XFCE vs ICEWM

[Ben Novack]

On 7/17/05, Colin McDermott <colmcd at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> http://www.ubuntulite.org/wiki/index.php?title=Desktop_environment#XFCE_vs_ICEWM
> (please do not edit this yet, I beg you)
> 
> In Summary XFCE uses 26mb of memory while Icewm uses 5mb (in fairness you would have to add a icon program to icewm (not sure on xfce) which adds 5~7mb) Also you may be able to trim xfce).
> 
> On Firefox and web browsers. I would like to know of real lightweight alternatives. It's bad to say, but Opera is looking close to the best useable alternative.
> 
> Having said that I think that the biggest problem is a MS compatible word processor that is lightweight enough to run on old machines. The current choices are abiword (which is very good but not stable and compatible enough.). Koffice (prefer abiword). PW (haven't used it). Does anyone know a better way around this problem.

I haven't personally had any problems with abiword; I've used it a lot
on laptops to keep resource consumption down. Compatibility's pretty
good - not perfect, but good enough for everything I've needed it for,
and I think it's probably the best choice for a lightweight distro.

As for web browsing, there's always dillo. It's amazingly fast, but
the rendering isn't nearly as pretty as other browsers and it can't
handle https - for example, gmail. But it's a 350k executable, and if
you want something truly lightweight, it's a good chioce.