Hi there im am using suse 9.3 an an acer travellmate 2303LC. I was wondering do u know another wm there is more light than kde?? IT has to have a batterymonitor, and powermanegement tool. I have tried windowmaker, and i like the style, but it has no powermengement, a far as i can see! It also have to shut the computer down, not only the wm, like windowmaker did i my case. Please help:-)

Try Icewm or Fvwm. Both are very configurable.

Well, KDE is the heaviest of the windows managers for Linux as far as I know, so ANY other WM will be lighter. Gnome will save you some resources while keeping most of the functionality of KDE (and you can run most KDE programs by simply installing the proper libraries). Gnome looks every bit as professional, but nowhere near as "pretty" as KDE. IceWM is much lighter... but I'd describe it as fugly.

Icewm can be editied/configured to look /feel/act however you want. It is much faster and tons lighter than KDE or Gnome. Plus all of your Gnome and KDE apps will run.

http://www.geocities.com/reverendsky/mozilladown10.png

GNOME and KDE can be resouce hogs. You could try XFCE or Fluxbox and those suggested above by others.

As suggested by others, FluxBox is very light on resources and the latest versions make it quite pretty with a decent theme installed. Something like gKrellm also drops a dock bar on the screen allowing you to monitor battery life, system temperatures, etc., which I found ideal on my old laptop. Does take a little configuration of menus to get it running, but most window managers other than KDE andGnome will be like. Again, as already said, KDE is probably the most 'professional looking' straight out the box. Most other WM's can look just as pretty if you put a bit of time.

ION, I would have to say next to twm its *the* lightest out there.
I dont use it tho, as its too light weight. I use fluxbox right now. and I really like it. its fast, and uber configable.

Windowmaker, as well as the *box window managers (BlackBox, OpenBox, FluxBox, etc) support dockapps. There are lots of neat dockapps for power monitoring - check out the DockApp warehouse.

Håkan

Fluxbox is a very good wm. BTW, Gnome, KDE, and XFCE are desktop environments not window managers.

I have tried too many WM/DM combo's, but I used to flip between KDE and Gnome trying to make each one run faster. For its speed and simplicity, I settled on Fluxbox ( fluxbox.org ) Window Manager. All of my systems scream ( read: are very responsive ) with this Window Manager, and it is very easy to configure. I don't even use a desktop manager because icons just clutter up my screen. I do run a background picture manager called ( suprise ) Change Backgroup(Chgbg ) along with GKrellm to monitor the system/email/weather, etc.

Give it a shot, it's cheap ( free ) and well-documented. Oh, did I mention fast?