The Lightweight experience:A comparison of Window Managers (Linux Times.Net) [LWN.net]

This is a preemptive counterpost

Posted Feb 17, 2005 3:36 UTC (Thu) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

I'm shocked someone hasn't already commented on the "bloat" of GNOME and KDE...well, some of us like smooth fonts, desktop environments that look like they came from this century, integrated toolkits etc. For everyone else, there are many slim X environments (TWM,FVWM,*box,IceWM,maybe even XFCE, etc etc etc) so just use one of them and stop trying to change the vastly outnumbered remaining eyecandy environments (GNOME and KDE).

This is a preemptive counterpost

Posted Feb 17, 2005 17:35 UTC (Thu) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link]

In the end this is all silly. What percentage of the "heft" is the window manager? Answer: not much. And the minute you open a GNOME or KDE application you've tossed all your 'lightness' out the window because you've just invoked Kparts/Bonobo, and kioslaves, and gconfd, etc... You know, all that 'bloat' that allows things like cut-n-paste to actually work.

People - you're gaining very close to nothing by doing this unless you also also avoid all the decent/modern applications. Run whatever window manager you like, because you like it. The lightweight argument is crap.

Copy+paste has never been bloat

Posted Feb 17, 2005 18:47 UTC (Thu) by jreiser (subscriber, #11027) [Link]

all that 'bloat' that allows things like cut-n-paste to actually work

Cut/copy/paste works just fine using the X11 server directly, without any bloat at all. I've put it in applications whose entire size is 52KB and use only libX11 and libc.

This is a preemptive counterpost

Posted Feb 17, 2005 23:27 UTC (Thu) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link]

Right, here is what the invisible hand of my (gnome) desktop is doing for me every day:
- antialiasing everywhere
- internationalisation everywhere
- consistent settings management: one place to change the proxy, the audio device and its mixer channel, the font, its size and rendering, the toolbars text, the preferred browser, all with instant-apply
- accessibility (though it is disabled)
- unified bookmarks in the file system, in file dialogs and on the panel
- consistent keyboard shortcuts
- mime associations
- access keys
- most important: hig consistency

Thanks to freedesktop.org, most of this could work cross-desktop too. The problem is, small desktop environments do not have the ressources to enable this, or don't think of all of these small things you never fully use.

(additions)

Posted Feb 18, 2005 11:45 UTC (Fri) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link]

I was missing:
- session management
- impose UTF-8, the one true encoding, everywhere internally

The Lightweight experience:A comparison of Window Managers (Linux Times.Net)

Posted Feb 17, 2005 3:51 UTC (Thu) by darthmdh (guest, #8032) [Link]

There's no meat in this article. Even the things it does talk about it skims over. I'm not sure what its point is, as it doesn't even do a very good review of Fluxbox (which it devotes the most time to) and I disagree with many points it makes regarding WindowMaker.

Casual readers are much better off going to http://www.xwinman.org/