Saturday, May 16, 2009

Switching to xfce4 on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

I've been using Ubuntu (Gnome) since Dapper Drake. I've liked it and didn't see the need to switch to anything else. I did take a look at KDE (didn't like it) and xfce (didn't like it then either). It's been a few years though, and xfce is now sufficiently like Gnome (except thinner), that I have now switched over to xfce completely.

I would probably still use Gnome except my work is in java lately, and with tomcat, eclipse, firefox, firebug and selenium, I'm finding that 2GB of RAM isn't enough. I can't upgrade my laptops (they all max out at 2GB, I'd need to buy new laptops to use 4GB or more). So I'm doing everything I can to retrieve memory from fat apps.

No doubt there are more ways to save memory. Maybe opera and selenium-server. For now though, xfce is definitely usable. It's growing on me and I expect that I'll like it more than I like Gnome in just a week or two :-).

2 comments:

Editor said...

what type of memory savings are you noticing?

this morning I am d-loading xUbuntu to try out on some really old hardware...circa 2002-2003 currently running WIN2000

i think 256Mb RAM

Bopolissimus X Platypus said...

Not enough :-). Every little bit helps, but tomcat+firefox+eclipse is just really fat. Hmm, let me boot my other laptop in both gnome and xfce.

xfce saves around 23MB over gnome.
icewm saves around 86MB over gnome.

there are other window managers that use even less memory than that, but for a good balance of features versus memory, I like xfce or icewm.