[GRLUG] Desktop managers

[Adam Tauno WIlliams]

On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 20:37 -0500, Lee Forest wrote:
> I guess this is a bit off topic. I have an older computer, along with
> it theres some rather odd performance issues with it. I'm running
> ubuntu 8.10 and I know it comes with gdm, and uses gnome. But it seems
> rather laggy. I've tried xfce to find an improvement in performance
> only to be dissapointed with a few things feature wise. then ended up
> running fluxbox. which of course definitly lacks a few things, but
> also seems very simple, appealing, not to mention faster. But I
> wouldn't mind finding a good combination of desktop manager/window
> manager that would maximize my performance on this system. Anyone got
> any good ideas? I have an intel celeron 700mhz, with 310 pc133 sdram
> ram. doesn't even feel like a 700 mhz the way its running. a bit
> better with flux box, but still some performance issues.

Is the disk light constantly going?  Curious what the performance
constraint is;  if you run "top" in a terminal window does it show your
CPU as consistently pegged?

I've never found that GNOME-XFCE-whatever ever delivered much of a
real-world performance improvement.  Most of the time, if performance
can be fixed, it can be fixed by other means.  But if you just don't
have enough resources.... the small difference between window managers
isn't going to make much of a dent.

Best tricks are:
1.) Change filesystems to be mounted "noatime,data=writeback"
2,) Reduce the display resolution/depth
3.) Use a plain color background (no image)
4.) Disable indexing (beagle) if your starved for RAM or your disk is
really slow.
5.) Shut down services.  But this will only help if you go so far as to
shut down services you'll actually miss (like CUPS & Bluetooth).  These
services periodically "wake up" even if you don't use them;  whereas
services like apache, if never used, don't actually consume anything
noticeable.