Fwd: Re: [TAG] please share your experience

[Thomas Adam]

--- Thomas Adam <thomas_adam16 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From Thomas Adam Sat Sep 17 17:04:07 2005
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> Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 17:04:07 +0100 (BST)
> From: Thomas Adam <thomas_adam16 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [TAG] please share your experience
> To: The Answer Gang <tag at lists.linuxgazette.net>
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> 
> --- "J.Bakshi" <hizibizi at spymac.com> wrote:
> 
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
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> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > some of you already have done some experiments with different
> window
> > managers . I request you to share your experience. I was a KDE
> user.
> 
> You're asking for a fight, yes?  :)  Joydeep, I/we have already
> pointed
> you to past articles in the past, about different window managers. 
> Heck, *I* even published it in TAG for you.  Here it is:
> 
> http://linuxgazette.net/114/tag/4.html
> 
> (hint: look at the footnotes, and the URLs therein)
> 
> > recently I have switched  over to icewm. icewm runs comparatively
> > faster than kde -:)  my H/W config is AMD semapron 1.5GHZ with
> 128MB
> 
> Of course it runs faster -- it's a WM and not a DE.  That, and DEs
> tend
> (not always, but in the case of KDE it does) load up core libs that
> are
> needed to run a small part of KDE (or sometimes a large one) that you
> might never use.  Then there's konqueror -- the libs for that are
> much
> the same.  So you can see how the memory factor escalates as time
> increases.  You want to know how I got on the "straight and narrow",
> eh?  Well, read on:
> 
> Slackware 2.0: Twm
> 
> This was the first ever distro I used. I has absolutely no idea what
> I
> was doing, but I do remember being able to get XFree 3.x up and
> running, having spent a few months prior to that using the console,
> as
> I really didn't know any better.
> 
> When X started, up popped twm. Coming from a Windows background at
> the
> time, I thought that maybe I had broken my computer. Whilst something
> had obviously loaded, it was not what I was expecting. The menus were
> not very well defined, and for me to see them, I had to click and
> hold
> the mouse button. Hardly user-friendly...
> 
> ... or so I thought. But at the time, I just assumed twm was all
> there
> was. I got to know it, and tweak things about it. Surprisingly
> enough,
> twm is more customisable than people tend to realise. Ok, so I know
> the
> default look-and-feel of it is enough to make anyone vomit (the green
> really does remind me of the sea), but if one goes digging about
> ~/.twmrc, it becomes obvious of the things one can change about twm.
> I
> started off by changing the colour, to a deep red. Since the
> foreground
> colours were white, the contrast this gave was pleasing to me.
> 
> Twm also has an icon manager. I didn't know this was the name of it,
> and why should I? Whenever I iconified a window, it just appeared on
> the root window as a text label almost. But even that's
> customisable...
> The end result, was that although very primitive, it functioned, and
> I
> was happy with it.
> 
> I ended up staying with twm for about a year. I didn't know any
> different, and it was only after leaving Slackware, for this then new
> distribution RedHat, that things changed slightly...
> RedHat 5.0: KDE
> 
> Anyone reading this that knows me, will laugh at the thought of me
> ever
> trying KDE, let alone using it. But it's true, one might say, almost
> unavoidable that I would use it at some point. Of course, I'm
> referring
> to KDE 1.x the version of KDE that actually worked. My main PC (up
> until very recently) was a P166. KDE 1.x actually ran on it at a not
> unreasonable speed, all things considered. KDE was still in its
> infancy
> compared to the over-weighted and monsterous beast it has become
> today).
> 
> But (and you can quote me on this) I liked KDE 1.x. I liked its
> style,
> and speed, even on a P166 and that matters when that machine was old,
> even when I was using it. Compared to the twm jail-house I had been
> in
> previously, this thing was immense.
> 
> Sure, I had a few issues with it. I remember distinctly that the
> icons
> on the desktop were tempermental. One moment they'd work, and the
> next
> moment, they wouldn't, or they'd disappear completely, etc. But I
> didn't let this bother me too much. It was useable. It worked very
> much
> like windows, which meant I didn't have to think about what I was
> doing
> -- KDE made all the choices for me.
> 
> I then switched distros a lot thereafter.  I tried GNOME, and various
> other WMs, before settling on FVWM -- actually, this was on RH4 using
> their 'AnotherLevel' package.  (The Lesstif theme)
> 
> You don't have to look very far for the WM I use.  Just look at the
> recent articles I have written, as well as recent TAG entries from a
> few months past.  Indeed, you can see my config file on the fvwmwiki:
> 
> http://www.fvwmwiki.org
> 
> ... as well as other examples on the fvwm-forums:
> 
> http://fvwm.lair.be
> 
> > DDR , 256KB L1, UDMA HDD . I have also tested fluxbox which is
> based
> > on blackbox and slower than icewm. openbox is another WM  performs
> 
> The speed issue is largely dependant on a number of things, Joydeep. 
> Typically, it could be that you're running extraneous applications
> along with the window manager you're loading, or it might be that the
> WM itself is loading them, providing you with the default theme it
> ships with (Englightenment used to do this -- no wonder I hated it.)
> 
> Indeed, I often get asked this question about FVWM -- and why that's
> so
> slow.  Typically in FVWM's case, it can usually be attributed to the
> over use of colorsets.  Colorsets (in FVWM parlance) are a means of
> specifying (in a lot of detail) the colours that can be assigned to
> various parts of a window (and all aspects thereof) as well as
> background colours.  Colorsets can be told to use gradient colours,
> and
> the like, that, on lower-end systems take up a lot of memory.  
> 
> Also, colorsets when used with transparency can cause a slow-down,
> due
> to the way the Xserver handles it  (remember that colour management
> is
> the responsibility of the Xserver.)  You can tell colorsets to buffer
> the transparent images as well -- this can be slow.  Where colorsets
> use pixmaps (and other graphics colours as opposed to single block
> colour) then more memory is used.  Indeed, when specifying colorsets
> in
> FVWM the numbering is important.  If one were to use:
> 
> ``
> Colorset 100 fg white, bg blue
> ''
> 
> Then in memory, there would be allocated space for *101* colorsets,
> irrespective of whether they've been defined or not -- so keeping the
> numbers low,  in their definition is often important.  (I'll be
> discussing colorsets in FVWM properly in an article.)
> 
> But I digress.
> 
> There are of course, some general things one can try to reduce
> slowness.  It's not so much of a problem on 2.6 kernels (as the
> scheduler is much better), but the Xserver used to be reniced when it
> was running so that it was more responsive -- but such things waere
> only ever negligable at best -- and renicing a process is NOT a
> general
> ideal to making things run faster -- but for really low-end systems,
> it
> *might*.
> 
> Going back to the subject of colour, running one's Xserver with a low
> colour-depth is advisable, something like:
> 
> ``
> startx -- -bpp 16
> ''
> 
> Which can reduce memory consumption.  Note that colour-handling in
> FVWM
> (and colour limiting, where it is applicable) is now done
> automatically
> in FVWM where those applications try and steal the entire
> colour-pallette (netcape 4 used to be notorious for this.)
> 
> > well but lacks of  theme . UWM ( unix window manager) with UDE (
> unix
> > desktop environment) though based only on xlibs to speed up but I
> > have found hardly any speed difference between icewm and UWM ( with
> 
> Any good WM can only be written in pure Xlib (as FVWM is.)
> 
> > UDE ). fvwm is there but setting its configuration is terrific . I
> 
> "Terrific"?  That's a new one.  :P
> 
> > have not tested the enlightenment window maker yet. 
> 
> Enlightenment and "Window Maker" are two different programs.
> 
> > If any one use any window manager faster than icewm (and
> configurable
> > like icewm ) please share the experience. 
> 
> That's a matter of personal bias -- and indeed, see my ramblings
> above.
> 
> -- Thomas Adam
> 
> 
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