William "Chops" Westfield wrote:
> On Aug 17, 2007, at 3:33 AM, Chris Emerson wrote:
> 
>> I presume the more modern GUI stuff is more resource intensive for all
>> the bells, whistles, and eye candy!
> 
> Is there a "desktop environment" that implements "modern functionality"
> (file managers and what not,  I guess) but NOT "eye candy" ?  I'm sure
> there are a lot of people that would give up fully shaded 3d menu bars,
> transparency, cute zoom effects and jpg backgrounds to get more life
> out of their older CPUs...  (Chasing the Windows GUI was the worst
> mistake linux developers ever made.  From a purely technical  
> perspective,
> anyway.)

You can turn most or all of that off in Gnome.  Under
Desktop->Preferences->Themes there are themes which are minimal and use
less resources.  Turn off file previewing in Nautilus and use a plain
color desktop background.  There are other things which can be done as
well that I can't think of right now.

For a lighter weight "desktop environment" have a look at Xfce which is
the default for Xubuntu.  My main computer is an Athlon 850 Mhz, and
until fairly recently I had only 256 Meg of memory.  When editing image
files that ran up to 100 Mbytes or so the Gimp would slow to a crawl and
crash under Gnome, but I could do what I needed if I ran it under Xfce.
 You can have as many desktop environments installed at once as you
want.  I've had Gnome, Kde, and Xfce at the same time and would switch
between them for different reasons.  Overall I like Gnome best and Xfce
next.  I might like Kde better if I used it more but I haven't had any
need for it and so haven't taken the time to learn it.

Moses
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