[TAG] please share your experience

[Mike Orr]

Thomas Adam wrote:

>--- Mike Orr <mso at oz.net> wrote:
>  
>
>>The terminals came with
>>a 
>>built-in window manager (Motif) and a menu to telnet into the 
>>frequently-used hosts.  This was the University of Washington, so
>>    
>>
>
>Hehehe, what a cool thing to do.  Bet it was slow though?
>  
>


Slow, no.  What do you mean?   All the hosts were on the campus network, 
which was no slouch.


>>For speed, there are pretty much three classes of window 
>>managers/desktop environments:
>>    1.  KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment:   slow.
>>    2.  WindowMaker, fluxbox, uwm, and a dozen others:  much faster.
>>    3.  FVWM, twm, wm2:  slightly faster still.
>>    3.  larswm, ratpoison:  fastest.
>>    
>>
>
>That's a fair comparison.  Mind you, when you wrote it, what was you
>thinking when categorising by speed?
>  
>


The delay between when you initiate an action and it happens.  KDE opens 
and closes windows noticeably slower than FVWM.


>>about as snappy as you can get without losing the "overlapping
>>windows" 
>>paradigm. 
>>    
>>
>
>There's lots you can do about that.  Overlapping windows can be a thing
>of the past, depending on the window placement policy in use.  In FVWM
>parlance:
>
>```
>style * MinOverLapPlacement
>'''
>  
>


No, I mean losing the capability of overlapping windows.  Most Unix, 
Mac, and Windows users are used to moving a window anywhere and letting 
other windows partially sit on top of it.  Windows 1.0 had only tiled 
windows, meaning a window could never cover another, and they all 
covered 100% of the screen so there was never a background peeking 
through. 

larswm returns to this as a way to maximize productive space and 
performance, although it also allows some windows to "float".  Normally 
you'd use tiled windows for xterms, editors, your clock/biff/meter 
panel, etc, and floating windows for graphical applications like Firefox 
and the GIMP.


>>I'm mostly satisfied with KDE.  Of course, everybody wishes it
>>started 
>>up faster and opened windows faster.  But the features, themability,
>>and 
>>integration is a good tradeoff.  As the KDE developers have pointed
>>out, 
>>KDE is "bloated" only in the sense that it has more features.  But
>>    
>>
>
>Sure -- but how useful are they?  :)
>  
>

You haven't spent years struggling to get programs to input and display 
non-English characters.   Every program did it differently, you needed 
special fonts, and some programs didn't do it well at all.  Now with KDE 
you just click the keymapper icon in the bottom right and the keyboard 
changes language.  I don't use that feature -- I got so burned out that 
I do everything in ASCII now -- but it's nice that it's there without 
having to dig through a HOWTO and configure a bunch of programs.