Linux Orbit: Breaking the Ice: IceWM Review

[ Thanks to John
Gowin for this link. ]

“In the world of the Linux desktop, there’s a wide variety of
software to keep you from being bored with one particular program.
Perhaps the best example of this is the variety of window managers
you can choose from. Should you get bored with a certain window
manager or decide you don’t like it, there are dozens more to try
out. I’ve gone through a few myself, and IceWM is the one I keep
coming back to. In this review, I’ll try to show you why I like it
and point to reasons why some of you won’t.

“To start with, IceWM is very easy on system resources. If
you’ve only used KDE or Gnome, then a switch to IceWM on your
desktop will seem like a major computer upgrade. Running the ‘top’
utility reveals that IceWM consumes about 5 megs of RAM on my
system. That’s negligible for a modern application and on top of
that, it loads very fast. If you load X-Windows from the command
line (via startx), you’ll notice the window manager has completely
loaded only a fraction of a second after the screen switches to
graphics mode even on older PC systems. The same cannot be said
about KDE or Enlightenment. IceWM has outstanding performance which
can help extend the life of older hardware…”

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