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My Eee Desktop
A couple of weeks ago I got myself an Asus 1000h netbook and I've been using it a lot since. Until now, I have a dual boot setup consisting of the included Windows XP and Arch Linux of course. Once I've made sure I got every component setup and running under Linux, XP will have to leave 
(I haven't got the chance to test wireless/bluetooth yet, everything else works quite well).
When I installed Arch on that box I wondered about which WM to use. On my big dell laptop I've switched to awesome, which is a tiling window manager, and I got quite used to it. My dell has a 1440×900 resolution, and it's a real joy for coding etc. to let the window manager handle all the window placement and to be able to switch back and forth between different screen layouts with just one key combination.
Because of that I decided to put Awesome on my Eee as well. However, it turned out that, at least for me, a tiling window manager isn't really usable on a netbook. I noticed that, mostly because I kept booting XP lately whenever I powered up my Eee instead of Linux, even though everything was working. I think the main reason is the keyboard size. The Asus 1000h has, compared to other netbooks, a quite big keyboard. It's comfortable for writing, but still not 100% comfortable to control a WM with it (coding isn't really fun as well, especially because the up key comes before the right shift key 
). Also, I consider a netbook still to be more of a fun tool for browsing etc. than a computer you want to do serious work on for a couple of hours (writing this blog post on it is serious work already ).
Looking for alternatives, I thought I could give LXDE a try. I haven't tried a DE for a while and I've heard some good things about LXDE. Also LXDE uses Openbox as WM, which I've used before.
I have to say I'm delighted . Everything feels still as snappy as with Awesome and it seems this is just the right thing for a netbook. LXDE is not as bloated as other DE's, it consists only of a few components (like a session manager, a GTK theme switcher etc.) bundled with Openbox, PCManFM and GPicView. Also it took me only half an hour to configure the whole WM to my likings.
Because a post titled like this one can't come without a screenshot here are two:
I'd be interested in what others use as WM/DE on their netbooks. Do you use GNOME/KDE/XFCE, if yes, are those still usable?
Comments
2
I use GNOME on my EEEPC 900A and it works quite well. Startup could be faster sometimes (there is some stuff loading in the background) but when it's there it works like a charm.
2008/11/23 19:33
3
Hehe, well, I stopped being all too picky about stuff like icons a long time ago. You can waste so much time styling a desktop, it's not always worth it .
4
Interesting to hear, I'd expected GNOME (or KDE) to be a real show-stopper on a netbook.
2008/11/23 19:39
5
On my several year old Medion (1,6 AthlonX2, 512MB RAM) Ubuntu with GNOME works fine…
2008/11/23 20:222008/11/23 21:10
7
I might enjoy LXDE (after all, I package it in Arch Linux ;), specially on old hardware, but I enjoy GNOME a lot on my MSI Wind (very similar to your EEEPC). It's pretty fast (fast enough for me not to see any impact on my work), and I can't think of anything in particular that would bore me.
2008/11/23 23:34
8
I'm running Debian Lenny with full KDE on my eeePC1000H. Its real fun and in no way a show-stopper.
2008/11/24 06:02
9
For the love of God: Never, ever post a screenshot with a terminal in it! It will just discourage half to world from using Linux, and give ammunition to its critics!
Real user friendly distros don't need to force users to use the command line, anyways…
2008/11/24 06:39
11
Point taken , though, I wouldn't say that Arch Linux belongs to the “real userfriendly” distributions anyway.
12
I am running KDE4 with Debian Lenny and it works great, on a first generation EeePC 701. It had 512MB of RAM which I recently upped to 1GB but it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference…
2008/11/24 14:46
14
It's actually totally not a show-stopper. KDE 4 works extremely well and smoothly on my netbook.
P.S.: Sorry for the stupid pingback that just contains your name - I thought WordPress would put some context around the link, but obviously it doesn't…
2008/11/25 07:53
16
Running Debian SID/Lenny w/KDE 3.5.9 on eeePC1000H (1gb ram, 120gb hdd, have no problems. It's quick, does what I expect to do. Some co-workers have their 1000's with xp, but have problems with net connect, slow app execution, it reboots on its own, etc.
17
I have a eeePC 900 and run Ubuntu 8.10 with Gnome and KDE 4. Both work well. Even Compiz Fusion works fine. I don't usually use it, but have it installed for fun. I have also used Enlightenment (E17), XFCE, Fluxbox and of course Xandros 4 in both IceWM and KDE modes. The distros that work best are Xandros because it was compiled for it and Ubuntu (7.10 to 8.10 all work fine). gOS, Elive, OpenGEU and several Ubuntu derivatives work well. MEPIS and Mandriva 2008 worked for for awhile but would not re-boot after updating with a kernel panic. Eeedora works but I could not get everything to work so I ditched it. I have not tried Arch in awhile. I am too lazy to do the work and don't think that the benefits are worth the effort. I would rather spend my time playing and using than configuring and troubleshooting.
2008/11/27 21:24
18
I'm running XFCE on my Eee 7”. It works very well, but I might give LXDE a chance.
2008/11/28 19:10
19
I'm currently running Debian Lenny with DWM on my eeePC 901. The actual plan was to use awesome, but I ran into dependency hell with the current version and decided that it would be to much of a hassle to track everything down.
Most of the time I'm just using Alt + $number to switch workspaces, so there is no problem using the WM with the keyboard. (I don't like the touchpad buttons anyway.)
2008/12/01 21:24
20
Hey dude,
Could you share what themes were you using in lxde in the screenshots? Looks pretty sweet, the default lxde look is ok but I prefer a darker theme.
2009/02/01 19:48
21
Hey,
it's a standard Openbox Theme (for the window borders), combined with dark murrine theme (IIRC one of the Murrine Dust Colors pack) and this icon theme.
2009/02/02 09:19
Good to hear, that lxde does the work. My next notebook will be an older 12” ibm thinkpad so im watching the posts about small-screen-notebooks.
but… well… please use some other (better [not so ugly]) icons for your desktop ^^