Which window manager?

zeus

zeus

out of date
My linux experiance is limited! Ive only ever used KDE.
The thing is KDE has too much bumf with it for my liking. My whole reason for slowly turning to linux is to only have what I need in an operating system.

Im trying to find a balance between size/speed/looks.

From looking into these things in the past I spent most of my time looking at fluxbox, enlightenment, windowmaker and Ice WM.

What are peoples opinions on window managers? How different can they be!!??
 
I would always go for KDE if possible.
I just absolutely love it.

Admittedly I have limited experience with other Window Makers.
My next choice would be XFce.

I have a hard time finding my way around WM....
 
If you are looking for a lightweight, easy to use, fast and good lookin' window manager then XFCE is your friend. Or to be more specific, Xubuntu is what you are looking for.

The other window managers you have listed all have their pros and cons.

Enlightenment, whilst very good looking and lightweight, is generally a pain in the arse to use. Not to mention it will crash every 5 minutes. It's still in beta you see.

iceWM is very lightweight and basic but looks very ugly without some nice skins. Fortunately there are some great Ubuntu skins for it. It's very fast and doesn't get in your way

WM looks good, although i've never used it before. AT installed it on his laptop, running Mandriva as the base. It used only 2MB of RAM whilst operating!

Fluxbox IMO is awful. I really can't get to grips with it. Just looks butt ugly and is horrible to operate.
 
Ive used Xfce on the LFS livecd. My only gripe with that one is the way you explore the directories. I find it cumbersome.
It does look better than most though. Plus there are plenty of option when installing.
I installed core KDE packages and it was still bundled with loads of stuff so I kinda turned my back on desktop environments.

Its going to have to be put on hold now anyway cos ive lost my grub floppy and am stuck with windows 2000! Ive got livecds but cant remember exactly how to enter a chroot environment. Ill work it out somehow.
 
Theres always GNOME if you want something different. Its a matter of opinion really, I prefer KDE for its uber-customisability, and I think the Qt library is better than the GTK that GNOME uses. But both are powerful WMs. try it and see what you think.
 
To be honest I thought kde, gnome and xfce were desktop environments.
cde is another.

Its kinda confusing to me cos ive only ever used kde and xfce but they seem to me to be big, slow and full of crap I will never need. Im not interested in taskbars and screensavers, icons n all that. I just want a menu to launch apps and a window to browse drives and use open a prompt with. I find linux without x installed a bitch. X alone doesnt have a menu, plus its ugly. windows 1.0 looked better!
Xfce is still an option to me though, I get the impression it has less core components than kde, which was my previous chioce.

Has anyone used a window manager not intergrated with a desktop manager?

Besides, my backup of LFS was dodgy and ive got to do it all again. Addis will know how much of a ball ache that is! I had even finished using blfs. I was just about to create a livecd of my own, Augustus, but its back to the beginning now :(

Thanks for the replies, I know not to go for Enlightenment now and have discovered xfce has finally sorted its directory browser out! About time. Grub has been updated too. Its another release which is up to #2 without ever releasing #1 ! Terragen is the same.
 
CDE is Common Desktop Environment, as far as I know it's closed-source and Solaris-only. It's a decent environment, but I like just about any of the major Linux desktops better. It's still a fast and productive environment though.
 
I also love KDE, but I have a minor complaint with it. The freakin naming convention, where everything needs to start with a K. I can't stand konsole and konqueror and all that nonsense, so I just rename stuff. As far as this XFCE thing, you guys make it sound pretty neat! Which livecd is it that uses it by default? I wanna try it and see if it's my style.
 
i've used KDE and Gnome, and for some reason i always disliked gnome, but then i gave it a good try via Ubuntu, and i really like it now. I think its a lot nicer than KDE.
 
wompshmack said:
As far as this XFCE thing, you guys make it sound pretty neat! Which livecd is it that uses it by default? I wanna try it and see if it's my style.
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I eventually stuck with Xfce. It is reasonably lightweight compared to the other two desktop environments. I first used it on the Linux from Scratch livecd. Its dead basic, no extras whatsoever. But the one you want will probably be Xubuntu.
 
I would recommend Gnome. The interface looks nice, and is easy to use. KDE forgets program launch commands quite often (don't know if this is still the case).
 
RHochstenbach said:
I would recommend Gnome. The interface looks nice, and is easy to use. KDE forgets program launch commands quite often (don't know if this is still the case).
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Never had that issue in Debian, Mandriva, Suse, Gentoo or RHEL/CentOS. Could be the case in Kubuntu, but I dunno. Seems like a lot of things about *ubuntu are glitchy where there's no problem with other distros. :( Sometimes I think *ubuntu gives Linux a bad name. :(
 
RHochstenbach said:
Well I had the same problem with Suse and Mandriva 2007 :confused:
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My intent wasn't to turn this into a flame-fest, believe it or not, so sorry for the rant. :O But, I might as well clarify further. That detail wasn't the only thing I had in mind; it's more of a pattern of strange things they do. My biggest gripe is the sudo ALL:ALL thing for the main user. That's only a notch below running as root full time. So while at first glance it sounds safer and seems simpler, it really isn't either. The other thing is the fact that the manage to break packages pretty often that work fine in the upstream distro (Debian) and they've used unstable versions of major libraries in production builds (glibc-2.4). And then there was the X.org breakage a while back... But hey, a lot of people like it a lot, so whatever. :D
 
Anti-Trend said:
So while at first glance it sounds safer and seems simpler, it really isn't either.
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That's true. If you want to make a distro very user friendly, you'll lose functionality. I think the Linux kernel should be improved to be as user friendly as Windows, I guess.
 
RHochstenbach said:
That's true. If you want to make a distro very user friendly, you'll lose functionality. I think the Linux kernel should be improved to be as user friendly as Windows, I guess.
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Why does the kernel need to be user friendly? The user does not interface with the kernel in any direct manner, other than compiling or updating. I think you are confusing the kernel with the whole of the OS.
 
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