All my life is a (UI) circle
Posted By matt on July 22, 2010
In the beginning, I was on RedHat, and there was Gnome + Enlightenment.
Later, Gnome adopted Sawfish, but you had a choice. I still used Enlightenment.
Then I don’t exactly recall what happened. I think Enlightenment went away from Gnome, I tried several (IceWM, Fluxbox, etc.) finally settled on FVWM, which I used for several years.
Then Liz made fun of me sufficiently for having an ugly WM that I switched to XFCE4.
XFCE broke their window stacking model, so I switched to Gnome + Metacity (the default).
This morning at work, Metacity decided to go insane, pegging my CPU and generally being unreasonable. Now, I had been annoyed by its sluggishness for quite awhile, so this was the final straw.
I installed lubuntu-desktop, and used LXDE + Openbox for today at work. It was a little.. interesting. Fast, for sure, but very minimalist, and not quite.. right in all cases.
On the drive home, it hit me… Gnome + Enlightenment.. again.
We’ll see how this goes. There is one little annoyance – with some themes, the gnome panel menu doesn’t seem to like non-minimized application windows managed by enlightenment… It makes you not able to click on menu selections.. However, with ShinyMetal (the theme I was originally using those many years ago), it works fine.
Oh, and I discovered Conky today, which may replace the gnome-panel flyout I have which does system monitoring. (I used to use GKrellM, but now I want trending for memory usage…
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What’s the least hardware I could run that on? I have a 700MHz box sitting in the corner, and my current plans are to make it a FreeDOS box so I can run old games on it.
–Hawk
Couple things here.
First off, why dedicate a box to FreeDOS for games? Why not just run it in DosBox?
Second, I’d try the following on low-spec hardware:
1. Haiku (it’s based off BeOS)
2. Lubuntu (the aforementioned LXDE + Openbox with which I was unsatisfied, but you might give it a whirl)
3. OpenGEU (Gnome + Enlightenment 17, as a nice distro)
Or, just install Ubuntu and run e16 on top of it.
I think your biggest issue will be apps, not the desktop. Lubuntu has a selection if lightweight alternatives to the mainline heavy ones.
Well, I have this old box sitting around collecting dust, and I figure I’d rather play with it than dust it.
–Hawk
Suit yourself. I’d use it for something like a Linux box, media server, or something like that, and put DosBox on my laptop so I have portable bits. But, as you like.