mikshaw
Group: Members
Posts: 4856
Joined: July 2004 |
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Posted: Oct. 02 2004,00:22 |
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Quote | I can't help but wonder if fb-dev is really that much larger than fb-stable or if it's just too "unstable"? |
I think a lot depends on what your priorities are for a window manager. For example, most people seem to prefer KDE as a graphical environment due to its numerous features and easy to use configuration. There are others (much fewer in number) who prefer using something like Blackbox or Ratpoison, which gives you a very minimal amount of frills for the sake of speed and low resource usage. Fluxbox provides an excellent compromise between the two...it gives the user the ability to customize to a point, while still keeping it as light and fast as possible. The devel releases have become noticeably more bloated than the newest stable release, but my personal opinion is that the added features are worth the little bit of fat it has gained around the waist. It's still much smaller and faster than some of the alternatives. There are glitches here and there, but overall it's still very stable. I have yet to see a crash or freeze, or really anything worse than some visual oddities here and there. If it were compared to the stable release on an older system, like a 200mhz for example, the difference may be more apparent. Since this is "Damn Small", I think just having Fluxbox stable instead of Blackbox is somewhat of a compromise. (I'm not complaining though )
Quote | I'm primarily interested in the new features it provides (like transparency) since fb-stable is a real impediment to my aesthetic manipulation |
There are even more improvements in the latest devel release. In 0.9.9, transparent menus meant transparent menu text as well, which I didn't really care for. 0.9.10 fixes this. Transparency in menus caused some weird things in 0.9.9 sometimes...one I noticed a lot was parts of the menu going dark. This has also been fixed. The latest release no longer has trouble using styles from flux stable. Pixmaps can now be used in menus.
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