OSNews

What's missing is ... high quality light weight applications that have a consistent look and feel.

I recently installed Debian on an old 500MHz system (which I upgraded from 333MHz), and 2x128MB (256MB total) of RAM (which I upgraded from 2x32MB).

Honestly, I was just experimenting with the old system to see what I could do with it. What I consistently found was that the operating system generally wasn't a problem. I tried Win98SE, BeOS 4.5, BeOS 5.0.3 Pro, Zeta 1.2, Win2K, and Debian (whatever the weekly build was of Etch at the time.)

Except for Zeta and Win2K, all the other operating systems really did "fly" when doing basic operations. Especially BeOS 5.0.3 Pro.

Unfortunately, as soon as you load Firefox, Abiword, Thunderbird, or some of these other applications that are (at least were at one time) considered "light", the machine just dies.

IceWM was one of the Window Managers I was running during the Debian install. So - I am in fact on topic here. But the main point I'm getting at is that you can run the lightest Window Manager of all time, or even no Window Manager at all with X11 (just use -geometry to place all your apps) ... but are there enough light weight apps to compliment the light weight Window Managers these days?

The whole point of Phoenix (which became Firebird, which became Firefox) was to be a highly functional, graphical, and LIGHT browser alternative to Mozilla. But I think 1.0.7 was the last version that felt even remotely light weight.

leafpad/mousepad is probably my favorite graphical app. Seriously.