mikshaw
Group: Members
Posts: 4856
Joined: July 2004 |
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Posted: Oct. 10 2007,20:14 |
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Ok! That makes complete sense to me now, thanks.
I think I already have swm around here somewhere...just never tried it in DSL before.
It's my opinion that Fluxbox 0.1.14 has been showing its age, as there seems to be an increase over the last few years in the number of window managers that provide a more robust environment while remaining relatively small or even smaller. Newer versions of Fluxbox are sadly suffering from both a much larger size and noticeable slowdown. It is still among my favorites, but I no longer consider it suitable for old hardware.
I'm looking forward to seeing how well dwm and dfm play together. I didn't care for the way xtdesk worked with dwm, but I don't care for xtdesk in itself =o)
EDIT: So far I like dfm much better than xtdesk, which is probably an obvious conclusion. There are things that really bug me about it, though, so I will probably use it only in a pinch (e.g. no extensions available at the moment), and for vanilla testing of extensions.
<bombast>
I have no love for desktop icons; the way I tend to work (fullscreen apps in a tiled wm or several overlapping apps in a non-tiling wm) forces me to have to move windows all the time in order to access the icons. This is pointless delay and effort when hotkeys and menus are generally always accessible regardless of what is on the desktop. Fortunately you don't have to use the desktop icons with dfm. There are still several useful features in this program.
I'm having a problem, at least in my personal dfm build, with opening directories in structure view. It worked the first time, and then again once a bit later, but every other time I've tried it the view flashed and disappeared. There was no error message to help find the trouble. Maybe this isn't a problem with the DSL version?
There is no documentation on the use of hotkeys. I had to push some random keys before discovering that Ctrl+q will close a window.
There doesn't seem to be any way to edit the right-click menu, as in adding application launchers to it?
Also doesn't seem to be a way to navigate directories using a single window. I haaate that behavior. Maybe I just haven't found the right switch yet.
I was going to complain about .dfminfo being an unreadable binary format, but i just discovered it's gzipped, so that's cool =)
</bombast>
I need to experiment with it more before I make a final opinion, but so far my personal choice would be to keep my current setup of using dwm, aterm, and mc for my desktop environment. The dfm/swm combo is still an excellent choice for a small but usable starting point in DSL, though. I really think it will be an improvement over fluxbox-0.1 and xtdesk
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http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html
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