Preference: Fluxbox vs. JWM vs. Other?

[John]

I am curious about people's preferences when it comes to window managers in DSL.  I am fairly partial to Fluxbox, but maybe more people prefer JWM.  If you would like to see something else, let me know.  Keep in mid though that what ever is in DSL should have a small footprint.

[lordmmx]

i do like fluxbox mainly due to the fact it's easy to use and it's closer to lxde.

[grindstone]

Didn't vote. The one thought I keep having is that it should be whatever "plays nice" with regard to populating/managing menus and having any "smarts" about MIME types. I think it'd take us a month to go through all these menus app-by-app and get everything straightened around and cleaned-up for all the permutations of desktops. Perhaps the over-arching consideration for you as distro-maintainer is to change the least possible (non-automatable) things from upstream Antix and/or Debian. I get that and I think it's smart to stand on the shoulders of a lot of great work--making things tiny is always harder than "normal" (contemporary full loads). My 2c is that that we take whatever is minimal work for you.

As a user comparatively new to Antix/MX, there are a lot of "new" things that are already confusing (all the little utility programs are wild and great but new), having fewer desktop choices would ease the adoption in my opinion but I understand others may feel differently. IMO, if that allows reduced work for you, so much the better. The whole nature of cherry-picking tiny stuff on a per-app basis makes for a disjointed experience for new/prospective users IMO, so it's probably even harder to "polish".

In my limited experiences here on 4 machines, whatever I choose seems to be maybe ~74+/- 5MB of ram usage at startup, but I haven't yet got it installed on the oldest boxes (spent half a day trying today--more elsewhere on that. If desktop performance limits reveal flux to be clearly superior, hopefully I can establish that quickly yet tonight). There is a place where every 5MB of ram matters to keep one out of swap--that's on a 256MB machine. That's been sort of a barely-tolerable experience that drives investigation of all the CLI stuff. It's really pushing me to consider what these old machines might be (while we can still have builds < i686). If not for DSL, they're getting close to basically needing to just run a copy of screen to access another machine

If I have enough ram, I choose JWM (and wish for openbox). If I'm on a life-support-type box, I'm happy to just have X at all so flux is the high-life--but I remember choosing blackbox because it was leaner than flux back in the day

Honestly, I think that, if a machine is capable enough to run Antix comfortably, that's a great way to go. If it wont, that's where DSL can fill a need and keep updated software accessible to the old machines. Thanks again for all you do.

[John]

Thanks for the input. I was thinking there may be a few tweaks I can do to get the ram use down a little bit.