Openbox

Having seen some truly awesome screenshots on the Arch Linux forum,
this afternoon I tried switching from KDE (v4.6.3) to Openbox. It was
a fair bit of work to get everything installed (openbox, slim, obconf,
cairo-compmgr, nitrogen, pypanel, gmrun), and then a fair bit of
editing config files to get it looking the way I wanted.

Unfortunately, a few things were a bit buggy. When I first ran
cairo-compmgr, it worked properly, but shortly thereafter my urxvt
windows lost their transparent backgrounds and I couldn’t get them
back again. The cairo-compmgr icon disappeared from the system
tray. At one point I switched desktops and pypanel disappeared.

Also, I really like KDE’s Dolphin file manager. When I use it in
Openbox, however, it sends periodic error messages to my terminal
emulator (even though I did not start it from the command line!) and
these errors would often interrupt my workflow in vim.

For now, I’ve gone back to KDE, since everything works, and works
together, without a lot of hassle. I guess I’ll keep on the lookout
for (or learn how to create) a KDE theme with the nicely minimal look
of an Openbox theme.

If I had an older computer with limited resources, I would probably
take the time to really get Openbox working. As it is, my computer is
powerful and fast, so even KDE doesn’t make a dent in CPU usage.