Lightweight Window Managers?

bcrowell asks: "We have an old Intel machine (166 Mhz pentium, 32 Mb), previously used only for playing Civilization, on which I've now got Mandrake running. The problem is, it doesn't seem possible to run KDE in this amount of memory. I've heard about Linux being a good way to run serious software gracefully on older hardware, but not having a GUI is pretty limiting, unless you just want a server. Has anyone used a more lightweight window manager that they could recommend? Are there ways of configuring X, KDE, or GNOME so as to cut down on the memory requirements?" Yes, a simple browse of Freshmeat will net you loads of answers, but I'm sure the submittor would appreciate some of your experiences with the numerous choices of WMs, out there.

Comments

a couple of suggestions.

[Mandrake]

First, I would recommend taking a look at blackbox - it's lightweight enough to run on quite a few lower-end machines nicely. Or maybe ion, which is decent for some types of work-related activities.

And then I would say that a lot of larger desktop environments (gnome/kde/enlightenment/etc) can probably be configured to run slower systems. most of the development work on E (before 0.14), for example, was done on a p120 and a p133. So I wouldn't completely discount these systems if you're used to them - you can probably make them run happily by tweaking configurations in them. Of course, you may not be interested in that, in which case I'd stick with something like ion or blackbox.