Is KDE4 usable on FreeBSD?

[Chad Perrin]

On Sun, Nov 02, 2008 at 12:48:12AM +0100, Polytropon wrote:
> On Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:36:30 -1000, Al Plant <noc at hdk5.net> wrote:
> > Aloha,
> > Try XFCE 3 or 4 for an excellent OS window manager.
> 
> XFCE 3 can be turned into a CDE lookalike if it's desired.
> It's very lightweight and still features all the nice things
> you know from a UNIX X environment. Zsers coming from CDE
> will feel comfortable, if you take the time to tweak the
> settings a little bit.

Correction:  XFCE is very lightweight *compared to KDE and GNOME*.  It's
pretty hefty compared to a lot of other options -- many of which are
comparable, in terms of popularity, to XFCE.


> 
> In my opinion - and that's very individual, you know - WindowMaker
> is one of the best window managers around. Fast, lightweight,
> easy to configure, excellent keyboard support (that's where the
> other ones are lacking), ah, and did I mention it's fast? You
> can provide a useful (!) system even on a P1 150 MHz system
> with it. No joke.

In the medium-to-heavy weight class, WindowMaker is definitely in my top
five window managers.  There's also a complete "desktop environment" for
it comparable to KDE, GNOME, and XFCE desktop environments, in the form
of the GNUstep framework and all those applications built on it.  It
manages to be significantly lighter on resources and better performing
than KDE, GNOME, and XFCE.  It's quite a bit less "intuitive" to people
coming from MS Windows or MacOS, of course, because it emulates NeXTSTEP
rather than those other OSes, but if that doesn't bother you, it's an
excellent choice in my opinion.  It was the first window manager I
discovered that did more to stay the heck out of my way than it did to
try to help me do things the way someone else decided they should be
done.


> 
> If the magic of the tiling window managers opens up to you,
> you will even be more productive. Allthough I tried several
> of them, their magic wouldn't open up to me... :-)

I find wmii to be quite easy to pick up, in general, among tiling window
managers.  It also allows floating window management, and can even be
configured to do that by default rather than the tiling thing, if you so
desire.  It's currently my second choice window manager, after AHWM
(which is *not* a tiling window manager).

-- 
Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ]
Quoth Bill McKibben: "The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have
grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to
yield."
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