Any way to put KDE on a diet?

[milanuk]

Hello,

I've been using KDE for a while now, and I am really liking the 2.01 release and looking forward to the 2.1 release coming up. But either I misunderstood things, or misread something.

I was under the impression that KDE2 was to try to alleviate some of the 'bloat' that people complained of in KDE 1.x. I don't have much problem running it on my main machine as it is a P3-500 w/ 384MB of RAM, but on another machine, which is a Celeron266 w/ 64MB of RAM, it was almost necessary to move to 128MB of RAM (which I did do anyway), and it's still a little 'slow' at times.

Yes, I know there are all those nice light WM's out there, unfortunately, I don't think they would appropriate or go over well w/ the users in the family ;) They are used to Windows, and I must admit, I kinda like the Windows interface, just the underlying OS pisses me off continually.

Is there a way to 'trim' KDE2 a little so it runs a bit faster, but still has the wealth of apps plus the integration of being a 'desktop environment'? Or am I better off just boosting hardware specs a bit more often?

TIA,

Monte

[X_console]

Since you're used to the Windows look, may I recommend Fvwm95? It looks just like Windows (more or less) with the same buttons and such. Check it out. It'll definately run faster too since it's just a Window manager. The downside is you'll have to download other software like word processors and so on.

[milanuk]

Well, it's an option. I use IceWM a good bit, and qvwm seems kind appealing for the all-out Win9x look, but I haven't used it yet. The question in my mind is, 'How much work is going to be required to make these wm's _function_ like Windows, i.e., the same hotkeys, etc.?' I'm sure it's not _that_ hard, and qvwm may do just that. But then you run into making things look like they actually belong together. Maybe it's just me, but my recollections of fvwm are not all that fond, beyond it's sheer speed. I'm trying to make this as asthetically appealing and transparent as possible, so as to be less of a distraction to the users i.e. having to relearn how to do this and that. Some is unavoidable, but KDE seems to have done a good job (depending if you like the M$ GUI or not) of maintaining the same hotkeys and conventions, and for that reason is 'easier' for me to use, at least, than say WindowMaker. Yes, you can configure the hell out of most modern windowmanagers, but I would rather be doing other stuff ;)

Thanks,

Monte