After several years of being a devoted KDE/beryl user, I’ve decided to go minimalist, specifically at work and on my laptop.
The reasoning? Primary my work computer keeps causing me problems. After several hours it tends to lock up. On occasion during one of these lockups, I have been able to execute the top command from one of the virtual terminals, showing that Beryl is using up 98% of my CPU consumption. Typically, I kill beryl, logout of X, log back in, restart Beryl, and I’m good to go for another few hours. After my last lock up, I got tired of restarting Beryl.
In addition, I thought a tiled window manager would be more effective for work, maximizing the full real estate of my screen, while taking advantage of my keyboard for navigation instead of my mouse.
Finally settled on wmii (for now). I’ve been using for about a week now. Still working on tweaking it to suit me. My first frustration was locking the computer when I left my computer for a few minutes. KDE had a nice Ctrl-Alt-L to lock the computer. After a little trial and error, I came up with the following:
alias lock='/usr/bin/xscreensaver-command -lock &'
Works like a charm. Would like to eventually bind that to a keystroke combination.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with my new setup.
