Normally I go with the defaults, but on my netbook for linux work on the road I didn't want to lose a lot of screen real estate to menu bars and window ornaments. Honestly I was only using X because the dark blue on black text in some emacs coloration was illegible, but fixing the console to get dark blue far enough off of black to be legible eluded me.
I nearly got there with 'slim' and 'awesome' and one of the terminal emulators, but then when I needed to pop up gimp for the odd image fix it was unusable. (tiled window manager meets the legion of floating windows with strange ideas about window manager hinting.)
I hate to say it, but it wore me down. I relegated the netbook to machine room console duty, bought a lighter main laptop, and just use VirtualBox to run my portable linux machine. My laptop load is 50% lighter, and the virtual linux box is faster than the netbook anyway. A much better solution. (and dark blue on black is legible on this machine).
>tiled window manager meets the legion of floating windows with strange ideas about window manager hinting
In case you still care, XMonad has some special configs to allow gimp to crap its windows all over some virtual desktop (which I recommend you reserve solely for gimp).
Normally I go with the defaults, but on my netbook for linux work on the road I didn't want to lose a lot of screen real estate to menu bars and window ornaments. Honestly I was only using X because the dark blue on black text in some emacs coloration was illegible, but fixing the console to get dark blue far enough off of black to be legible eluded me.
I nearly got there with 'slim' and 'awesome' and one of the terminal emulators, but then when I needed to pop up gimp for the odd image fix it was unusable. (tiled window manager meets the legion of floating windows with strange ideas about window manager hinting.)
I hate to say it, but it wore me down. I relegated the netbook to machine room console duty, bought a lighter main laptop, and just use VirtualBox to run my portable linux machine. My laptop load is 50% lighter, and the virtual linux box is faster than the netbook anyway. A much better solution. (and dark blue on black is legible on this machine).