Help me pick a WM/DE for my parents

jimlynch11

Ok - let me first start off by saying I've been away from gentoo for a few months due to a disk failure - it's good to be back though.

I'm overhauling my parents laptop because it's been running on Win98 and it seems to be on its last legs - I thought throwing on a minimal gentoo installation would be the best way to extend its life for another few months to a year or so.

My question is, what is the best choice for a WM/DE that is both highly user-friendly (i.e. all point and click, Windows-ish) and not that system intensive? The laptop is a PII 366 with 128 MB of ram, so it can't really be anything that robust - but they don't need anything that robust. All the system is really used for is Email, word processing, and web browsing. The system needs to have auto-login, and I'm going to try to configure it to have bootsplash so the boot/login process doesn't throw them for a loop. I'll be installing OO so that they will still be able to use their old word documents, but other than that, I have no software requirements. I haven't been keeping up with changes over the past 6 months or so, so I'm not sure what the best choice would be for this.

Thanks in advance

Boris27

Apreche · Guru Joined: 18 Sep 2003 Posts: 506 Location: Beacon, NY

your parents, who I assume were windows users will probably have the easiest time with KDE. But failing that xfce4 works pretty good on laptops.

benguru · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Feb 2004 Posts: 125

Well, you said they like and used windows, why not XPDE? It is amazingly similar to Windows. If it doesn't need to be that similar I would recomend XFCE.

shm · Posted: Fri Apr 09, 2004 3:28 pm Post subject:

I'd have to say KDE is ideal, but if it runs too slow for you on that box (KDE 3.2 isn't CPU hungry at all.. but is quite MEMORY hungry), try ICEWM or xfce4.

jimlynch11 · Posted: Fri Apr 09, 2004 4:43 pm Post subject:

Alright, thanks for the input guys...I'll try out a few and let you know what works best.

slikdigit · n00b Joined: 30 Aug 2002 Posts: 73 Location: US

If you're going to set it up for them, the more minimal the better- just make sure they have a menu with the apps they're going to use already working, and they know how to start-stop apps, etc.
On the other hand, If they are going to be doing more of there own thing, then KDE or Gnome might be the way to go, with xfce being a middle of the road choice in between those extremes.
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jimlynch11 · Posted: Fri Apr 09, 2004 5:32 pm Post subject:

I think I should mention that I will be away from the house for months at a time, and thus the machine needs to be fairly self-sufficient from a WM standpoint. I plan on doing admin related tasks via SSH, but would like to keep this to a minimum.