On Fri, 3 Mar 2000, Ian Thompson-Bell wrote:
Yes, I'm using Enlightenment which seems OK as long as you ignore all its excess baggage of themes, backgrounds etc.
Yes, there are some very dark, odd, weird themes out there - makes you wonder a bit about the people that created them.
Indeed, one comes to the conclusion that they are very artistic. Probably also bored teenagers too ;-)
I've actually spent the past few months using:
E (on it's own and with GNOME) WindowMaker (as above) SawMill (on it's own).
The themability of WindowMaker is good, but the titlebar it just too square and big. Sawmill is fast, but still early in developments, and E is just damned pretty.
I've now settled comfortably with GNOME+E with four virtual desktops. Actually the thing I find most annoying when using Windows now is the lack of virtual desktops, no doubt Microsoft will 'invent' those too soon enough.
On the matter of speed, yes GNOME+E is slower than windows, but take into account what it has to do and you could say it's comparitively faster. GNOME still has some way to go, and I'm not convinced that GTK's performance is truely great (Qt is damned site faster) even without any themes.
But for those with
really minimalist tendencies there is on my (Mandrake) system a WM called TWM, for Tiny Window Manager. I've fiddled about with it and it doesn't appear very user friendly but might be worth some persistence.
I think TWM is quite commonly available - its probably on my redhhat dist but I have not checked. It's mentioned in most of the 'learn everything possible about Linux in 21 days' type books where it's referred to as Tom's Window Manager, presumably after the man who wrote it.
Indeed the number of WMs becoming available seems to have tripled in the last year or so. XFCE is getting quite a bit of exposure on linux.com ads although I've not tried it.
Incidentally I just got the Staroffice CD and was trying it out by >
editing a small document, thought things were a bit sluggish, checked
memory use and found that of my 64mb RAM and 128mb swap Staroffice
was > using around 130mb! Do I need more memory or is this excessive??
I am not sure. I have run up Star Office but not used it in earnest. Did not seem noticably sluggish to me. That amount of memory usage does seem excessive but remember Linux mamory usage figures need carefull interpretation.
StarOffice for me is very slow to startup, but once you're in everything's quick. The two problems I have with it is that it doesn't produce a correct Word97 export and it refuses to see the fonts provided by xfstt.
James.
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