Thread: Switched from GNOME to Xfce

XFCE is a fairly light weight desktop environment
it's not going to have al the bells & whistles that Gnome or KDE has

Having said that, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "workspace scrolling"
Are you talking about the Compiz animations (3D cube, desktop wall, etc.)?

If so, Compiz works with XFCE fine
(although, it's kind of counter-productive to install a light-weight DE then bung a flashy window manager on top)

As for AWN,
as far as I know, AWN is a Gnome application (as in, it uses a lot of Gnome libraries that aren't included in XFCE)

I did think you could use AWN on XFCE (although not with full functionality)

In fact, here's a video of XFCE + AWN + Compiz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uBul-NqQY4
so both are certainly possible

Okay, cool. I tried running AWN, but it doesn't show up...I'll look it up.

And I do mean the desktop wall.

Have you tried Awesome, SG? I stumbled across it the other day, and love the idea and look of it, but haven't been able to get out to the library to download it yet to give it a try.

Also, out of curiosity, does anyone know if Enlightenment has been updated in the last couple years? I used to use that on my old Dell Latitude with 256mb of RAM, had it set up with Knoppix.

I miss that thing...

Gnome is more user friendly and also has many more interesting features that you will not get with Xfce. Overall I like Gnome better than Xfce, more features and easier to navigate.

Originally Posted by Man of Steel

Also, out of curiosity, does anyone know if Enlightenment has been updated in the last couple years? I used to use that on my old Dell Latitude with 256mb of RAM, had it set up with Knoppix.

I miss that thing...

The stable version of Enlightenment (0.16) has not changed (aside from minor things) since '99 / 2000

Funny thing, when Enlightenment 0.16 was released, it was seriously heavy compared to other DE's
it's only now thought of as a "light-weight" DE because it hasn't changed

But saying that, there is an unstable version (0.17) that is under development

Originally Posted by JJMKA

Gnome is more user friendly and also has many more interesting features that you will not get with Xfce. Overall I like Gnome better than Xfce, more features and easier to navigate.

To be honest, it's down to what you know and what you're used to

Xfce is a decent DE (although it's not got the community clout of Gnome or KDE), but decent none the less

Plus, Xfce is based on GTK+ (same toolkit as Gnome), so there's a fair amount of cross-over between the two

So far, I like it, but I think I like my GNOME set-up a little better. And MoS, I'll check it out and post screenies for you.

I was using the desktop shell version of Enlightenment (DR17 or 0.17) when I ran my Knoppix system about three years ago. I just did some looking, and it seems that though the version number hasn't changed, there have been considerable bug-fixes and minor updates to the libraries and such. May bear trying again. It had a lot of issues when I was using it—I think on top of KDE then.

Fluxbox is the 'lightest' DE/WM (which is the proper term for Fluxbox? I think window manager?) I've used, in my days of playing around with Damn Small Linux on ancient Pentium II systems with 128MB of RAM. Fun shit.

Dude, DSL on 128 MB? I put it on an even older one with 64 MB. Runs pretty damn fast too.

Originally Posted by Man of Steel

Fluxbox is the 'lightest' DE/WM (which is the proper term for Fluxbox? I think window manager?)ux on ancient Pentium II systems with 128MB of RAM. Fun shit.

Hell no! The *boxes (blackbox, fluxbox, openbox, etc.) are lighter than desktop environments but far more bloated than the real lightweight window managers. Keyboard-controlled tiling WMs like stumpwm, ratpoison, dwm, wmii, awesome, xmonad, ion, larswm, evilwm, and others are much lighter. I personally use stumpwm. Check out this article to get a feel for a tiling setup. That article uses ratpoison, which is the predecessor of stumpwm.

Originally Posted by dsr

Hell no! The *boxes (blackbox, fluxbox, openbox, etc.) are lighter than desktop environments but far more bloated than the real lightweight window managers. Keyboard-controlled tiling WMs like stumpwm, ratpoison, dwm, wmii, awesome, xmonad, ion, larswm, evilwm, and others are much lighter. I personally use stumpwm. Check out this article to get a feel for a tiling setup. That article uses ratpoison, which is the predecessor of stumpwm.

Holy crap that's minimalist. O_O



So I was correct in calling it a window manager, though? I would like to note that I did say it was only the lightest I've personally used. I've seen lighter, like stumpwm, but never played with them myself. That article is freaking sweet, though I'm not sure I could do without my little bit of eye candy. The whole keyboard-controlled deal is really appealing to me, though. I must admit though, that a good 70% of the terms in that article are lost on me. I haven't used Linux as a primary OS in years, and I never did enough in the shell to get a thorough grasp of the inner workings.

That said, I'd like to learn, and now I'm going to. I've been thinking that I needed something else to flood my brain with soon. Learning new stuff is a great stress reliever for me, and I could sure as hell use that right about now. I think I'm going to be up all night on two laptops now...

Loving that the author of the article uses Dvorak, too.

Haha, have fun. I jumped directly into that setup (using ratpoison and xterm at the time--now I'm using stumpwm and urxvt) 10 months ago when I switched from Mac OS X to Arch Linux. It was like crash immersion in a new spoken language. I had to get comfortable with the command-line very quickly. I probably had 5 different manpages open at once in GNU screen. Fun times...

I got CLI comfortable super quick as well. I love terminal!