A quest for the perfect Window Manager

Recently, I have been trying to choose a window manager (WM) that will suit my needs. The search has been long, and it's far from over. I hope u don't mind reading through my experience as I went on this quest.

When I first started looking, I was using WindowMaker as my WM. Initially, my "needs" were speed, speed, and speed. I have a 500 Mhz box, u see, and I resent even a two-second delay when I deal with my computer. So I went for a "pure X" WM - FVWM. This WM was *fast*, and the memory usage was the least of all WMs that I tested (about 500kb). However, configuring this WM was a royal pain in the u-know-what. The configuration possibilities were endless, and I seemed to be taking forever to come to grips with them. Why, even getting a keyboard shortcut to work properly took me about ten minutes! Also, fast though it was, it wasn't pretty. There are people online who say that it *can* be made to look pretty as well, I wasn't ready to put in the effort. Not for now, at least.

So the quest continued. I stumbled uppon FVWM95 (an FVWM fork that aims to be a Windows 95 clone). I left that alone. Then came Joe's Window Manager (JWM), which was very small indeed. Compilation : a mere 20 seconds, on MY machine. However, it was far too less configurable. I tried fiddling with the source, and even managed to overcome a deficiency (that of switching to the previous desktop - my first attempt at modifying source), however, there were far too many issues. Then there was IceWM. I can't recall why I left it ... ahh ... yes, the rendering was slow in some cases. Whenever I switched to a desktop with a Gnome app, redrawing was a bit slow. Not acceptable. Also, it had a far too many binaries (executables), one for managing windows, other to set ur backgrounds. Ditto with Blackbox, which needs bbkeys to get keyboard shortcuts working. I also tried Hackedbox, a hacked version of Blackbox, optimized for speed (or so they would have me believe). There was also TWM (comes with all Redhat installations, I think), but it has no support for virtual desktops. I moved on.

I had given up by now. In fact, I had decided to switch back to WindowMaker. Then a thought hit me - whenever I am *working*, I am in the console mode. I even have a console player (mpg123) that plays songs for me (with a randomized playlist, which is important for me :). All I use the GUI for is the internet, and maybe a few games. Not very demanding applications, are they? Then why was I looking for a lean-n-mean gui environment? I decided to revert back to the old console while working, and into the gui only at time of _leisure_. Now that speed is not one of my concerns, "looks" has taken over. While I am at it, I'm trying to get the best gui environment that is out there. I have decided to go back to KDE. Here's a screenshot of my latest desktop. It may not be the coolest one around, but I hope I am getting close!

BTW, notice the wallpaper ... does the lady bear any resemblance to Aniston?

Here's a close-up ...