Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: How do I choose a second window manager?

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 6:43 AM, Duncan<1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
> Martin Herrman <martin@herrman.nl> posted
> 40bb8d3b0906170618g152b5f8fxc79889f0d6213bf6@mail.gmail.com, excerpted
> below, on  Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:18:24 +0200:
>
>> "The Xfce 4 Appfinder is part of the Xfce 4 Desktop Environment and
>> features application search on the whole system. It searches for
>> .desktop files based on the freedesktop spec and makes an index of the
>> found apps."
>>
>> Source: xfce website:
>> http://www.xfce.org/documentation/4.2/manuals/xfce4-appfinder
>>
>> Does Gentoo use these .desktop files?
>
> In general, yes, as it's a freedesktop.org standard now and both KDE and
> GNOME use them too.  However, whether individual (non-main-DE) apps
> packages include them would depend on either upstream (if it ships, so
> will Gentoo in most cases) or the the initiative of the individual Gentoo
> package maintainer, if upstream doesn't ship one.
>
> On the title question, I've never used it, but based on what others have
> said and the originally requested features (including an auto-managed
> menu), I too would recommend XFCE.  It seems to be /the/ middle ground
> between a "full feature" DE and a bare-bones WM, and gets very high
> reviews in general.  If I ever decide KDE's not for me any more, or
> perhaps for my netbook when I get around to putting Gentoo on it, if I
> don't like KDE's performance, I've always thought I'd try XFCE first.
>
> But on my main machine, at least kde3 has been great.  I can't say the
> same for kde4 (yet?), for a couple reasons.  First, one of the big kde4
> features is 3D eye candy... that my aging Radeon 9200 can't handle at the
> 1920x2400 desktop size I run (it maxes at 2048 each, X and Y), and
> without that, there really isn't enough better (and a lot changed enough
> I'm not comfortable with it) to upgrade from kde3.  Second, I've so
> deeply customized kde3 to my own needs and style, and kde4 is so much
> changed, that it's simply different enough that even with full 3D
> features, it'd take me awhile to get kde4 setup similarly effectively/
> comfortably.
>
> So, I have both kde3/4 merged, and occasionally run 4 and mess around
> some, but for actually doing anything productive, it's kde3 (or the text
> console).  Sometime later this year I plan to upgrade to, probably, one
> of the later r500 based Radeons (which run thru the x1950 models), and
> meanwhile, kde-4.3.0 and likely 4.3.1 will be out, and we'll see how kde4
> does then.
>
> --
> Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
> "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
> and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

I suspect that XFCE might be a good one to look at. Thanks.

Any thoughts from folks about fvwm?

thanks to Marc for the pointer to fbpanel. I'll certainly take a look at that.

cheers,
Mark