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I second this recommendation.

Using a smaller specialized distribution is IMHO a better choice than all the bloat found in "full" dists like Ubuntu -- notice that I do use Ubuntu :-S.

Years ago, I used a PentiumIII with 128Mb and a terribly slow disk. It booted Debian into Gnome (a very old version - can't remember which) in 23 seconds. My "Core Duo" laptop, or brand new Quad-core desktop take more than twice that to start up. BTW both run Ubuntu.

In my experience, this claim/expectation that XFCE is significantly faster than Gnome or KDE just doesn't cut. IceWM and LXDE are the real contenders here.

Why do you think you need the latest/greatest KDE/GNOME to replace Win98? The machine is still Win98-era, so that's about the best you should be able to expect from it and get decent performance. Choose a lesser desktop...you can probably find one that still has feature-parity to Win98 by looking through Windowmaker, XFCE, Equinox, Blackbox, IceWM, etc. - and you'll get decent performance.

Control Panels --> System --> Optimize for Best Performance
It turns off ALL the fuzzy, fading, stupid stuff, and surprises them how much better it responds.

Linux/BSD?
IceWM on top, but with KDE libs underneath, so you can run any KDE or Gnome apps, but don't need all that mem-hogging desktop candy just to run KMail or whatever.

I've not used Linux significantly, but there are a number of "Window Managers" with low resource needs such as IceWM which can even be skinned to look like your favorite commerial OS.

Personally I prefer the "Windows Classic" theme in XP, as it takes up less resources. Microsoft also released the Media Center Theme for XP users, but it takes up about the same resources as the "Luna Theme."

If you want to get better performance out of a 2K/XP/+ system:

Disable unneeded services: Remote Registry Service and Messenger (there are more possible)

Disable System File Protection

Disable Visual Effects and Active Desktop

Disable "last access" timestamp on files.

IceWM is good for things like that. Most desktop environments and window managers have themes with the name "Redmond" somewhere in it to signify it's a Windows look-alike theme.

IceWM is where it's at. It's lightweight, fast, and has more essential features that blackbox is missing.

Are there any good WMs which don't have any gtk+ or Qt dependencies?

IceWM is my favorite.

The only real dependency it has is, as you said, GTK+. As for DEs not requiring a toolkit i'm not aware of any - there's a lot of assorted WMs though. You could try IceWM or Fluxbox, both very lightweight but excellent, well-featured window managers.

As for light DEs, look no further: XFCE is the best. And by far. Give it a shoot, it runs very well on an old PII of mine.

As for features, you get a taskbar with start menu, quicklaunch buttons, and a dock with a clock. The dock will also work with GNOME and KDE programs if you run an extra process to manage that. IceWM also supports multiple workspaces if you want them. It does not have desktop icons, and it does not have a file manager or similar built in.

Lourens

I use icewm personally, but you could use whatever you wanted. Have the links to a script which does the following:

-Take the startup parameters for the game, write them to an .xinitrc file. Make it restart normal X after.
-Write a custom XF86Config if needed too.
-Kill X
-Run startx pointing at your custom XF86Config as needed
-.xinitrc should load the game for you

Biggest issue is a little voodoo needed to have your script not die when X stops. Perhaps a file in one of the regular X init scripts that it checks for and runs after the server stops? Test -x ${SOMESCRIPTFILE} && ${SOMESCRIPTFILE}

Try checking out some window managers other than KDE and Gnome. I recently installed a very old laptop (P133 with 48MB RAM) with IceWM (http://www.icewm.org/) and it runs fine.

Well, you don't have to use KDE as the window manager. There others like Fluxbox, WindowMaker and IceWM that could suit your needs and aren't full of bloat.

I use cygwin on a daily basis, was nice to see that on an upgrade it removed all of Xfree and upgraded to X.org X11 server.

Seems everyone is ditching Xfree. (About damn time too!)

BTW, those use mentioned screen because they don't want to use a mouse. There are X window managers like EvilWM or Ratpoison that are mouseless. Though, my favorite WM is IceWM with the PicoGUI theme. Though I like to modify it with additional buttons. Freshmeat has a ton of themes for it.

Some of it comes with the base debian install:

GCC,G++
<flamewar>vim/emacs</flamewar>
links-ssl/curl-ssl-wget
ssh
Perl

Then a whole lotta debs for Gnome/KDE...

Then the actual desktop GUI:
GDM
IceWM
Idesk
Endeavour 2


Then the base apps
Anjuta (C++ IDE)
Gedit Notepad
Mplayer + plugins
XMMS + plugins
ALSA framework
Frozen Bubble!
the GIMP
Open Office
Thunderbird+Firefox
GAIM
Gnome-meeting

And the latest 2.6.x kernel

I've created a CD which will give you all the above in one disk. Automatic installations. Just create a linux/swap partition, and it will install to the largest available 'nix partition, also adding any windows partitions to the lilo.conf

ALSA Sound support is ready (though you must edit /etc/modules with whatever soundcard module you have)

X GUI starts in SVGA mode (best to xf86config and choose your GUI)
USB mouse support through /dev/input/mice

I'm considering putting it up online, but at about 620MB for the ISO I'd need some decent hosting space for that. So far we're using it at work to convert windows desktops to dual-boot... it's XP themes so the windows lusers can figure it out rather easily.

It's also configured to build the base menu structure when a user logs in... and idesk will mount a CD+browse with endeavour on doubleclick, or unmount+eject on a right-click.

• dnsmasq - A DHCP+DNS server that is simple to configure, lets you set up names for local machines and local services, lets you block external names of your choice, etc, etc
• masqmail - A mail server for machines with intermittent connections to the internet (dialup, laptops, wireless)
• Xmail - A slightly bigger mail server for when you want to run your own domain. Linux and Windows.
• Icewm - The window manager for people who want to get their work done
• Bluefish - Text/HTML/Perl/PHP/Java/etc editor that just works.

Actually I prefer IceWM or xfce not because of some old hardware(although sometimes this can be an issue, I'm on a laptop with 800Mhz Coppermine), but rather becasue I really don't have anything against installing all the software I need by myself, thus I'm looking for a Windows Manager not an entire desktop solution.

On the "One desktop to rule them all" rant, I'm certainly not the only one to think that it's not so bad at all to have diversity "even" on the Desktop choice. Yes, some users gets confused, yes, there're compatibility problems(heck, I hate when one really *needs* to run a gtk program on KDE PC or QT one on Gnome station), but at the end I tend to agree with you that people should "deal with it" and adopt one or another. The futur will show if we'll have a "winner"...

I use Debian as my desktop at home and at work and have done for the past few years.

I love having a "start" menu, and a task bar.

Because I can't run KDE/GNOME I've tried lots of lightweight window managers - and have settled upon IceWM for the past year or so, precisely because it has a start menu and a task bar.

You'd be amazed at how many window manages don't give you these things; which I won't use. Ion I loved; but it just doesn't have the same features.

Maybe I've been spoilt by windows but I'd never use a WM that didn't give me a task bar again...

H. Seldon himself could not have come up with a better way** to improve Linux GUIs than the rivalry (mostly friendly) among the various approaches to Linux GUIs. (And though there are other Free Software desktops, I'm going to ignore them for part of this comment ;))

KDE's approach looks a lot like Windows, is very well integrated down to having a "burn data cd" (with k3b) option in a menu reachable with a mouse click on any file. Neat. (I'm typing on a KDE desktop right now, appreciating how much more I like KDE now than I did a few years ago.) (Knoppix comes with KDE, this machine's installation was from the Knoppix HDD install script ... )

GNOME is IMO slightly slicker graphically, and -- in ways that are not easy to pin down -- a little more user friendly. No accounting for taste (and I certainly have questionable taste), but I happen to like a lot of GNOME apps more than their KDE equivalents ... mostly a "so what?" since most apps I use don't care one way or the other ;)

The Seldonmost part of the KDE/GNOME "battle" (in which actual developers mostly get along well, share beers in pubs when they're not coding) is that their [conspiratorially arranged?] back-and-forth wrt feature lists and ease of use distracts people from, for instance:

- enlightenment
- blackbox (old) / fluxbox / etc.
- icewm
- and windowmaker / afterstep

The point being, KDE and GNOME may be the most complete / comprehensive approaches to Free Software desktops, but they're far from alone. Fluxbox and Afterstep in particular I like for defaulting to extremely clean desktops, making apps easy to get to through menus available with a mouseclick from anywhere. We're not all in the same gang, because we're not in gangs, gong long a gong a gong a long long fee phi pho fee phum.

Whenever people talk about "standardizing" as if this was an obvious good thing, I wonder if they feel the way to end illiteracy is to settle on one accepted book as The Standard, and making sure people know *that* book. Architecture, too, would be a lot less confusing if we didn't have all these different *types* of housing or approaches to engineering large buildings -- let's just settle on the right one, dammit!

Having only one choice in a given context might make sense -- but it depends on the context.The owner of Amalgamated Consolidated Products, Inc.* is free to declare that Windows 3.1 is the only acceptable desktop standard for his company's employees while they're at work: Fine. Dumb, or maybe it's smart for that company, but fine. Likewise, if NASA decides its billions in tax dollars would contribute the most to the commonwealth if some of them went to creating a standard GNOME-based desktop and ignoring KDE, well, that might make sense in that context.

When I hear lots of 1st-person plural handwringing about how "we" ought to adopt a standard *anything* though, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I get a little defensive. 1st person plural is always annoying when someone seems to be speaking on my behalf but without my consent or agreement. What if I *like* the standard you don't? Think Low-flush toilets as a mandated standard. Think building codes that make inexpensive legal housing a legislated near-impossibility. Building codes, of course, are standards imposed for the good of all, and if you don't like it, you can stick it your ear, fill out this form in triplicate, and wait for the county inspector, who is currently on extended leave in Botswana. Citizen.

To the extent that actual programmers voluntarily combine their efforts, it's nice to see some convergence, even a lot of it. But there's no g

As the other reply mentioned, this is off-topic.

But on the other hand, I run Linux on a p166mmx laptop /w 96mb ram.

I run Debian on it, with the Ion window manager and XFree86 3.3.6 (cos I don't like the glidepoint, and I use mostly console apps on it), but you could use IceWM, Blackbox or XFCE, all of which are in Debian Stable (Woody).

For a web browser I use Dillo mostly but Mozilla for some stuff (SSL etc). I don't use email on that machine though.

For productivity I have vim :P but AbiWord and Gnumeric would work okay I would imagine.

Basically, keep it sensible, and don't go for any memory intensive stuff (KDE / GNOME). Recompiling the kernel would help.

It's a nice laptop actually, apart from the HDD has a maximum transfer rate of 4mb/s, which is it's downpoint. Still, it's adequate for it's needs.

Martin

Sure, the default is KDE, usually with GNOME also (would you prefer newbies straight from Windows to be dumped into ion?)

KDE AND Gnome?

I'd prefer they be started with something sensible that doesn't cause them to think 'Linux is slow and bloated' right off the bat, frankly.

IceWM maybe. Personally I prefer WindowMaker, but Ice is probably better for the folks that have never used anything but windows. Either way, if they'd put half the time they spend on KDE and Gnome into a sensible default setup with a WM that doesn't require a supercomputer to run at a decent speed, I think it would give a better initial impression to most newbies.

Instead, these things are left exclusively for those of us that know about them, know how to find them and how to configure them on our own time, while the newbies are being given a very bad impression of Linux, if they try to install it on anything but a brand new box at least.

I agree. I still use the core red hat distro for my desktops, but i rip out metacity and most of the gnome features (gnome-panel, menus, nautilus, etc) and use IceWM for that stuff.

No float on top feature to Metacity? Too complicated?

no kidding. how about the minimization window animation? Did anyone else follow that endless, idiotic jerk-off fest trying to get a pref in Metacity to TURN OFF ANIMATIONS?!! He simply would not put it in there.

Well, would you rather try at least 20 choices to find one you like or be stuck with one default that you absolutely don't like.

there should be one, DEFAULT, good looking and very user friendly one out there

There should be a clean, cheap alternative energy to crude oil. There should be a cure for cancer and AIDS and a dozen other ailments. There should be a fridge full o' beer in my garage right now...

But there ain't...

People rant about bloat, and people rant about eyecandy, but none of the window managers people rant about hove usable, out of the box normal configs.

What am I talking about? A window manager that has keyboard shortcuts that happen to be configured in a normal way. I don't know if the Mac-like WMs properly do option-Q, etc, but I do know that IceWM is the only WM I've found that has a superset of Win16, Win32, and OS/2 shortcuts in its sane, default configuration. Rather than spending hours hacking away at some obscure config file, or googling around for one that worked, this Window manager worked out of the box in ways I expected.

Keyboard feel is why I've never used any other Window manager for longer than a few days. I've been 100% linux since 2000, and had been using it since 1996, and have always enjoyed how I haven't had to relearn everything, hack files, or lose my couple of years of Windows and OS/2 experience to move up to something better.

So why don't you try IceWM for a bit, and see how much faster you can work with good shortcuts.

People rant about bloat, and people rant about eyecandy, but none of the window managers people rant about hove usable, out of the box normal configs.

What am I talking about? A window manager that has keyboard shortcuts that happen to be configured in a normal way. I don't know if the Mac-like WMs properly do option-Q, etc, but I do know that IceWM is the only WM I've found that has a superset of Win16, Win32, and OS/2 shortcuts in its sane, default configuration. Rather than spending hours hacking away at some obscure config file, or googling around for one that worked, this Window manager worked out of the box in ways I expected.

Keyboard feel is why I've never used any other Window manager for longer than a few days. I've been 100% linux since 2000, and had been using it since 1996, and have always enjoyed how I haven't had to relearn everything, hack files, or lose my couple of years of Windows and OS/2 experience to move up to something better.

So why don't you try IceWM for a bit, and see how much faster you can work with good shortcuts.

Almost the entire math department (i.e., the 4th floor of a massive building called Tech) uses GNU/Linux with Gnome for their research projects and simulations. Down on the ground floor, at least one lab is loaded up with GNU/Linux and IceWM (see Intro to EE lab instructions under the "Hardware" section), because they needed real-time responses while running some simulations and such. It's heartening to see my university using OSS.

-- Kurt

You might be interested in combining IceWM with ROX to get a good looking "desktop environment" without the bloat. (You will have to play around with text config files for IceWM, though, which is not everyone's cup of tea) ... but I actually find IceWM runs faster than twm or fvwm* - and it has many of the features of KDE.

I am a big fan of thin clients, and have administered two setups. When it is done right, the amount of administration work drops to virtually nothing. If you can set up a new company to rely on only web apps or custom jobs, the user has virtually no power to mess with anything, can only use the apps you offer them, and, if they hose their home directory, you simply copy it back from a daily backup for them. Simple and beautiful.
The administration costs on this are minimal, and hardware rarely needs to be upgraded, except to add another server to the setup.

Personally I use a combination of ROX for the desktop and IceWM for the window-manager, both of which work just as fast on my laptop (an ancient P120) as on my desktop - in a word, near instantaneous. They're worth checking out if you like the idea of a desktop environment but don't like the associated crud that comes with GNOME and KDE. (The fact that ROX whips Konq or Nautilus in the file-management stakes is a pretty big reason too, of course :)

As far as X's stability goes, I've only ever seen that keyboard/mouse lock-up situation twice in nearly five years of using linux, so I really can't agree. For me, X has been rock-solid, and even the standard apps I use with X tend to be incredibly stable. Hell, I reckon that the "unstable" GIMP is just about as stable as certain commercial COREL or Adobe products :)

I think the main reason why linux *seems* slower from an end-user perspective is because of KDE (which gets installed as default by just about every distro these days). The first thing the user sees is a rather ugly, unreponsive piece of memory-hogging bloat-ware that has all the features he/she doesn't need (aa text, alpha-blended menus, etc) turned on to make it even slower. "What could be easier than opening the file-manager to find a file", the naive user thinks ... whooops! Guess which application takes half a minute to open a directory!

(alright - I got fairly carried away there, I know KDE isn't that bad. But if I knew nothing about the open-source software concept or underlying OS stability, didn't care about pirating software, and was presented with a choice between Windows or KDE ... well, I know which one I'd choose, and it wouldn't be the one with the penguin on the front :)

I was in a similar situation a year ago to you - I loved having a taskbar (which is what originally converted me from a steadfast Enlightenment user) but hated the horrible overhead of KDE, coupled with it's long start time and the pain of using Konqueror. I found that I never used Konqueror for file management - I still used an xterm as I had always done before. But ROX has completely converted me - I've been using it for a year and find it indispensible.

By the sounds of the newbie's article, RedHat is maintaining their excellent form (that said, I haven't used RedHat since that hideous 7.0 release). But a decent distro shouldn't create such a terrible mess ... and although others have suggested what part of the problem should be, a default installation should not require editing text files just to bring GNOME up to speed.

Personally I'd suggest Mandrake - I recently installed 9.0 and it worked fine "out-of-the-box" ... I was especially impressed by the hardware configuration (didn't need to do a single thing!) and in particular the printer configuration (click on "Add printer", turn on your printer and ... presto! ... it tells me what my printer is and asks if I want to install the default drivers!! Fantastic!!)

Oh, and if you want a blindingly fast desktop (even on my P120 laptop) that still looks elegant, try ROX, possibly with IceWM. Windows open instantly. You'll never want to touch Nautilus or Konqueror again!

Funny...I'm running the RH beta now, & I can still choose between KDE & Gnome (thanks to switchdesk, or by editing ~/.Xdefaults) and even neither (console or icewm). So what choices has Red Hat denied me?

Regarding the boxes. They are all donated either to ACCRC in Oakland or FreeGeek in Portland. We spent the last several weeks going through all the old lower end boxes they had and trying to make workable boxes out of them. Because we were getting together 235 computers we lowered our standards from what ACCRC or FreeGeek normally will send out. The boxes range from 100 mhz to 333mhz P I's and II's. Our goal at accrc was to get 64 megs of ram but freegeek doesn't have quite the resources that accrc gets from the bay area so they used 8meg edo simm's which means the box only gets 32megs total. All of the boxes have NIC cards, 1 gig or better hard drives, and a video card. There were sound cards in a bunch of them but we didn't have the time to go through and configure them. The same goes for modems, we actually tried to add modems but if kudzu didn't find it we just left it in there unconfigured and moved on to the next box.

The final setup we used was based on a netinstall / net boot system that the freegeek folks have put together called lessdisks. After a little pain recompiling the kernels to make sure we had support for all the random ethernet cards we got the install process really streamlined. We'd make sure the box had a hard drive, ram, video, and ethernet. Then we'd pop in the netinstall disk. It boot up using grub and our kernel would just nfs mount from a local server. Everything else was pulled over the network. We had scripts for formatting the hard drives which just set everything up with boot, swap, and one big main partition. On the server we had a clone of a server which was used as the base for each install. After everything was copied over we ran a bunch of scripts which tried to detect all the hardware. We then had like 4 questions which we need to answer on each box to detect the sound card, video for x, and mouse. This process made doing a couple hundred installs MUCH easier. Because we were finishing up the software configuration at the same time as we were rolling out boxes we have another option in the lessdisks install to do an rsync update. This let us fiddle with the spanish configuration and setup until two days before we packed everything up on palettes.

We used ICE for the window manager, Rox as a desktop, and KOffice for the basic apps. KDE, Gnome, StarOffice, and Mozilla were all way to bloated for this class of machine.

If you're in the Bay Area or Portland and are interested we will be working on sending more shipments of computers to south america in a few months. Please send me an email, evan at indymedia.org if you want to be notified when we start.

"What makes this process even more lame is that at least in Mozilla, the tabs are on the opposite end of the screen from where I switch tasks on my WM. This means I have to do a lot of unnecessary mousing around. "

Which is once again why I must emphasize that you should use hotkeys on your keyboard. IceWM, at least, has a nice set of defaults that allow people migrating from OS/2 or Windows to settle in quickly, and avoid "unnecessary mousing around." I just wish it was KDE compliant, because KWin doesn't have the depth of features that allow for the same hotkey behaviour (IE: it's not that the defaults aren't Wincompatible, it's that it doesn't support the same features..).

IceWM, "The Cool Window Manager" :-) came out to be a small-footprint, functional X11 window manager. Which it was (I think it was about 1.2M or less of RAM when I had it running).

Now it got deeper theme support, KDE and GNOME hints, sound support...

I wished I could still run it in 1.2M. :-(

The problem is that you can't simply turn off most of the bloat, and just taking an older version of the code isn't an option, too, since it contained several bugs. Guess it: The bugs were fixed and bloat was added.

I really hope these guys aren't going to do the same mistake.

With IceWM you get a full featured Window Manager with many bells and whistles but low memory footprint and very fast.

As well as Blackbox IceWM is small, fast and pleasant to use. I run it everywhere, from Athlons down to a 16MHz 386SX box, and it's acceptably fast on all of them :-).

KDE 3. Wow, is all I can say.

Now, back to the topic at hand. Isn't one of the main premises of the "Linux movement" to prove that Linux is indeed a "better" OS than Windows with the advent of "desktops" such as KDE and Gnome? Well, if it's so damn good, why do the developers of KDE have to copycat everything from Microsoft® Windows(TM)? Give me a break.

If you haven't seen these screenshots yet, look. They prove that KDE 3 is just a blatant Windows(TM) wannabe. From Konqueror's integration into KDE to join web browsing and file management into one view a la Microsoft® Internet Explorer (the common Slashdot mantra of "Let's pretend we hate it, steal all their ideas, integrate it into our own OS, and proclaim that it's better!"), to even the "Open File" dialog box. Holy shit, it looks like someone decompiled comdlg32.dll and recompiled it for KDE. That little "jump to location" panel was circa Microsoft® Office 97, and became a part of Windows' common dialogs later. Nice to see that KDE has finally stolen that one too.

All the widgets have moved to a Microsoft®-style type of widget. The check boxes (or should I say 'boxen'), scroll bars, command buttons, etc --- all a la Microsoft®! The only thing KDE 3 is missing is using Tahoma font for all the dialog boxes -- but I hear that is next on the list.

Hmm, the new "K" menu -- looks exactly like the new Office(TM) XP-style menus. Next thing you know, KDE 3.1 will come in the "Luna" style interface. Why don't you hacks try and come up with your own ideas once in a while? I guess that pretty much sums up the GPL -- "We're incapable of any self-developed ideas, we need to steal some from someone else and modify it to come up with our 'idea'." What a crock.

For all you legitimate Linux users out there --- don't buy into this crap. I suggest you use IceWM. It's small, efficient, and fast as hell. Oh, and it has its own, original interface.

I wonder if the next version of KDE will be called KDE XP?

Anybody attempting to design a truly user-friendly Linux distro needs to start by making IceWM the default window manager. IceWM gives the average users What They Want: a simple clean desktop. The taskbar isn't filled with junk (well, maybe a little, but the distro should default it out), just a set of simple buttons. Yes, it looks a lot like Windows, but that's not necessarily bad. What's important is that it's a clean interface that users can understand right away. The desktop war is won or lost in the first minute that the user looks at the screen and decides if s/he understands what's going on.

try ROX with IceWM, its easy, comfortable and fast :)

One person asked if it was prototype hardware that you couldnt buy yet because it was so fast.

LOL. But in fact ROX will never be as fast as what inspired it - the RISC OS desktop (mostly) hand-written in ARM assember. Acorn's 8MHz ARM-based desktop was in fact faster than almost anything short of a Sun workstation back in 1988 when RISC OS came out, but most of the _feeling_ of speed came from the OS being implemented in assember, and on ROM so it loaded instantly. Legend has it the windowing code was written by a games programmer - perhaps the best person to pick.

Is anyone keeping an official list of 'desktop software that looks good and isn't horribly bloated like almost everything else seems to be these days, not like back when I were a lad' (tm)? I nominate Dillo and Icewm; I would use ROX-filer if I needed a file manager (I've become accustomed to using the shell now). I can't bring myself to give up XEmacs though :-(.

Most of the memory problems with KDE and Gnome are the over-pretty window managers. Disable them and use something simpler

The ActiveX I don't think anyone can help you with. Bad design decisions.

Exchange allows access via POP3 and IMAP. These are supported by pretty much any mail client. I used this where I work on my Solaris Workstation. Exchange also has LDAP access, so if you use Netscape 4 or 6 you can use the address book. This provides some aspects of the PIM. Unices still lack decent shared calendar support, StarOffice 5.2 had quite a nice one, but this is gone in SO6

The authors' choices seemed unnecessarily limited to me. It is kind of hard to have a "best" of anything if you only sample a few of them.

For instance, they did not mention Mandrake except when talking about the Sims. Mandrake kicks ass though IMO SUSE comes close.

The window manager choices were also sparse. Lightweight WMs like Sawfish and IceWM weren't mentioned. Everyone knows about Gnone and KDE, how about telling people about the WMs they don't know about?

And when it comes to text editors, no new ground was broken. What about FTE? It is the best cross-platform (Linux, Windows, OS/2 and others) editor I have come across: full-featured yet relatively small and easy to use.

Jeez, it seems that *anyone* can start a Linux site these days!!! :->

Konqueror btw gets the favicon everytime too, and it even shows it as it's window icon. Nice if your window manager supports that.

--
Proud User of IceWM

I was going for "First Plug" with this link but you beat me to it with your so-called "friend's" project. :(

I cannot stand it when I have a button in my taskbar that refuses to respond to a right-click Close command.

2. Put to user.js for Mozilla:
user_pref ("capability.policy.default.Window.moveTo", "noAccess");
user_pref ("capability.policy.default.Window.resizeTo", "noAccess");

3. Enjoy

As a long time computer user, starting from a C64/Floppy/300 baud modems to DualP3s/Terrabyte storage/DSL I have migrated and changed the way I interact with GUI's and store my files many times over the years.

Mark Hursts ideas are almost like mine. I will break it down a little as to HD layout then OS.
I have normally have 2 HDs in my system, HDA for my OS's and HDB for my Games and Work. HDA I break down into 4 Paritions.
HDA1 for Win98,
HDA2 for Win2K,
HDA3 for either a Linux dristro or WinXP beta
HDA4 for the swap if im using linux.
HDB1 is 1 parition, normally 3 folders, Games, Work and Emulators. (Im a UAE and Mame freak.)

I dont normally use boot loaders other than Win2k's, If i boot linux i use loadlin, it seems easier for me to maintain. (C:\linux)

Im a big fan of Norton Ghost, using ghost on the paritions, I can restore quickly. As I like to play around with drivers and migrate my HD's to more space. I also burn the .gho files on CDs. If the files are larger than 700 megs, I rar the ghost images and make it self extractable. So I can boot a fresh HD from floppy. I also copy the CD images to the HD, unrar, and ghost from the whole image.

I'm a little more in depth on my HDA1 drive, I use directory names, Apps, GFX, Net, Sound, Utils, Work. I also have the normal windows directories, My Documents, Windows and Temp. Under My Documents I put My Pictures, My Music and Favorites. I then use M$ Tweak UI to point all windows versions on my HD to c:\My documents, C:\My Documents\favorites, etc.. This keeps all my files at hand if im either Win98, Win2K or linux. It makes it easier to keep every file in the same place under ever os. (Example, IE for Win2K and Win98 point to the same favorites, so my bookmarks are the same.)

After I get the basic windows installed (doesnt matter what version). I upgrade the entire installation with the newest patches and drivers. Then register file types for my apps, not windows defaults. Apps include textpad, winzip,winrar,cdrwin,nero,acdsee,winamp,proxomitro n. Windows modifications as x-teq and m$ powertoys.

Now that windows is installed, and apps, I keep a shortcut to a folder NET in c:\net\net on my desktop. This folder c:\net\net keeps shortcuts for all my programs. Even if I reinstall windows, my c:\net\net folder stays. I put a shortcut of my NET folder in my tooltray. I can either alt-tab or click on the tooltray icon (in case my apps are maximized) to have access to my favorite apps. I really dont use the start menu, as it takes longer to get to my commonly used applications.

Microsoft has weened us off Dual pane file managers.(I miss fileman!) This was (IMHO) the hardest thing to get used to in win95 and new versions of windows. Trying to copy files from a file viewed pane, then select the destination folder is slower and has more steps involved. M$ introduced powertoys that included "Copy To and Move To" extensions to windows, that at least helped. I do keep a copy of 2xExplorer for when I need to handle large ammount of files.

The part that actually increased my productivity was the toolbar. Being able to have access to my running applications, instead of alt-tabbing was a nice changed. It also provides a quick visual que on what programs im running. The tooltray also speeds up access to my c:\net\net quick launch folder full of shortcuts.

Drag and Drop, right mouse menus have become standard. I have found that I now drag mp3's onto winamp, and right mouse clicking and enqueing them. My older habit was using playlists for everything. IE didnt have the best right mouse menus, but with IE6, they have the most common menus again. (Using proxomitron and enabling all right mouse clicks also helps)

Now as my Linux GUI, I really use Windows as workstation, and unix as a server and display X back to my windows box. (X-win32 is far the best for this.) But when Im using a unix workstation, I normally install IceWM. IceWM is small, fast and has a toolbar and tooltray. It is highly customizable and can add those extra buttons that come in handy. The windowshade mode which rolls up the window to a bar is very handy. Comes in handy when I need to view multiple load balanced servers at the same time. Also for quick eye-candy, I like the network and cpu meters on the toolbar, dont really need it, but nice to see.

Started to use WinXP beta, and I'm pretty impressed with its Font Smoothing features. Check out some screenshots I made for friends here and here.. The font smoothing works all throught the GUI, notice how the menus are changed.

I spend too much time playing around with new utilities and GUI's for windows. If your interested in modifing your windows GUI, check out Shell City, WindowBlinds, and Litestep.

Have fun!
-Brook

As a long time computer user, starting from a C64/Floppy/300 baud modems to DualP3s/Terrabyte storage/DSL I have migrated and changed the way I interact with GUI's and store my files many times over the years.

Mark Hursts ideas are almost like mine. I will break it down a little as to HD layout then OS.
I have normally have 2 HDs in my system, HDA for my OS's and HDB for my Games and Work. HDA I break down into 4 Paritions.
HDA1 for Win98,
HDA2 for Win2K,
HDA3 for either a Linux dristro or WinXP beta
HDA4 for the swap if im using linux.
HDB1 is 1 parition, normally 3 folders, Games, Work and Emulators. (Im a UAE and Mame freak.)

I dont normally use boot loaders other than Win2k's, If i boot linux i use loadlin, it seems easier for me to maintain. (C:\linux)

Im a big fan of Norton Ghost, using ghost on the paritions, I can restore quickly. As I like to play around with drivers and migrate my HD's to more space. I also burn the .gho files on CDs. If the files are larger than 700 megs, I rar the ghost images and make it self extractable. So I can boot a fresh HD from floppy. I also copy the CD images to the HD, unrar, and ghost from the whole image.

I'm a little more in depth on my HDA1 drive, I use directory names, Apps, GFX, Net, Sound, Utils, Work. I also have the normal windows directories, My Documents, Windows and Temp. Under My Documents I put My Pictures, My Music and Favorites. I then use M$ Tweak UI to point all windows versions on my HD to c:\My documents, C:\My Documents\favorites, etc.. This keeps all my files at hand if im either Win98, Win2K or linux. It makes it easier to keep every file in the same place under ever os. (Example, IE for Win2K and Win98 point to the same favorites, so my bookmarks are the same.)

After I get the basic windows installed (doesnt matter what version). I upgrade the entire installation with the newest patches and drivers. Then register file types for my apps, not windows defaults. Apps include textpad, winzip,winrar,cdrwin,nero,acdsee,winamp,proxomitro n. Windows modifications as x-teq and m$ powertoys.

Now that windows is installed, and apps, I keep a shortcut to a folder NET in c:\net\net on my desktop. This folder c:\net\net keeps shortcuts for all my programs. Even if I reinstall windows, my c:\net\net folder stays. I put a shortcut of my NET folder in my tooltray. I can either alt-tab or click on the tooltray icon (in case my apps are maximized) to have access to my favorite apps. I really dont use the start menu, as it takes longer to get to my commonly used applications.

Microsoft has weened us off Dual pane file managers.(I miss fileman!) This was (IMHO) the hardest thing to get used to in win95 and new versions of windows. Trying to copy files from a file viewed pane, then select the destination folder is slower and has more steps involved. M$ introduced powertoys that included "Copy To and Move To" extensions to windows, that at least helped. I do keep a copy of 2xExplorer for when I need to handle large ammount of files.

The part that actually increased my productivity was the toolbar. Being able to have access to my running applications, instead of alt-tabbing was a nice changed. It also provides a quick visual que on what programs im running. The tooltray also speeds up access to my c:\net\net quick launch folder full of shortcuts.

Drag and Drop, right mouse menus have become standard. I have found that I now drag mp3's onto winamp, and right mouse clicking and enqueing them. My older habit was using playlists for everything. IE didnt have the best right mouse menus, but with IE6, they have the most common menus again. (Using proxomitron and enabling all right mouse clicks also helps)

Now as my Linux GUI, I really use Windows as workstation, and unix as a server and display X back to my windows box. (X-win32 is far the best for this.) But when Im using a unix workstation, I normally install IceWM. IceWM is small, fast and has a toolbar and tooltray. It is highly customizable and can add those extra buttons that come in handy. The windowshade mode which rolls up the window to a bar is very handy. Comes in handy when I need to view multiple load balanced servers at the same time. Also for quick eye-candy, I like the network and cpu meters on the toolbar, dont really need it, but nice to see.

Started to use WinXP beta, and I'm pretty impressed with its Font Smoothing features. Check out some screenshots I made for friends here and here.. The font smoothing works all throught the GUI, notice how the menus are changed.

I spend too much time playing around with new utilities and GUI's for windows. If your interested in modifing your windows GUI, check out Shell City, WindowBlinds, and Litestep.

Have fun!
-Brook

Even on high-end (athlon/piii with 128MB+ RAM) machines you can really tell the difference.

I'm all for everyone using what suits them but how many from now on are going to be proffered GNOME/KDE by their distro and never really realise that there are alternatives? (Everyone here but me would be using KDE all the time if I hadn't forcibly pointed out alternatives...which they're now using of their own accord).

Meanwhile I'm thankful to KDE for providing an easy to get into desktop for my new users, but that doesn't mean I like it much or like the direction it seems to be taking (at least RAM-wise my app server is drowning in swap because of KDE2).

As long as KDE is kept relatively modular and happy to work with other environments, I see no absolute need for a a KDElite when you can use one of the many ultra-lite, yet functional, WMs with whichever parts of KDE (and GNOME) you want to use.

You're using a bad Windows manager. Lots of Linux users who run it only for 2 hours a week love their E or Sawfish, but as someone who works in Linux 24/7, I've found nothing compares to IceWM.

Why is it good? "Centre dialogs on owner window" setting. Alt+tab moves between windows. crtl+esc brings up launcher menu. Totally Gnome WM compliant. Multiple destops. Stability. Speed and low foot print. But the best feature? A default configuration fully usable without tweaking!!
--

... which is called IceWM
Actually, I don't quite understand why you are shifting the topic from file managers to windows managers, and why only people with less-than-500-MHz-CPU-box need them to be GNOME compliant.