Xfce Forum

argt

Member

Registered: 2007-01-18

Posts: 1

What is the lightest ?

Hello all,

I am running xfce4 on a rather old computer (PIII 450 Mhz, 384MB of RAM) so I am trying to get the lightest applications and customizations to enjoy the possibility of a desktop computer without the usual slowness.
I would like to do the benchmarks myself but downloading and compiling (I am using gentoo) new packages takes time on a machine like mine.

Here are some questions:

xterm or xfce-extra/terminal ? I didn't find any real article on xfce-extra/terminal about its speed, just that it was better integrated into xfce, but I am not looking for any transparency of fancy stuffs.

Is there anything lighter browser than firefox and still having most (not to say all) the functionality? (I guess the answer to this question is no, at least after my google search I did not find anything)

Same question with e-mail client. I read stuff about Claws, but I am wondering how secure and serious the project is.

mplayer or vlc ?

Is thunar faster than xffm ?

Is there any difference in resource used between a background image in png format and a background image in jpeg format.
(all the default background image of xfce4 where png files, that how I came with this idea).

Thanks for any advice/help.

Pindakoe

Member

From: NL

Registered: 2003-11-26

Posts: 116

Re: What is the lightest ?

• Terminal: aterm is lighter than xterm (but lacks some modes for graphics that you seldom use)

• Browser: Dillo is very light and very fast, but lacks a lot of features. May offer what you want. I use epiphany. Maybe somewhat lighter/faster than firefox (which I think is slowly putting on weight). It is the default gnome browser.

• I use sylpheed -- the base version of which sylpheed-claws branched off. Compact, fast & powerfull. Regular updates. The sylpheed-claws started as a separate branch to test new features, but has since evolved into a separate standalone program

• I use mplayer, but never used VLC

• Thunar has some gnome-dependancies which makes it 'heavier' than xffm. The userinterface of xffm is somewhat arcane. I would try rox. I used it for a long time and found it easy and fast. The only thing I can see that Thunar has better is the Trash mechanism (which rox has somefunction for, but not as easy to set up).

• I do not think there is any significant saving in going from PNG to JPG. I you want to save some memory there, then set a colour.

MtheF

Member

Registered: 2004-03-21

Posts: 26

Re: What is the lightest ?

As browser you could always try Opera. Me like it and it is supposed to be lightweigth. (Not OpenSource, but free). It includes a Mailreader to.

Nick

Dev

From: ~

Registered: 2005-02-17

Posts: 1,144

Website

Re: What is the lightest ?

• Thunar has some gnome-dependancies which makes it 'heavier' than xffm. The userinterface of xffm is somewhat arcane. I would try rox. I used it for a long time and found it easy and fast. The only thing I can see that Thunar has better is the Trash mechanism (which rox has somefunction for, but not as easy to set up).

Thunar has no Gnome deps (there is one, gconf, which is optional). Furthermore, Thunar is lighter then rox (Data size Thunar: 2900, Rox: 5544, Xffm: 4188). I also think Thunar is faster in browsing directories then ROX, but I've never compared it.

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