Virtues of Window Managers

Eitan — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 12:46:00 -0500

I have been using linux on the desktop for about a year now. I do love it.

Like most people, I do have a penchant for a great desktop and lots of critical opinions about what makes a good desktop.

I must admit recalling using windows with joy a decade ago and how productive I could be in that environment (windows 3.1, windows 95).

The two virtues I look for in a good window manager are:

performance
stays out of your way, allowing you to be productive

ok, now that I think of it: keyboard accessibility is also very important to me.

As I try to rate Gnome and KDE against these qualities, I find that Gnome has had less than perfect performance but has done a good job staying out of your way. I also rank it highly on keyboard accessibility.

With KDE the opposite seems to be true: the performance is great, but I found myself continually futzing with it, being distracted from the work I actually needed to do.

So I have been a Gnome user, and a happy one at that. I'm also looking forward to Gnome 2.14 and Dapper Drake, which will improve the performance of the window manager.

I'm also looking forward to a year from now where Core Duo notebook prices will be lower, and the improved performance that will come with it.

I suppose I should also say a word about the MacOS. It stays out of your way nicely and it's fast. The problem is that it ran on hardware that was slower than a snail (the G4). They fooled a lot of people into thinking the G4 was a fast processor. Anyhow I digress and Apple is not what this blog entry is about.

So I am writing this as I download Xubuntu: Ubuntu + Xfce window manager. I don't know why I overlooked Xfce before. I just checked out the screenshots and the movies and it appears to be what I have been looking for all these years. The price of ignorance is indeed high. I hope in a future blog to recount how things go between me and Xfce.

Eitan Suez's Home: Virtues of Window Managers

Virtues of Window Managers