Replacing windows XP at home.

[John Nielsen]

On Wednesday 26 July 2006 11:23, Joshua Lewis wrote:
>    I am replacing my XP system with a FreeBSD 6.1 system. I finished
>    installing it last night and cvsuped. Now I need to choose a window
>    manager.
>
>    There are what seems like hundreds of different WM in the ports
>    collection and there is no way I will be able to find the time to read
>    them all and get any kind of good idea on what each one does.
>
>    I am hoping a few people form the list could e-mail me what they like
>    and for what reason.

I use xfce. It's lightweight and very configurable. It has a few fancy tools 
(file manager, etc) but it doesn't force them on you. It's reasonably 
intelligent about saving sessions. Some of my favorite features are 
in "plugins", many of which are available as additional ports. (Personal 
favorites include xfce4-taskbar-plugin (instead of the freestanding taskbar), 
xfce4-cpugraph-plugin, xfce4-minicmd-plugin).

>    I want something lean and fast but I want to have my cake and eat it
>    to because I do want something that is not strait up ugly and is
>    functional.

If you're willing to invest in some customization and add-ons, fluxbox is 
extremely lean and fast (but not very attractive or full-featured by 
default).

>    KDE seems like it is bloated so I was considering Gnome. I have also
>    been reading about enlightenment and it sounds interesting. I have
>    looked into Fluxbox and it also seems like it would do the trick.

Gnome is also rather bloated.

>    Would I be better off just going with Gnome or KDE? I realize once I
>    start installing apps that I will probably wind up installing
>    something that uses Gnome or KDE libraries so I am going to wind up
>    bloating my system any ways right?

The two apps I use all the time are kmail (kde) and firefox (which uses gtk). 
Libraries sitting around on disk don't hurt your system, it's just the ones 
that are running. You can install KDE, Gnome, fluxbox, xfce4, and a couple 
others and switch between them to see what you like best. Once you've decided 
on something, uninstall what you don't use (the pkg_cutleaves port is very 
useful here).

JN