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

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.)