Minimalist desktop app sugestions

[Kamikaze_Ice]

Hello!
First time poster, semi-frequent lurker.
Now, I don't really know which section the following question would fall under but here goes.

Software. Could use some recomendations on software. Yes I'm sure you've all heard this before, time and time again.
I've been searching around for the past few weeks on various applications and such, and tried many and kept few.
Now the problem is this, I I've recently been limited with my time, and could use some software sugestions.
So, if anyone would be so kind to mention any

Yes, i could run KDE/gnome with a composite manager, and still run fairly smooth. but i prefer to use as little of my memory as possible untill I really need it (ie - video editing or rendering, or movie playback with post-process effects in realtime) I just prefer the minimal look too.

I looked for 'mini how-to's similar type threads, which is where I got a few apps from, but I started to wonder if the performance over-all might be worse than sticking with one library (qt or gtk).
My general understaning is that gtk libs on an app-by-app basis are faster than qt. But if you went with qt-based apps with minimalism and low memory usage in mind, how would eachother fare, compared to mix-matching your favorite 'slim' apps?

So I guess the question I'm asking is, could someone list a few apps based on each library, with low memory usage in mind? and which would be faster overall (qt vs gtk) following this theme?

Goal: minimal dependancies, but still full of features. Trying to keep the total memory used as low as possible, without being all command-line (I've got ADHD so I forget what I'm doing alot, and images help me remember... sometimes)

The following, in bold, are the areas i'd like some help with. You can read or ignore what's after it, which is just a short note on my current program or a mention of what I don't like.
Window manager: Openbox with pypanel. heard it was faster, and I use blackbox (bblean) on my windows partition.
Text editor: scite. no, i dont like VI. sorry. This happens to be the closest thing to Notepad++ that I use in, yet again, Windows.
Media player: mplayer. now i know theres VLC, but it dosen't like multi-line subtitles (they overlap). mplayer works, but i can't figure out how to change the subfont.
Music player: MPD with Sonata. Going to get around to seeing Foobar2000's performance with WINE, and if it's good, I'll stick with my beloved Foobar.
File manager: Thunar. Now, I like this and all, but it requires xfce libs. planing on trying PCMan file manager since it uses gtk like some other apps.
Web browser: Firefox. I don't like the recent releases of opera for nit-picking reasons, and there arent any other browsers.
Instant messanger: SIM. Well, it aint no Miranda. Planing to try 'ayttm' at a later point in time as well.
Image viewer: -undecided- currently using feh, but wouldn't mind something like Irfanview.
Disk burning: -undecided- k3b sure is nice though...
Photo editing: Photoshop. sorry but I can't stand The Gimp's layout. Prime reason I'm keeping windows around.
Illustrator/Flash/Fireworks alternatives? I havent gotten around to searching for any yet, been mostly pre-occupied with the above whilst learning about tweaking gentoo useflags and all related make.conf material for a fast, stable K8 oriented platform.

I mainly deal with videos and digital images, while sometimes playing around with 3D landscaping. So you can see why i'd prefer to stay with minimal memory usage.

Now I could spend days and days reading up on all these applications and variants, but I prefer opinions from, hopefully, people with similar needs or tastes in their system performance as I.
Just please no CLI/ncurse app sugestions, just cause I like minimal don't mean I don't need some eye-candy

ps - I've jumped all around this message depending on what my brain happened to think of. I hate you ADHD and short attention span! And I'm very bad at explaining things in text.

[yngwin]

I suggest you try out KDE. It is a well integrated desktop environment. Once the base libs are loaded any KDE apps that you start don't need much more. Because of it's modular character, parts (kparts, kio-slaves) are re-used all the time. You can turn off any eye-candy that you don't want or need, and keep a reasonably light work environment.

Window manager: KWin, comes with KDE
Text editor: Kate
Media player: mplayer with SMPlayer frontend (a Qt/KDE frontend, the best GUI for mplayer I've ever seen, has a good array of options for subtitles too)
Music player: MPD. I use QMPDclient as client, but that is Qt4. I don't really care for KMP, the Qt3 client, but you could try it.
File manager: Konqueror. Does remote file management (ftp, ssh, etc) as well.
Web browser: Konqueror
Instant messanger: Kopete
Image viewer: Konqueror works pretty well. If you want anything more fancy, try Gwenview or ShowImg.
Disk burning: K3b is the best.
Photo editing: Krita seems to be shaping up pretty well, but I don't think it's up to par with Photoshop yet.

[Sadako]

Window Manager; If you really want a minimalist wm, try dwm, but for this I think you should really focus on something you are comfortable with and has all the features you need/want.
All the wm's are somewhat minimalist, and the three wm's for the big DEs (metacity, kwin and xfwm4) are among the most minimalist of the lot,
as they leave a lot of the usual functionality to other programs automatically run with their respective DE's.
The point I'm trying to make is you have little to gain by skimping on your choice of wm, and if you're happy with openbox and have gotten used to it, you should just stick with it.

Text Editor; I adore nano, but scite would be (IMHO) one of the better gtk based ones, and perfect for your needs.
Leafpad is nice as well, is even smaller and more minimalist than scite (and looks just like a gtk+ version of notepad, only better ), however it doesn't have syntax highlighting or tabs support.
If neither of these are an issue for you, you should definitely check it out.

Media Player; mplayer > *.
'Nuff said.

Music Player; I love mpd, but the thing is to be useful it allways needs to be running in the background, and then you start up a gui client to control it.
I think you really need to decide (or be more specific about) what you are looking for from a music player first before anyone can really help you with this.
But anyway, I use mpd with conky to see what's playing and either keybindings or something like esekeyd to control it (with mpc).
You can start sonata, gmpc (which seems to be coming along nicely) or my favourite, ncmpc (console, mightn't be much use to you) when I really need it.

File Manager; I've never actaully heard of PCman, but it looks nice so I'm going to check it out, thanks for pointing it out.
I use emelfm2 and love it, it's a two pane gtk file manager, really minimalist.
Thing is though, it only has a "list" view, which works perfectly for it, but I get the feeling you really need something with icons/thubnails, so take a look at rox-filer.
It's a gtk file manager without any xfce- or gnome-related libraries or dependencies.

Web Browser; Firefox sucks, but is still probably the best of a bad lot.
Both galeon and epiphany have heavy gnome dependencies so are out, and you said yourself opera is a no go too.
(I've gotten firefox to start without starting gconfd-2, I can help you with it if you want, more about that later).

Instant Messanger; This (im) is something I don't make much use of myself, so I'm probably not qualified to make recommendations here,
but pidgin seems really nice and should at least be tried out.

Image viewer; I use feh myself, and with a file manager with thumbnails (again, see rox) it should be pretty much perfect for a minimal setup.

Disk Burning; I prefer to use the cli tools directly (cdrecord, mkisofs), but k3b is absolutely fantastic, and I while I rarely use any kde or qt apps, I actually think it's worth installing both qt and kdelibs just for this app alone.

Photo Editing; If it's the layout of the gimp which puts you off, then you should really try krita, which is a lot closer to photoshop's layout, and has a few features the gimp doesn't.
Also, gimpshop might be worth a look, a version of the gimp modified to look like photoshop by and for people who feel the same as you.

Illustrator/Flash/Fireworks alternatives; Have no idea, sorry.

One thing you need to look out for is all the stuff started by launching one lone gnome or kde app in a minimlaist desktop is all the daemons they start in the background, like (for gnome) gconfd-2, bonobo, dbus, blah blah blah.
It's worth it for k3b, and you can kill them when you're done, but it's something to look out for (it's a pet peeve of mine).
You should at the very least have "-gnome -kde" in your USE flags, but you've probably figured that out already.

Also, it might be a little late for this, but the desktop profile is way too bloated for a minimal setup.
Take a look at (as root) `eselect profile list`.
It's preferable to use the "default-linux/amd64/2007.0" profile rather than "default-linux/amd64/2007.0/desktop", although the same affect can be achieved by diasbling a load of use flags in make.conf.

[i92guboj]

Hello,

As you already said, there are quite a lot of threads about this. I will just comment one thing:

Web browser: Firefox. I don't like the recent releases of opera for nit-picking reasons, and there arent any other browsers.

It surprises me that looking for a "light" alternative, you look into gecko. And I am also surprised that you say that "there aren't any other browsers". There are quite a lot of them around. And even the lightest ones, are heavy bulls if they use gecko, like firefox do. So: nothing light on firefox.

Epiphany, kazehakase, seamonkey, galeon... are al gecko based, and so, even if the rest of the app is light, gecko gives all of them all the extra weight they can get. You can read more about gecko and see a few dozens of gecko browsers here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(layout_engine)

Besides gecko, there are several other rendering engines: opera, links and dillo have their own, konqueror and safari use khtml. All of them, are lighter than gecko.

[Sadako]

Besides gecko, there are several other rendering engines: opera, links and dillo have their own, konqueror and safari use khtml. All of them, are lighter than gecko.

While I completely agree, the problems with the other gecko browsers (I mean asides from being gecko based in the first place) are they either have very heavy gnome dependencies (epiphany, galeon),
or just aren't as mature or useable yet (kazehakase et all, although this is of course just my opinion).

Konquerer is actually quite nice, but using outside of the kde environment just doesn't really make sense to me (but is perfectly doable).

Links and dillo are both quite nice, but compared to what most are accustomed to in a browser they are quite limited in some ways (I'm currently trying links -g exclusively for a while).

Although seamonkey is a pretty good alternative to firefox which I had neglected, and might be worth (the OP) trying out.

[i92guboj]

Besides gecko, there are several other rendering engines: opera, links and dillo have their own, konqueror and safari use khtml. All of them, are lighter than gecko.

While I completely agree, the problems with the other gecko browsers (I mean asides from being gecko based in the first place) are they either have very heavy gnome dependencies (epiphany, galeon),
or just aren't as mature or useable yet (kazehakase et all, although this is of course just my opinion).

Well, that is why we still have mozilla/seamonkey. No gnome deps at all, and it is quite mature.

I am not a big fan of gecko, anyway.

Konquerer is actually quite nice, but using outside of the kde environment just doesn't really make sense to me (but is perfectly doable).

Well, to use qt and khtml outside kde makes exactly the same sense that using gtk + gecko. If not more, since I think that if we count code size, gecko is bigger or at least equal to kdelibs. So, I can't see the point why using firefox is any better than using konqueror outside kde.

PS. I use konqueror as my primary browser in fvwm, no kde. The memory footprint of konqueror for me (io-slaves included) is smaller than the footprint of seamonkey after a couple of hours of usage. I use seamonkey though, when konqueror fails to render something, which is getting rare these days.

[vermaden]

Text editor: geany [ http://toya.net.pl/~vermaden/links.htm --> 9. howtos --> Light GUI editor for WM ]
Music player: gimmix [ http://vermaden.proplayer.pl/gfx/screen ... ata-00.png ]
File manager: thunar / rox
Web browser: flock / kazehakase
Image viewer: feh / gqview

[Kamikaze_Ice]

Thank you all for your opinions.

Guess theres not a good alternative for the few qt apps that have my interest (smplayer, k3b, krita), and the best option would to just use both sets of libraries, and make sure to remove the processes and related when done using said app.
There shouldn't be that much of a hit on memory/cpu usage if by some reason I end up runing both at once eh? Not like my computer can't handel it, but I'd prefer to use as least as possible.

*makes note of 'Firefox and not starting gconfd-2'*

geany looks very nice! has everything I could ever ask for- speed, syntax highlighting, code collapsing, tabs and all in a gui. Vermaden, you are the first person I've seen who's said anything about this program, and for that I thank you.
Kazehase: I was under the impression it was more-less a slightly slimer firefox, with a few extra features and less stable. Which is one reason why I mentioned "...aren't any other browsers.", due to either being instable or not supporting a wide enough range of web standards.

in reguards to konqueror, it just has kde all over it, which I'm assuming is basically kde-base yes? I'm not much of a fan of multi-use applications either, and in this case a filemanager and web browser. Reminds me to much of Explorer And Epiphany is gnome.

Seamonkey; I was under the impresion that it was an 'all-in-one' type package of an advanced mozilla suite? but if it performs better than Firefox with big ol' gecko i'd be glad to give it a whirl.

And for rox, from all the good things I've heard about it I don't supose it would happen to have a plugin or somesuch to have a directory tree on the side?

During my freetime tomorrow, now that the bathroom rennovation is finished, I'll beable to play around with some of these goodies.

Again, thank you for your opinions.

[palsyboy]

To echo vermaden, GQview is great, and it will meet your Irfanview-like desires.

[vermaden]

geany looks very nice! has everything I could ever ask for- speed, syntax highlighting, code collapsing, tabs and all in a gui. Vermaden, you are the first person I've seen who's said anything about this program, and for that I thank you.

You are welcome, about borwser, I use opera and I do not see any other alternative now, [maybe firefox only], opera does not uses kde-libs etc, it only uses pure QT. there is also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceweasel but its only little changed firefox.

And for rox, from all the good things I've heard about it I don't supose it would happen to have a plugin or somesuch to have a directory tree on the side?

No such plugin for rox, stick with thunar, also you can try XFE: http://roland65.free.fr/xfe/index.php?page=screenshots you can also try pcmanfm with tabs: http://pcmanfm.sourceforge.net/ or naofm http://nao.linux.pl/index.php?content=screenshots, lots of choices here.

[Cadynum]

Illustrator/Flash/Fireworks alternatives?

Inkscape is really good.

[GivePeaceAChance]

How about those internet browsers... which ones support tabs? Currently I'm using Firefox, and it's a heck of a resource hog (slow to start up and at least on Windows it uses a good 55 MB of RAM on a normal day) but I have gotten very used to tabbed browsing since I began using it, and I don't think I'd want to live without tabs. So which of those browsers are lightweight and support tabs? (Ctrl+T would be sweet to keep as a shortcut).

[Kamikaze_Ice]

Kazehakase was quite nice when I was using it, but something about it's layout just struck me as wierd. While using it, I managed to find an older opera download (from before they added the built in torrent client) so I'm back to using this--which I originaly prefer despite having two libraries running at the same time.

IMO, Opera's memory management is just great. When your not really doing anything important, it'll try to use more of your computer for its self, but one you start needing memory or cpu cycles for other things (game running in the background, portage, movie encoding, etc.) opera will get smart and use as much of the unneeded stuff so everything thats more important gets priority.

well, this is how the windows version works, and from my limited knowledge the linux version is the same.

But if you wanted to dump firefox, without trying the other big named (iceweasel, seamonkey) i'd say Kazehakase is quite nice. it has the mouse gestures built in, if you use them, and a nice assortment of other goodies while still being alot faster than firefox. It feels like it runs as well as Opera, but with a slightly klunkier look.

[GivePeaceAChance]

So what about browsers that don't rely on KDE or Gnome? Is opera the best bet then? (FYI, I am going with a window manager style of lightweight-ness and don't want anything to do with gnome or kde if I can help it).

[Crono81]

i use these apps:

Image Viewer (full screen / slideshow / not much more, but fast): Mirage
IDE / Editor: geany (SVN)
Graphic: Inkscape

I also use Thunar as fm and Mousepad ad notepad, but they rely on XFCE, which is my wm.

[Sujao]

I only read the first post so please exuse me if this was already mentioned:

Why do you want to save memory? I suppose if you do video editing you have at least 1GB memory. If you just use the comfortable KDE programm it will maybe take 80MB at most of your memory. So what? If you use something else you might only use 20MB of memory. So you have 980MB free memory instead of 920MB. Thats 6,5% more memory...sounds much, but its only 60MB! Do you really want to spend days and weeks searching for the "perfect" combination and then laboriously setting up all the "1337" apps with text files and than realising that you can't even drag&drop between them and your working speed is low because there are no comfort features and you see more text editing coming? I WOULDN'T!

KDE offers you all the convenient functions you need in one framework at not so high memory costs. And come on: 1GB branded RAM costs around 70€ here, thats about 50$ I guess. Its not that much and then you can forget all you memory problems.

Note: This might have been a subjective oppinion but I also spend years testing all those 1337 window manager, only to realize that 3% more speed isn't worth hours of configuration and that I don't need to prove to myself that I am h4x0r enough to set up it. Oh, and although you might think that I work for KDE in the marketing....I don't

[lyallp]

With regard to image viewing

I use gqview

Fast, simple - gets the job done.

Also allows easy renaming of files without having to use the mouse! Great for when you have large numbers of digital photographs to 'file'.

[vipera]

My vote is for feh for an image viewer. I wrote a small perl script to make feh behave how I like. It will load all images in the current directory when you open a single image. This works great with Thunar for thumbnails. If anyone knows a better way to replace special chars let me know.

Code: Select all

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use File::Basename;

$fullname = $ARGV[0];
$dirname = dirname($fullname);
$filename = fileparse($fullname);

opendir(DIR, $dirname);
@files = sort readdir(DIR);
closedir(DIR);

$index = 0;

foreach $file (@files) {
   if ($file eq $filename)
   {
      $dirname = replace_special($dirname);
      exec "feh --start-at $index $dirname";
   }
   if ($file ne '.' && $file ne '..' && -f "$dirname/$file") {
     $index++;
    }
}

sub replace_special {
  $_[0] =~ s/\(/\\\(/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\)/\\\)/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\ /\\\ /g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\'/\\\'/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\"/\\\"/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\`/\\\`/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\</\\\</g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\>/\\\>/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\;/\\\;/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\[/\\\[/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\]/\\\]/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\?/\\\?/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\#/\\\#/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\$/\\\$/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\^/\\\^/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\&/\\\&/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\*/\\\*/g;
  $_[0] =~ s/\=/\\\=/g;
  $_[0];
}

[faux]

Hi!
I'm searching for a media player with media library which does not depend on a desktop environment. I like Rhythmbox, but since i changed to Fluxbox I won't install all GNOME dependencies. Amarok also seems to be nice, but also KDE dependencies are unwanted.
Currently I'm using Audacious, but I miss the media library.

Faux

[swimmer]

Ever thought on mpd in combination with a client of your choice?

HTH
swimmer

[nixnut]

merged above two posts here.

[faux]

Ever thought on mpd in combination with a client of your choice?

No, never thought about that, because never heard about it.

Great idea! Thank's! I like the idea of a media-daemon. I chose Sonata as client and like it very much!

[swimmer]

Good to hear

[pappy_mcfae]

I am using a Frankenstein mix of XFCE and KDE. XFCE is the main WM, but most of the apps I use are KDE based, except for Mousepad, which I much prefer over just about anything else that is referred to as a text editor. It just seems that things run better under XFCE because it's not as big of a resource hog as a full on KDE install. XFCE has a cleaner, more Linuxy, less Windozey look about it as well. Best of all, it maintains the same right click functionality of KDE in a much lighter package.

Just my $0.02.

Blessed be!
Pappy

[dbodner]

I must say, I completely prefer mpd+gmpc to anything else I previously tried. Trying things like rhythmbox and Amarok, and while they had some nice bells and whistles, they tended to be heavy, especially when scanning for changes in my media library. mpd + gmpc is incredibly thin, takes seconds to rescan (with a library of ca 8k), and I actually think it's easier to browse/search for music. All I really want in my player is to find music, make playlists, and play music, and mpd does it extremely efficiently IMO.