[arch-general] Openbox - great lightweight desktop, similar to icewm, but better in several regards

[hollunder at gmx.at]

On Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:24:06 -0400
David Rosenstrauch <darose at darose.net> wrote:

> David C. Rankin wrote:
> > Listmates,
> > 
> > 	After reading the newsletter article about old boxes with
> > minimal hardware collecting dust in a closet, I thought about the
> > openbox desktop I had just given a run-through and thought I would
> > pass it along. You have several lightweight desktops to choose
> > from, icewm, fluxbox, etc.., but also add openbox to the list. As a
> > minimal desktop, it is pretty cool. Damn fast, easily configurable,
> > and well implemented. (it even ran Virtualbox with a XP guest for
> > me)
> 
> >         All in all, I was as impressed with openbox as I was with
> > icewm. Both are great lightweight window managers that will get the
> > job done and, if you are on older hardware, they will definitely
> > blow the doors off KDE/Gnome from a performance perspective. Pretty
> > cool.
> 
> Haven't tried openbox, but I like fluxbox a lot which is quite
> similar IIRC.  I use flux as my "lightweight window manager" from
> time to time, when I don't want the bloat and/or slower load time of
> full-blown KDE. (e.g., I always use fluxbox as the WM inside of any
> VM.)
> 
> DR

I'm using openbox on my oldish machine, without panel or anything, and
it's quite nice so far.
Some apps I use or can recommend:

1) parcellite, so you can copy stuff, close the app you copied from,
and still paste it.

2) obtheme, I only know it from the newsletter but it looks nice.

3) the nice wallpaper rotation script:
#!/bin/bash
WALLPAPERS="$HOME/.wallpapers"
ALIST=( `ls -w1 -B --ignore=*.sh $WALLPAPERS` )
RANGE=${#ALIST[*]}
SHOW=$(( $RANDOM % $RANGE ))
feh --bg-scale $WALLPAPERS/${ALIST[$SHOW]}


But I'm really tempted to try a tiling WM like awesome..

Regards,
Philipp