[ Thanks to M. Fioretti for this link. ]
Sooner or later, many of the people who decide to try
life on Linux without Gnome or KDE find out that they are missing
something that is not eye candy. Sure, they gain free screen space
and, very likely, their computer runs faster than before. The
problem is that some of that speed goes out of the (desktop) window
when you end up doing manually something that happened more or less
automatically in Gnome or KDE, if you installed and configured some
plugin. Normally, that “something” is information from, or
interaction with, some other local program or online service. How
do you maintain that level of integration without slowing down your
computer, filling the screen with panels and icons, or running some
script manually in a terminal?“My favourite solution for this type of problem is to run some
descendant of the Blackbox window manager like Fluxbox or Openbox,
properly equipped with a tool that is, in my opinion, really cool
and made on purpose to answer the question above: pipe menus.