[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting Sunday 2011-10-02

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

> I demoed the late distro, Koppix 6.7 which was the DOM for
> Linux Pro issue 130 and which I had put on an 8 GiB usb stick on
> my old Compaq CQ60-215DX.   It uses LDXE as a window manager.

Quibble:  LXDE is _not_ a window manager, but rather a desktop
environment (DE).  The window manager almost always used _within_ LXDE
is Openbox -- but you can use any other window manager, e.g., icewm,
metacity, fluxbox, etc., and it'd still be LXDE.

The difference between a DE and a WM is worth understanding, I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Environment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_manager

Let me illustrate further:  I generally prefer Window Maker as a window
manager.  Window Maker is generally compiled with hooks to let it
function smoothly within the GNOME desktop environment as its WM
(instead of the GNOME WM du jour, which these days tends to be metacity
or Compiz).  However, nothing forces the five-course meal down your
throat:  You can have the WM a la carte, instead.  (Basically, all you
need to do is turn off the X11 session manager, and restart.)

A useful taxonomy of DEs and WMs:
http://xwinman.org/

Of the common DEs, LXDE is by far the most lightweight (relative to
GNOME, KDE, and Xfce).  I like Xfce because it's relatively sparse and
doesn't launch a forest of mostly unwanted processes the way KDE and
GNOME do, but have to admit that it sucks RAM about as much as GNOME
does.