Alternative Desktop Env's/Window Managers

9 respostas [Última entrada]
silince
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Joined: 11/24/2009

I'm sure these are available on the repo's, but has anyone else used Trisquel combined with Openbox? I'm a big fan of combining openbox and xfce. Its a really nice combination of speed and the ability to configure/hack.

janus
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Joined: 10/10/2010

hmmm that is an interesting question

iKonaK
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Joined: 10/06/2009

In Taranis I experienced high system loads followed by a complete system lock when using the xfce4-panel with xfwm4, kwin and fluxbox; I assume I will experience the same with openbox.

grvrulz
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Joined: 09/23/2010

interesting combination.. openbox and xfce... gonna try this today only :)

Cyberhawk

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Joined: 07/27/2010

how can be openbox and xfce combined at all? I thought both are window managers (in case of xfce more of a complete desktop environment, but still)?

silince
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Joined: 11/24/2009

In the form of Crunchbang!

http://crunchbanglinux.org/

My fave distro at present...

Cyberhawk

I am a translator!

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Joined: 07/27/2010

Still, even in Crunchbang you can download separate images for Xfce and Openbox version. Afaik it is impossible to run both things together at the same time, it's like saying I have a distro that runs on a combination of gnome and KDE. Either one of the window managers does the job and all apps from all projects are installable anyway.

This whole Openbox talk and the screenshots from the Crunchbang site make me want to set my old PIII up and install some Openbox based distro there (I think it still has Win98SE on it). The PC has a built in TNT2 card, would it have 3D support with free drivers or at least high performance 2D?

grvrulz
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Joined: 09/23/2010

well let me clear some confusion here.
XFCE is a DE or Desktop environment, i.e. it provides a window manager, some utility libraries, and most importantly, a session manager. The XFCE window manager is called XFWM.
Openbox, while being a window manager only, also provides a minimal session manager, for resource-limited systems(can be used on powerful systems also, :p), it can be used as a drop in replacement WM in another DEs such as GNOME or KDE, in the same way as compiz is used to replace Metacity or Kwin.
So any (standard compliant) WM can be used in any DE. This is a feature of X (modularity), that we have been using for several years.

Cyberhawk

I am a translator!

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Joined: 07/27/2010

Ah, I see. Using Openbox in gnome sounds interesting. That would make the system react faster, right? Or does the whole speedbost of an Openbox-only setup come from being just a WM and not a full desktop environment?

grvrulz
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Joined: 09/23/2010

well it would suely make the system more responsive, but not as fast as an OB-only setup, because a lot of libraries are not loaded.
But on a modern system, it dB when used with Gnome takes about 2MB, compared to 25 MB used by compiz.
This is the reason LXDE was created, to provide some lightweight set of utility libraries on top of OB, and it surely does the job it was meant to do.

And yes, i tried OB with XFCE, it works great. Apart fom hat, there is no significant speed boost. So its better to stick with XFWM while on XFCE.