Openbox + tint2

Previously I was using Xfce4. Then, because of the heavy working environment, I tried the lighter desktop environment, LXDE. But still, it has some limitations that made me choose to use Openbox window manager only.

Pros and cons of Xfce4

Xfce4 is lightweight comparing to GNOME or KDE. I like it, because of the conventional design like the task manager. Furthermore another thing I like is the “aerosnap” feature like Windows, which I can view the two windows side by side. However, when running Windows in VirtualBox and other applications, I can feel the obvious slowness in the computer. It is really reducing my working performance. That is why I decided to change to LXDE.

Pros and cons of LXDE

LXDE is lighter than Xfce4. So, running a lot of heavy applications does not slow down the computer like Xfce4. But there was one issue I faced. The LXDE pager (workspace) does not allow me to drag and drop the applications to move among the workspaces.

As a result, I decided to use something lighter than Xfce4 and I can drag and drop the applications among the workspaces easily.

Openbox and tint2

I had experienced Openbox with tint2 when I was using my old laptop. Openbox is nice and highly customisable. Tint2 allows me to set number of workspaces, and easily to move the applications to other workspaces. However, tint2 does not have applets or plugins like Xfce4 or LXDE.

There is one feature I need, that is to see CPU usage, so that I know whether there is any application causes high CPU usage. As a result, I installed Conky and display the CPU usage at the corner of the desktop.

[caption id=“attachment_1300” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”] Openbox + tint2[/caption]

Conky

For the Conky, the following is the conky.conf

[code] conky.config = { alignment = ‘bottom_right’, background = false, border_width = 0, cpu_avg_samples = 2, default_color = ‘white’, default_outline_color = ‘BBBBBB’, default_shade_color = ‘444444’, draw_borders = false, draw_graph_borders = false, draw_outline = false, draw_shades = false, use_xft = true, font = ‘DejaVu Sans Mono:size=1’, –by size 1 then only there will have no space after cpugraph gap_x = 0, gap_y = 2, minimum_height = 5, minimum_width = 5, net_avg_samples = 2, no_buffers = true, out_to_console = false, out_to_stderr = false, extra_newline = false, own_window = true, own_window_class = ‘Conky’, own_window_type = ‘desktop’, own_window_transparent = true, own_window_argb_visual = true, own_window_argb_value = 255, stippled_borders = 0, update_interval = 1.0, uppercase = false, use_spacer = ’none’, show_graph_scale = false, show_graph_range = false, double_buffer = true, imlib_cache_size = 10, }

conky.text = [[ ${cpugraph 27,40 000000 FFFFFF -l} ]] [/code]