I started cutting marble in a quarry. I worked my hands, I wasn't in a hurry.

[reddragdiva]

When I got a FreeBSD machine, I started with an all-macho X desktop: Sawfish and nothing else, all applications started by middle-click. After setting up KDE for redcountess, I realised that the shiny and helpful is actually very nice to use and saves a lot of arse pain.

Lately I've been annoyed at how slow Firefox and Thunderbird seem to be getting. Literally several seconds to open a window. Odd pauses typing URLs. It's a PII-450 with 640MB memory, it should be doing a lot better.

So last night I closed KDE and put sawfish back in .xinitrc. And I had a revelatory geek experience: KDE makes your system really fucking slow. WELL DUH. Firefox now screams, Thunderbird is actually not so slow I want to kill it with an axe despite its l33t spamgobbling p0w3rz.

So much for the shiny.

(Don't follow up talking about your favourite window manager. Window managers are for pooftahs. You should size your initial xterm in your .xinitrc and each new application using -geometry.)

Comments

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

There's some wacky crap required to hook in to the keyboard stuff, as I understand it. So if you've got a big bloated thing hooking in...

As to lapdogs, even the current iBooks are pretty well-specced -- they're all G4s now. And they're rugged little bastards, too. Were I in the market and not looking at the penis-substitute AlBook an iBook is where I'd go.

If I had a TiBook I'd be worrying about scratching or dropping it. When I had an iBook, well, I don't recall worrying about much of anything.

[vatine]

Almost *all* X wm:s intercept the keyboard input. The exception would be those that have no keyboard short-cuts. That's (basically) how X works. For encore, I shall bore you to death about my latest hack on top of raw XLib.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

I know. I mean that if the thing doing the hooking-in is a slow bloated pig, then it's presumably going to slow everything else down -- i.e., most other wms *aren't* slow bloated pigs, at least the bits that actually do that bit.

[vatine]

Well, yes. I'm still surprised taht even doing Motif emulation (definietly the least performance-bummed add-on) my wm-of-choice is quite nippy. Must be because it's written in 1993 and optimised to work with then-high-end systems. Not much chrome, though.