On Wed, 1 Jan 2003, yid@softhome.net enslaved 16 hundred monkeys to type:

> KDE IMHO is a hog, it is slow even on my P4.

Ditto, slow on my Celeron (that's a P3 no?) Gnome is horrible too.
Englightement was sort of ok for a bit, then I got fed up with the
window-changing-lag. The depedencies aren't great either. JMO

> Plain X without *any* wm is impossible. Of course, X comes with twm
> but that is neither the most lightweight nor the most useful. Try
> pwm (my favorite ultra-light wm) or one of the blackbox clones.
> I also like Window Maker, but that might be a bit too heavy weight
> for a 486. All of these are available in pkgsrc, and are as simple to
> install as adding a line to .xinitrc in your home directory for startx.
> PWM source is under 100K to download, a stark contrast to what you need
> to grab for KDE.

I tried many many wm's from the pkgsrc, and in the end I've stuck with
fluxbox which is my favourite. I think the source is around 300k, and I
can't remember it's dependencies (if any - at least, doens't nneed perl
and pth and gtk+ etc)

I'd go with fluxbox on any X system now, it's light, very fast, nice menu
systems and very handsome:

http://poff.sixbit.org/netbsd/screenshots

Poff

poff@sixbit.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org