On my Arch Laptop I blew out GDM and replaced it with SLiM and I have added dwm to my list of usable desktop environments. I have no real experience with either of them but I’m working on it. My first thoughts of SLiM on my laptop so far is that it is a pain in the butt to configure. I know its supposed to be “simple” hence the name but I’m having a terrible time getting it to work properly. It lives up to its reputation though. It is very light weight and despite its being lightweight it does look very good. After I get it setup I’ll give a better review of it.
dwm, much like SLiM, has been a rather rough ride. At this point all I’ve got is it up and running. My impressions at this point is that its lightweight. It does have some rather odd, I think their odd anyway, methods though. For example it has not configuration files. Instead all of the configuring is done through the source code. So every time you change something you have to recompile. This is great while the program stays under 2000 lines of C, but when it begins to grow and gain new features that is really going to become a nuisance, if it isn’t already for some users. Past that I haven’t really gotten the chance to use it much. I’m busy doing a lot of other things besides Linux.
I have created Arch Linux Wiki pages for both SLiM and dwm if you would like to check them out. As of this writing I’m the only one who has edited them so feel to change them or submit changes to me if you see room for improvement. Again, as of this writing, I haven’t tried to use either of these with Gentoo though a Gentoo Wiki page does exist for SLiM, though I do not believe one exists dwm, yet.
Enjoy the Penguins!
