[H-GEN] Desktop wars ..... (no not really)

Sarah Walters sarah at uow.edu.au
Wed Jun 25 19:21:09 EDT 2003


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Hi Nick,

On 25 Jun 2003 Nick Kwiatkowski <nickolas at au1.ibm.com> wrote:
> a) Do I go with a desktop, and if so which 
> - or -
> b) Decide on a window manager first and work up from there?
> 
> The knowledge that I don't have is really in the area of the desktops, what
> they contain and how "pluggable" are to different window managers/dekstops.
> ie KDE with kvm and gnome with sawfish, etc.

My personal favourite window managers are blackbox and fluxbox. Fluxbox
is basically blackbox with key bindings and a couple of other features
built in, where with blackbox you run programs (eg bbkeys) to do this.

I like blackbox because it keeps completely out of my way. I have a tiny
little bar at the bottom of the screen (this location is configurable of
course) that tells me which desktop I am on, and which is my active app.
Ooh, look at that, it auto-hides (I didn't notice that before). Yay,
invisible window manager :)

This is my work computer, am considering putting KDE on my computer at
home. I prefer KDE for no particular reason, but I do like that blackbox
is one of the window managers that reportedly runs well with it.

Blackbox (and fluxbox to a lesser extend) are fairly minimalistic window
managers, but they do everything I need and keep out of my face.

As a point of interest, in a normal sized terminal blackbox almost never
appears when I type top. Each aterm uses the same amount of resources.
That's the way (IMNSHO) a window manager should be.

-- 
Mrs Sarah Walters
Systems Group
Information Technology Services
University of Wollongong
Phone: +61 2 4221 3775


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