Where are we going? (Not a rant)

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 2:03 PM, Dan Mashal <dan.mashal at gmail.com> wrote:
> MATE IS growing. And MATE developers are starting to contribute to Gnome. :)
>
> Dan

So is Cinnamon. So is XMonad. So is <spit> Unity, for that matter.
What *doesn't* seem to be growing is LXDE, and I'm not sure about
XFCE, Enlightenment and WindowMaker. The lightweight window manager /
desktop space seems to me to be floundering except for XMonad.

I finally got around to putting a few hours into getting XMonad
functional on my Fedora 18 boxes. I haven't quite gotten used to some
of its quirks, but at least I'm in a position to compare its memory
usage with the other lightweight alternatives. To be blunt, 4 GB
*used* to be a lot of RAM but GNOME 3, KDE 4 and Cinnamon are
swallowing big chunks of it, and so are Firefox and Chromium / Chrome.
I'm beginning to think Google has the right idea with the ChromeBook -
shove so much functionality into the browser that you only need an OS
to manage the devices. ;-) I want my RAM back!

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How the Hell can the lion sleep with all those people singing "A weem
oh way!" at the top of their lungs?