After seeing my poor netbook suffering under the rule of KDE, it’s fan always on, it’s memory occupied by weird stuff like virtuozo and plasma-something, I decided I needed to give it a break. So, I went back to openbox.

To be honest, before that I tried awesome. Awesome at it is, I gave up eventually… maybe I’m now too old for new stuff, or as my same-age friends want to put it: I don’t have the time to configure all this things… :-)

I had tried openbox some time before on the same netbook (a first-gen atom). Believe it or not, it wasn’t something wrong with it to then eventually re-install KDE. It was simple as in one application: Akregator. Trully a great piece of software. Liferea was fine too, but GTK apps I think do tend to need more screen space. QT on the other hand is more “compact”. It just looked better on the small screen.

Anyway, just the horror of upgrading qt/kde (of course the netbook runs Gentoo), even with distcc, was too much. I had seen some pretty nice shots of openbox on the internet, so I tried again. I can live without Akregator. (Yes, I know I can run it from within openbox, but then what’s the point…).

Wait: I need to rant on this: Xfce: why oh why can’t an application appear ABOVE a panel?

Back to openbox: Emerging only lasts untill I can get a fresh cup of espresso. Drank it and tint2 was compiled too. On my first journey to openbox, I selected a few xfce applications: thunar and Terminal. This time I settled on the lxde ones: PCManFM, lxterminal, leafpad, etc. Much better. Not much functionality missing, and they do appear a tad ligther to use. Firefox will never be uninstalled, untill another browser provides it’s top-notch full screen functionality.

With a little help from reddit/r/unixporn, here’s what it looks like:

{% img http://winterland.no-ip.org/images/openbox_netbook.png %}

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