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Comment by spudlyo | Hacker News Reader

I can't read "Enlightenment: the lightest desktop manager there is" without smirking.

Ya, I did the same thing.

I remember first messing with Enlightenment in '95 or so. And it was the bleeding edge, the realm of "latest hardware only". I think my overclocked pentium 120 did an ok job of it, but only barely.

But I guess fast forward 15 years and it is pretty fast. Kind of like Emacs eh? :)

Maybe they're only going after the non-power users who never venture beyond KDE or Gnome and don't know any better. :)

I'd agree. I'm a windows user for many years (XP) with couple of old machines laying around. I have recently tried PeppermintOS, Joli, Lubuntu. I think I have found Peppermint to be better than all of them and I think there is a market growing for lightweight Linux distros. With a lot better software manager, file manager, windows' look-alike environment and simplicity, I think it is time for a linux comeback with all these distros competing with each other.

I like my "desktop manager" to.. not have a desktop (I have a desktop background image, no icons, no menus (that are always visible)) and my window management to be as simple and automatic as possible. I also want the mouse to be 100% optional. Its nice to use it when I'm pointing and clicking anyway, but when I'm not, eg, when I'm coding or in a terminal, I want to be able to control everything without leaving the main keyboard. As such, my window manager of choice is, of course, a tiling window manager (musca), and it is truely lightweight - a few K lines of C code, a few KB compiled binary, very fast, very low memory usage. Hell, it delegates its menu to dmenu (which I find to be an awesome little program - useful, very fast, tiny, easy to use and no dependencies besides xlib).

I run Musca on an Arch install (on an eee PC) for true lightweight minimalism :)

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