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I'm toying around with fluxbox and like it's speed and simplicity.
However, the gnome-panel is great and I would like to use it in fluxbox. Specifically, I like its system monitor, typing break, gnubiff and clock (which world clock support).
My question is: if I'm running the gnome-panel in fluxbox will this degrade performance, for example, since the gnome-panel needs to load all the gnome related libraries etc.?
One of the main reasons I'm looking into fluxbox is for speed so I don't want to lose that just because of the panel.
The perceived "speed" will greatly depend on the amount of
available RAM on your system. You *could* just use gkrellm2
or conky to get the applets you're after.
well, I find the panel immensley useful and am more than happy to sacrifice those 10 pixels at the bottom of the screen to have all the info I need at a glance.
With conky/gkrellm I'll have to minimize windows/keep them transparent to see conky/gkrellm which seems a hassle.
But does gkrellm has a typing break, world clock, desktop switcher etc. which are all in the gnome-panel?
The Fluxbox taskbar has a desktop switcher, as does the default Fluxmenu, and a configurable clock (it's configured with a text string, not with a GUI). You can also change via hotkeys (I use lots of keybindings in Flux).
I run GKrellM in the slit in auto-hide mode, so it takes up no desktop space unless I mouse over it. It contains a clock and passive email notification, and lots of sensors I choose not to use, but no typing break.
(I can't see myself needing the "typing break," so I've never investigated it.)
I guess one reason that I default to Fluxbox is that there is nothing I needed or wanted to do in KDE or Gnome that I can't do lighter faster simpler in Fluxbox.
Not specifically for these type. I just wanted to make sure you had looked. I agree with others that the general idea of fluxbox is the minimalism
which is what dockapps tries to support.
Maybe also have a search through Desktop forum on this site to see if anyone else has some ideas.
Just for the record, gkrellm has a ticker somewhere that sets it as a paneled window. This means that if you put it on one side of your screen then applications shouldn't maximize other it.
In any case, if you truly want to use the gnome panel then use the gnome panel. The performance is in the eye of the beholder, unless you are short on hardware resources. The tool that performs better is the one you know how to use and the one you enjoy using. There's nothing comparable. You will find several panels that can look similar (fbpanel, suxpanel, perlpanel, xfce4-panel, lxpanel...), but they are not gnome panel.
The gnome-panel comes with a penalty of (as I understand) having to install gnome with all its mega-libraries and dependencies. The upside is that it is currently actively developed, and well supported. The clock with world time is handy and the gnu-biff mail-checker is just great.
Looking at docapps.org most of the apps seem to be from 2004 or earlier. Is there still any activity/support with docapps?.
Dockapps seems pretty lifeless. I have checked it serveral times over the past three years or so and nothing seems to have changed.
Frankly, I never found anything there that I wanted to use.
Gkrellm is not a dockapp, I'm just running it docked with FLuxbox's -w switch.
My guess is that as computers got brawnier and desktop environments such as KDE and Gnome replaced window managers for a (I suspect) large majority of users, a lot of the steam went out of dockapp development.
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