IceWM rocks
I was getting kind of tired of GNOME's poor performance on my hardware so I decided to try IceWM.
Rather than compile from source, I opted to install one of the third-party Slackware packages endorsed on the project's home page. The latest version available in this format, 1.2.18, installed in seconds, and even set up a .xinitrc file inetc-X11-xinit so it was a true no-brainer.
Kier poked his little head through the XP firewall and said: It does have some problems. I don't care about the consistency of the...
The first thing I noticed was how blazingly fast Ice starts. This takes any pain out of startx. I found the default configuration pretty unpalatable, but as I got to work checking out the configuration options, I discovered that IceWM packs an astonishing range of configuration options in its 6 or 7 simple configuration files. The config files are logical and straightforward. For example, the clock format is controlled with a strftime format string, so it's easy to change, but hard to imagine any format you'd want that you couldn't have.
Editing the menu or toolbar is stupidly easy. To change, say, a theme detail like the graphic on the menu button, you simply edit (or create if it doesn't already exist) a specific .xpm file in the theme dir; there's no need to tell the WM to use the image. For my button, I resized a Slackware logo I got from an image search and saved it as an .xpm with Gimp. It took two minutes yet it looks incredibly professional, like official branding, not that the Slackware people show much interest in branding :)
begin DFS Nope. I just make sure that OE using cretins have to go through some more work with their garbage program It is not about how many...
Using IceWM is a more low-level experience than using GNOME, of course. For one thing there's no big fancy file manager like Nautilus. I'm happy to just use an xterm instead. GTK apps run peachy under Ice, although I still haven't figured out how to get the fonts to look as sleek as they do under GNOME.
One of the things I love about this WM is that everything feels so snappy. Apps open faster per se. The redraw rate and general responsiveness of everything on screen is incredible -- I've never seen a WM perform this well on my hardware, even including lo-fi ones like Fvwm. With Ice, it's as if you can feel the absense of bloat and complexity in every function that comprises the WM. The overall impression is refreshing to say the least, especially if you have hardware that doesn't quite have the muscle for GNOME or KDE.