The Next Pdaxrom Wm

[InSearchOf]

I'm looking to change the wm to something more modern. I'm in favor of xfce

Looking to see what the community has interst in. Now I know a lot of people have a problem with xfce because of memory usuage but I will be working on optimizing it as much as possible.

But throw out suggestions

Late

[T3_slider]

I use XFCE already, so that gets my vote. It's fairly lightweight yet still fully featured.

[adf]

my vote would be for either metacity, qlwm or ede, though it might take a helluva lot of tweaking to be anywhere near as nice as ice/rox or openbox.

The argument I see for qlwm is really based on using qt interfaces for webkit and as much of the other system stuff as possible. Probably the degree of interface work to make it enjoyable to use (webkit with the qt front end too, for that matter) would prove prohibitive

Same sort of argument for ede--- making as many system widgets as possible in fltk and running a light fltk desktop would be reasonably efficient

metcity is ..well... gtk2. I'm not sure how really light it can go, though.

I really like xfce, but I have never had it stay stable on a system or distro I've used it on extensively. Maybe it's just me, but I'd be a little nervous about it as a default interface

I suppose in the end icewm/rox is pretty good

[Meanie]

I don't care which wm we use as long as it does the following:

easy to use
quick and responsive
pretty (easily themable)
support for .desktop files or other way of easily generating menus
support for screen rotation
window resizing
custom key bindings
applets/doclets (whatever you call them) that give you easy access to commonly used features, ie mount/unmount of cards, network, date/time,....


so far I have tried several such as FluxBox, IceWM, OpenBox, MatchBox, Enlightenment, KDE, and each has their own strengths and weaknesses... i have not tried xfce yet.

i think discussing the pros and cons of each wm would eventually lead to an informed decision about which wm would provide a better Zaurus user experience.

[louigi600]

In my point of view there is so much more inportant stuff to fix before starting to look at how to make things nicer that I regard this as being proposed with the wrong timing.

I mean current pdaxrom has severe low level stability issues, some basic functionality crippled or compromised, ancient kernel, touch screen incompatibilities with current kernels, incomplete boot loader, applets that should be for every day use that take ages to load (and some times do not even work), the usb client functionality is compromised for various reasons, the text console command line editing does wierd things, vi is still not in shape, there is no official backup/restore tool/applet ... and many more that I've ither forgotten or I'm not aware of.

I think a system should be built from the ground up ... no point building castels in the air ;-)

[Dromede]

i agree with the above post. I dont want to be OT so my vote goes for xfce4 or ede. i never got ede working on any pdaxrom... i used xfce4 in the past and it was quite a pleasant experience although it had it's flaws.
so, xfce4 for a nice desktop or ede for a fast desktop.

[InSearchOf]

In my point of view there is so much more inportant stuff to fix before starting to look at how to make things nicer that I regard this as being proposed with the wrong timing.

I mean current pdaxrom has severe low level stability issues, some basic functionality crippled or compromised, ancient kernel, touch screen incompatibilities with current kernels, incomplete boot loader, applets that should be for every day use that take ages to load (and some times do not even work), the usb client functionality is compromised for various reasons, the text console command line editing does wierd things, vi is still not in shape, there is no official backup/restore tool/applet ... and many more that I've ither forgotten or I'm not aware of.

I think a system should be built from the ground up ... no point building castels in the air ;-)
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=167065\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Hey, calm down, this is just a question to prepare the pdaXrom roadmap

Late

[Capn_Fish]

I think IceWM with a lightweight desktop like fbdesk or the like would be a good option. It looks nice and doesn't eat RAM like the current setup does.

Xfce4 wouldn't be bad either, assuming stuff was trimmed to make it a little bit lighter.

Of course, I don't particularly care, as I'm just going to switch to EvilWM anyway, which (almost) nobody else would want as a default.

[HoloVector]

I love the eye candy and some of the functionality that enlightenment offers but it is not ready for prime time stability-wise even though it has a small footprint and zippy performance on the Z.    

So my vote is for a combination of IceWM and ROX which I have been using very successfully under pdaXii13.

[adf]

In my point of view there is so much more inportant stuff to fix before starting to look at how to make things nicer that I regard this as being proposed with the wrong timing.

I mean current pdaxrom has severe low level stability issues, some basic functionality crippled or compromised, ancient kernel, touch screen incompatibilities with current kernels, incomplete boot loader, applets that should be for every day use that take ages to load (and some times do not even work), the usb client functionality is compromised for various reasons, the text console command line editing does wierd things, vi is still not in shape, there is no official backup/restore tool/applet ... and many more that I've ither forgotten or I'm not aware of.

I think a system should be built from the ground up ... no point building castels in the air ;-)
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=167065\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

I'm confused about this... pdax stable/pdaxii13 has what you might call an ancient kernel, but it is pretty stable and functional, if difficult to work with some newer (like qt4 based) software. pdax current seem like it has the stability/functionality issues, but not so ancient a kernel.  I get the picture of general dissatisfaction, it just seems like you are conflating issues.

As to going from the ground up...  if that were really the approach, wouldn't it make more sense to combine efforts with a large distro and become a zaurus gentoo or debian (or fedora or slackware) branch?  That would no longer be pdaXrom, of course...

[ZDevil]

As to going from the ground up...  if that were really the approach, wouldn't it make more sense to combine efforts with a large distro and become a zaurus gentoo or debian (or fedora or slackware) branch?  That would no longer be pdaXrom, of course...
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=167122\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

I cannot agree with you more.

[ZDevil]

I don't care which wm we use as long as it does the following:

easy to use
quick and responsive
pretty (easily themable)
support for .desktop files or other way of easily generating menus
support for screen rotation
window resizing
custom key bindings
applets/doclets (whatever you call them) that give you easy access to commonly used features, ie mount/unmount of cards, network, date/time,....

[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=167060\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Using a feature checklist like this will definitely help, instead of passing holistic and impressionistic judgment on different wms.

How about this also: collapsible toolbar/taskbar/tray?

[walkman]

I don't care which wm we use as long as it does the following:

easy to use
quick and responsive
pretty (easily themable)
support for .desktop files or other way of easily generating menus
support for screen rotation
window resizing
custom key bindings
applets/doclets (whatever you call them) that give you easy access to commonly used features, ie mount/unmount of cards, network, date/time,....

I would add highly configurable. Preferably using text config files so that the whole environment can be customized and shipped as a bunch of configs (e.g. E17 is awesome, but AFAIK it uses some kind of binary config files...).

so far I have tried several such as FluxBox, IceWM, OpenBox, MatchBox, Enlightenment, KDE, and each has their own strengths and weaknesses... i have not tried xfce yet.

i think discussing the pros and cons of each wm would eventually lead to an informed decision about which wm would provide a better Zaurus user experience.

IMHO, that strongly depends on what are the user-experience expectations from the system.

I tried to take a deeper look at some WMs as I am trying to make my way to a hybrid PDA & micro-laptop environment (see my trolling  ). My personal feeling: it seems to me that shipping a customized openbox + matchbox-desktop might be still worth considering. That's because openbox is highly configurable and the new versions have a possibility to configure appearance per-application (which IceWM also has), however with a twist that one can use wildcards (which e.g. IceWM does not seem to feature) what allows more control over the look&feel.

One more point: hypothetically I would also add a requirement easily reconfigurable in run-time. It seems to me that it might be worth experimenting with changing the "feel" of the system on e.g. screen rotation event (PDA mode vs. laptop mode: in PDA mode launching apps in maximized state seems like a good idea, while in laptop mode it probably is not). In this sense, for example E17 seems to be easily run-time reconfigurable using enlightenment_remote tool.

[realm]

i've been using pdaxrom on my c860 for probably over 3 years now. its always been stable and fast, my c3000 i've been using angstrom on though, because their build environment is accessable, easy to get going, and updated between releases (not that they have any "stable" releases yet), so i have experience with how to port packages from openembedded to pdaxrom.

but enough off topic.

the point of that is that i've been using e17 and a 2.6.22 kernel on my c3000 for over half a year now, and am finding the kernel and window manager very effective. if people are interested in videos or other information related to the responsiveness of e17 i'll gladly provide what i can.

the positives of e17 as i see it are:

Very easy to remember window position / virtual desktop settings

Low processor usage eye candy ( not required but fun to show off)

Good centralized management of configuration options (everything gui related can be configured through the main interface, including changing default font sizes of different wm aspects, titlebar, and scrollbar to name a few that apply to pda usage. they help with easier finger dragging and scrollbar usage)

(tenative) some work has been done doing an iphone type keyboard based off e17 libs, keyboard looks pretty nice, but its not fully implemented right now. it would be a really nice feature though.

Actively developed


some negatives

there aren't that many epplets (their version of a taskbar app)  for e17 right now, so volume, brightness, cf/sd, wifi epplets would all have to be written. there are lots of example epplets in the e17 repository though.

i can't really think of any others right now, so how other people see it would be appriciated.

[scottlfa]

I would put a vote for Xfce4, its clean and configurable.  Supports a number of cunstomization's, its quick running and responsive to use.  Not a fan of e17 ... did not find it very usable, pretty though.