Window manager VS. Desktop Environment!

[Sepero]

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Let's get everyone's opinion on this! What's up? Personally, I have yet to figure out exactly what the advantages are of a DE over an alone WM. Please respond, we want to hear from you. Do you use a DE or only a WM, and why?

[Dolda2000]

Personally, I use GNOME2, but it's extremely seldom that I actually _use_ the DE functions that it provides. I usually just have a couple of xterms, emacs sessions and mozilla windows going. It's mainly just that since I have 512 MB of RAM, I haven't needed to minimize the RAM cost of the system.
I kind of like the GNOME panels, however. They don't take much space on the monitor, and the WM adapts to them, so that windows aren't maximized over them. Then you can add all sorts of applets to them. It's really useful having some system status applets running.
It's nice to have on this forum, though, since it helps me help people through the DE functions, which many often consider more easy.

But for real, it's rather obvious that DEs are mainly for ease of use, and possibly that they look a bit nice. They haven't very much use beyond that, and system interaction through them is much slower and much less versatile than through a shell.

[Sepero]

Concerning my system, I'm a complete power user so I try to get as much functionality for as little a cost to cpu/ram as possible. On my pc I use fvwm. Send in your opinion! What do you choose? Why?

[Dolda2000]

This 512 MB system is really the only high-end system that I have. All other computers are running with 32-64 MB RAM, and range from 66 to 233 MHz. On them, I seldomly run X at all, I'd never use a full desktop environment.
I choose sawfish, though, since I love its extensibility. I know that it is a bit resource demanding, but I consider it clearly worth it. I never run X at all without sawfish, except when experimenting with stuff, of course.

On this system I almost never prioritize low CPU or RAM usage, since there are so many much more interesting things to do than tweaking around to lower resource usage.

[wassy121]

I am a DE man, just because I have been using GNOME2 and helping test for it and stuff. I don't do much, but it is almost like a sort of big project to "clean things up" on the desktop, maybe make it more user-friendly, prettier, etc. Using a desktop environment over a Window manager is what your grandmother wants. She wants something easy, something that looks "clean-cut" so to speak. She doesn't want a lot of functionality, she just wants it to work right, and look right. Using a window manager is the quick way about it. You can do exactly what you want at the right speed, and not have anything to slow you down like window borders, or wasted time looking through program menus when you know the program name.