff, as they incorporate a developement framework for applications, and highly advanced toolkits. without them two (exlcuding that somethign else would have filled their shoes) applications wouldn't be able to be near as complex or pretty... it's good to have their libraries installed in general, you just don't need to actually run the things themselves. But what do you think you would miss from a full blown windowsesque affair?

i used to use gnome exclusively, but i'd seen blackbox and thought it looked neat, but it didn't have any features... then i got a cheap low spec machine and found i couldn't run gnome fast enough on it, so used blackbox, and soon (minutes) realised that there was nothing that i missed, there's no launch bar, or icons, but i never aactaully need to use them anyway. With a decent personalised popup menu it does exactly the same job...

Yeah, if you like the KDE panel or GNOME panel you can run both of those in fluxbox.

for gnome panelits "panel"
for kde panel its "kicker"

Hey everybody. I just swung by this thread to see what is really considered to be the most useful, "lightweight" window manager. I've tried KDE & Gnome and they both tend to be resource hogs. Of the two, though, I prefer Gnome because it seems to use up the lowest amount of resources. But by reading this thread I think I'll give fluxbox a try. Is fluxbox in the software manager? If not, could somebody plz give me a mirror or a url where I can get hold of it?

Since it doesn't come with any distros (that I know of) by default, you'll wanna download the latest version (0.1.7) from here:

http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/

It's a fun fast little guy and has some neat themes you can get.

Yup, i got about 35 themes, fluxbox themes are very nice..

NYZ! kickass theme, soo nice. looks even nicer if you edit it to be

borderWidth: 3
handleWidth: 4

still reckon blackbox is better tho... actaully i'll be interested to see which one does take the lead, irrelevant or wether one has tabs or not, one will presumably be developed better, and as fluxbox uses the 0.61 (i think) blackbox source, they've already missed one minor version of changes, and have their own instead...

Well considering Fluxbox is basically blackbox but with all the code reworked and tabs and scrolling added. I dont see why you dont like fluxbox. Ok even if you DONT like the tab idea, its very easy to remove it even though i think its a engenious idea and helps organize some apps that are meant to be together like ICQ and AIM.

Bout' half the themes i have are blackbox themes btw.

tabs are a fine idea, but i can't be bothered with them if they don't automatically dock. blackbox has more configuration apps for it. even though the wm itself is smaller, there is more support and external apps. i know some of these will run on fluxbox fine aswell, not enough.