So one of the reasons I even looked at OpenMadriva was because it was a Plasma/KDE focused distro. Specifically because I wanted to learn what all the fuss was about KDE.
My reaction to KDE at this point? Meh.
Some of the KDE software? Abs-a-freakin-lutely will I always be installing them.
Which brings me around to what’s next. It’s time to start playing around with plain old window managers, rather than a full DE.
And I’ve narrowed my selection to i3 (tiling), Icewm (floating), and Fluxbox (floating). All are in our repos.
Some of the suckless stuff looks pretty neat but I don’t know if I want to play with that at this time.
Obviously I’m going to have to actually try them out. So I’ll be installing on a new partition to experiment.
All of this background finally leads to asking those of you who use a WM (rather than a DE):
What is it you prefer about them?
And if you use one of the ones I mentioned (i3, icewm, fluxbox) why that one?
I can see where you’re coming from. I always have a full desktop environment, and a window manager installed so that I can switch between them as I wish. The window manager I like to use is awesome. For you that’s in the rock extra repo. I highly recommend it as it’s well configured out of the box, and you can do whatever you want very easily beyond that. Out of the three that you mentioned, I have a lot of experience with icewm and I like that one a lot. I know others around here do as well. As for why I do, I guess it’s because you get everything you need and nothing you don’t and configuring it beyond that is very easy. I haven’t used it on OpenMandriva, so I don’t know what the defaults are, but they’re usually very sensible. For example, they are on Mageia. Good luck on your journey. I’m sure you will have fun.
Just another way or doing things. Lighter on resources than a full DE - especially a heavy one like Gnome or KDE.
But if you’ve got 8GB or more ram on a decent cpu, you probably won’t notice the difference.
On my old i3-2160 w/8gb ram there is a noticable difference between say xfce and cinnamon. But I only saw it when I was looking for it.
I might see a speed difference on my laptop (i7-3770, 32GB ram). But on my main desktop, I won’t see any difference at all.
They are generally much more (easliy) customizable though. So while they may be bundled with specific parts (like a panel or menu) it’s easier to mix and match. They run at just that little bit lower level.
For example if I wanted to play with the suckless system and alter something, (my current understanding is…) I’d have to recompile, not change a config file. So it’s on my list, just after I play with the others.
Besides, I just want to learn how they work. So I’ll probably just install all (I added awesome to the list) of them and see which one I like the best.
And this being linux, I can run them and still use the other tools I like (like dolphin)
" most certainly has. I’ll add it to the list