Was wondering why openbox

I have used Fluxbox and I really do like it for many of the same reasons.  I also know that the fancy graphic stuff, to include icons, has to be loaded into RAM.   No big difference on a modern machine with plenty of resources, but trimming down on little things is one of the things that makes Crunchbang faster and more versatile in terms of hardware.  On my old box, I am happy whenever I can trim off even 5-10MB of RAM use at idle.

corenominal now uses Xfce but will provide Openbox as well for users in the next release.

To hell with productivity *runs Wesnoth. contemplates adding a keyboard shortcut for Wesnoth*

On topic, I love the minimalism of Openbox, and an added bonus is that OpenBox treats this machine nicer than XFCE

I don't think Openbox is necessarily lighter in terms of actual disk space, but it's far more nimble and conservative with the system resources.  I'd say it's a beancounter's DE.

I have to say I have fallen in love with openbox's versatility and hack-ability The community is also very nice. The low resources it requires and the endless customization that is possible is just plain addictive.

I've used OpenBox a few times but find Xfce more comfortable for daily use -- in fact just reinstalled from OB to Xfce this morning.  I've been wondering though -- is OpenBox lighter simply because it doesn't have to load all those icons or is it something else. 

I would need some convincing that openbox is lighter than fluxbox, I have a stripped down formerly Xubuntu 10.04 now running fluxbox that idles at about 66mb with conky and network running (it's on a 700mhz p3 with 512mb ram)

I've always found fluxbox to be... how do I describe it... Painful comes to mind.

I find Openbox easier to work with because it doesn't try to be /1000x graphical/ it just aims to be simple: a WM that handles... windows. I personally use Blackbox if I /absolutely/ have to (I actually grew up using WindowMaker) but I've grown to only really feel comfortable using Openbox. I was dissapoint when I couldn't find pypanel again (I like pypanel) but happy when I saw tint2

Okay, this is the first time I've heard Openbox being touted as lighter than Fluxbox.  Can't find a lot of statistics to back it up, but here's one:
http://debian.cante.net/stem/faq/index. … ow_manager
Openbox may be redesigned and take up less hard drive space and need less code, but memory requirements are higher.  I've seen a few other sites that give similar statistics.  I've run Openbox, Fluxbox and dwm on a 64 MB RAM system and done tests with Conky and top and lxtask.  Every test came out with Openbox using about 1 MB more RAM on that system than Fluxbox.  dwm used less (several MB less).  In my comparisons I was running just Openbox, not LXDE (Openbox with other applications like a task bar).

I personally don't find the configuration files for Fluxbox any easier to work with than Openbox, although I have noticed it's easier to make a typo in the Openbox configuration files and have things not work.  There are some good editors specifically for XML if anyone wants to give them a try instead of using a standard text editor with no XML support.  Might help with editing.  A programming editor can at least highlight XML syntax so you can see if you lost quotation marks or something.  I like the obconf program, but obmenu requires Python.  On slower, older computers, I tend to avoid installing programs written in interpreted languages when I can.  They're almost always slower than compiled programs.  If Python isn't installed already, it can take up a lot of room too.  I personally find it easier to just edit the XML menu file in a programming editor.

There are a few things I like about Openbox that have made me end up using more often than Fluxbox of late.  I like the ability to alt-tab through windows.  Fluxbox can do it, but I find it doesn't do as smooth a job switching between windows and sometimes it brings up the wrong one.  It's not an important feature, but I like the logoff dialog in Openbox as well.  I find keystrokes when navigating the menus work smoother for me in Openbox than Fluxbox.  I like having an empty background screen with Openbox (no other tools running) so if I run something like Xfireworks, it can use the entire screen display.  I haven't made much use of them yet, but Openbox also provides pipe menus and I don't think you could provide similar functionality as easily in Fluxbox.