Although Mepis and PCLinuxOS have been my favorite"major" distros, I have lately been more interested in lightweight distros.

When I tried a previous version of AntiX (more than a year ago?), frankly, I was unimpressed. But things change both for the better and worse. I look forward to trying out AntiX 8.0

It has probably been stated before but what is difference between AntiX 8 base vs full?
Is there a package listing for both?

BTW, I have grown fond of two OpenBox versions of Linux, TinyXS (TinyMe remix) and CrunchBang. TinyXS is faster and uses fewer resources but CrunchBang is a more complete Linux with the advantage of access to large Ubuntu software repositories without the relatively slow performance of Ubuntu and its derivatives.

What are the particular advantages you find with IceWM compared to OpenBox?

Welcome to antiX, NewCityVegas.com and I hope you like antiX-M8.

The difference between the full and base versions is that the full version is a complete 'desktop' with apps for office work, multimedia, Internet and email, a few games etc whereas the base version is really for those who wish to build up their own distro from an easy to install and with X set up baseline. Base comes with fluxbox, iceweasel, rox-filer, epdfview, roxterm, MEPIS tools, Xorg, gparted, and a few other apps.

There is a list of installed apps here:


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I personally prefer fluxbox to icewm, but icewm is a bit more friendly to the new linux user than fluxbox or openbox (or it is perceived to be). My experience on my boxes is that both fluxbox and icewm run faster and using lighter resources than openbox. (more so if the distro uses openbox and lxde as seems to be quite a popular combination in a few distros).
I have nothing against openbox, I have used it in the past, but I always revert back to fluxbox.
IMO antiX has the best configured icewm in distroland. A lot of work has gone into it and I think it has also 'converted' a few people to it from even the bigger desktop environments.

Give antiX a try (the full version has fluxbox as an alternative) and let us know your thoughts.

I agree, I have run Openbox, IceWM, and Fluxbox and I find IceWM to be the friendliest. There is not much of a resource difference between the three.

I think some advantages that icewm has over openbox:

1. easier to configure and more configurable.
2. complete - you don't need any extra tools to make it work.
3. comes with a taskbar.
4. smaller footprint.
5. if you use something like lxpanel, then icewm is a bit easier to edit - remember, lxpanel uses .desktop files to populate the menu while icewm uses a simple file.
6. recall that openbox was not meant to be a standalone wm; however, icewm was.

john

OU812 wrote:I think some advantages that icewm has over openbox:

1. easier to configure and more configurable.
2. complete - you don't need any extra tools to make it work.
3. comes with a taskbar.
4. smaller footprint.
5. if you use something like lxpanel, then icewm is a bit easier to edit - remember, lxpanel uses .desktop files to populate the menu while icewm uses a simple file.
6. recall that openbox was not meant to be a standalone wm; however, icewm was.

john

I agree with you John. I particularly like the fact that IceWM comes with a task bar. I don't like to navigate through menus for programs that I most frequently use, so I put these on my task bar if they are not already present. The antiX configuration tools make this easier than ever to do, though at times there is some config file editing involved. The syntax of the config files is reasonable to understand, probably not quite at newbie level, but within the grasp of someone who can look at an existing configuration and make minor modifications to it.

LXDE and Openbox each have certain features that have some appeal, but at the end of the day, I'll still take IceWM. I even prefer it to using XFCE, though each has their advantages and appropriate uses.

IceWM consistently rates well when there are window manager comparison reviews. IceWM may not be the absolute smallest window manager, but the footprint is modest, and all but the oldest systems (the kind where going without X entirely is probably the way to go) do well with IceWM.

I had a 400 Mhz AMD desktop that I no longer use. As it was nearing end of life, KDE and GNOME would still run, but sometimes take nearly five minutes to start up initially, and half a minute to bring up apps; clearly unacceptable. XFCE improved on that - but it was the old XFCE 3.8 version. IceWM, though, could handle that box without any problem at all and gave it at least another year of life before I retired it.