Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 17 Jun 2003 10:37:30 -0700
From:      Johnson David <DavidJohnson@Siemens.com>
To:        David Lodeiro <dlodeiro@optusnet.com.au>, freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Desktop Environment
Message-ID:  <200306171037.30793.DavidJohnson@Siemens.com>
In-Reply-To: <200306172326.13507.dlodeiro@optusnet.com.au>
References:  <200306172326.13507.dlodeiro@optusnet.com.au>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tuesday 17 June 2003 06:26 am, David Lodeiro wrote:
> What would be the fastest, most efficient desktop environment to use
> on freebsd?

Don't confuse "desktop environment" with a window manager. Blackbox uses 
very few resources, so on machines with few resources it will be 
faster, but it is not a desktop environment.

The actual window managers of KDE and GNOME are very small and very 
fast. They just seem slow because you're running a desktop on top of 
them. You can use Blackbox as the window manager for KDE, but it will 
be just as "slow" as if you used the native "kwin". If you've got less 
than 64MB of memory then you may want to stick with a small window 
manager, but from my experience with more than 64MB, once you have the 
environment started you'll see no speed differences between a plain 
window manager and a full desktop.

Efficiency depends on how you work. If you're a classic UNIX user who 
thinks that the only purpose of X is so you can have multiple terminals 
on the screen at once, then by all means stick with a small window 
manager.

p.s. On this dual-boot Win2k/FreeBSD workstation, I once did some 
informal time comparisons. From bootup to login to the final rendering 
of my homepage in a browser, FreeBSD/KDE/Konqueror was faster than 
Win2K/Windows/IExplorer.

David



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200306171037.30793.DavidJohnson>