10 of the best Linux window managers

The title of the article is "10 of the best Linux window managers" and then the first four things it lists are desktop environments - not Window Managers! Please someone correct me if I am miss understanding...

~Jeff

Doesn't a desktop environment include a window manager?

herzeleid: You're right, one can argue they used the wrong names of the window managers.

I'm more than willing to let "desktop environment" = "window manager" ... it's just not that big of a deal.

@Steven, have you tried Sawfish? (Maybe you have; I'm just too lazy to go looking through old comments.)

To point out also, Enlightenment does not mean E17, they are two distinct and separate window managers.

I'm running boring ol' GNOME 2.30 in Debian Squeeze. It's fast enough on this particular machine. I like Xfce as a hedge against GNOME going totally KDE 4 crazy, but that hasn't happened just yet.

In my experience, xfce is now almost as heavy as gnome, so if I need speed I go for lxde.

Quoting:In my experience, xfce is now almost as heavy as gnome, so if I need speed I go for lxde.

I don't know which distro(s) you've tried, but I've been running Debian Squeeze Xfce for the past 11 months, and I've found it to be very light.

Yeah, Xfce isn't all that much lighter than GNOME, and I don't find GNOME overly heavy. But GNOME 3 / GNOME Shell is an unknown quantity at the moment (to me anyway), and Xfce is there as a GTK-powered alternative.

> don't know which distro(s) you've tried, but I've been running Debian Squeeze Xfce for the past 11 months, and I've found it to be very light.

I think the more important question is the hardware you are using. I can tell quite a difference on either a netbook or a nine year old, 1.5 GHz AMD desktop. On the desktop, GNOME is just too heavy for a good experience, and while XFCE is better, it's just not as responsive as I'd like. You can really tell the difference when moving to LXDE. This is based on several distros, including Fedora, Mint, Mandriva, and Arch.

Edit: And let me throw in the off-topic comment that it's disappointing how all distros continue to become heavier and heavier. It's probably not GNOME that is so bad, it's GNOME plus the kitchen sink, with the kitchen sink becoming bigger at a fast rate.

> In my experience, xfce is now almost as heavy as gnome, so if I need speed I go for lxde.

Do you have XFCE starting all the Gnome utilities? That would slow it down considerably. From memory, I believe it has options to start both the Gnome and KDE utilities on startup.

Quoting:Do you have XFCE starting all the Gnome utilities? That would slow it down considerably. From memory, I believe it has options to start both the Gnome and KDE utilities on startup.

Enable/disable GNOME/KDE services in Debian Squeeze Xfce by going to Xfce - Settings - Session and Startup - Advanced. Debian Squeeze Xfce has them disabled by default.

@bigg - I'm sorry to hear that Xfce isn't as light as you need it to be on old hardware, because I've read that, although it is improving, LXDE is still pretty spartan.

I ran Xfce on my home-built, 7 year-old, AMD Athlon XP 2400+ PC for several months until I got a new(er) used PC from a friend. Xfce appeared to me to run just as fast on that old PC as it currently runs on my AMD 64-bit, dual-core, Athlon X2 5000 PC.

> LXDE is still pretty spartan

No doubt about that. I have a dual core now, so I don't use the old desktop much anyway.

bigg, you're right - the differences between desktop enviroments and apps are much greater on older hardware. I suspect a lot of developers don't use the old junk lots of us use. With CPUs <1 GHz (and even <500 MHz) and RAM <512 MB (or even <256 MB) the right desktop environment/window manager / web browser / image editor can really make a difference between a usable machine and an exercise in frustration.

Debian/XFCE makes my old one-core AMD Sempron fly compared to KDE4 on anything, faster than openSUSE, and it's even peppier than stock ubuntu.

It's been awhile since I did the tests (the Debian Etch / Slackware 12.0 days), but both Debian and Slackware with Xfce were equally (and very, very) fast on the desktop. My test machine was a 500 MHz VIA C3 with 256 MB RAM. On that same platform Ubuntu (this was the 7.04-7.10 days) with GNOME beat Xubuntu with its heavily GNOMEish Xfce.

Sure you may be able to squeeze more out of something like Arch or even Zenwalk. But stock Debian and Slackware offer a whole lot of bang/MHz.

Steve, that old article of yours was one of the most important factors that inspired me to try Debian Squeeze Xfce after I had such a horrible experience with Debian Squeeze KDE4.4. http://www.computerbob.com/guides/my_debian_adventure_3.php

I've been very happily using only Debian Squeeze Xfce on my PCs ever since (currently an AMD Athlon 64 and and AMD 64-bit Athlon Dual-Core X2 5000.

Thanks for that.