[Resolved] Minimal WM environments and modern computing power

Question

Hi, I'm not trying to start any flamewars with this thread.  With that out of the way, I'll continue.
I have wondered quite often why there are always some (or more than some in this community!) people in every linux community that prefer to run a very minimalist setup.  I will find no shortage of people who have i5/i7's with 8GB of Ram and gods know what else in their hardware.  However, these same people insist on running a WM that would be just as happy on a 386Mhz with 128MB of ram and using a coloured Hercules, or Trident, video card.*  Why do that to your super-fast-with-gobs-of-ram-and-cpu-power-computer ?  What is the rationale behind doing so?
I subscribe to the philosophy that unspent/cached ram is wasted resources/ram. I've seen others say the same thing and that question is never really answered or rebutted (no, I'm not asking for a rebuttal, just pointing out my observations).  And this begets the next question about other computer habits a lot of people have, such as trying to squeeze out as much power as their system can use but they still use a blank wallpaper and wonder how else they can "optimize" their setup.  I don't get it.   
As I'm Canadian, I'll issue a blanket apology in advance to any people I've offended and/or people whos goldfish is in emotional torment due to this thread.
*To anyone too young to remember these things, feel free to look them up on Wikipedia, or the like, and see how the old guard used to do computing.  You'll be fascinated or horrified; guaranteed either one of those emotional states will show up when you start the reading frenzy on Wikipedia.
Last edited by MoonSwan (2011-09-04 00:42:18)

Answer 1

First off, let me just say that as an American I find the entire idea of Canada vulgar, blasphemous and inconsiderate of my feelings. 
Second, to answer your question:  I'm actually getting a new Thinkpad next week with the works:  i7 quad-core, high-def monitor with dedicated Nvidia graphics card, mSata 40-gig SSD along with a 750-gig HDD--the only thing in it that's "standard" is the 4 gigs of RAM.  And still, I'll be using Awesome with it (though I'll probably try out KDE with it just for curiosity's sake, just like dhave said in his post above).  Most of the reasons here have been covered, but I'll  chime in anyway:
- Have you ever noticed that with certain apps (e.g. music players, backup programs, bittorrent clients) you actually spend more time monitoring them than interacting with them?  It's nice to have all those windows neatly arranged and available at a single key-press, rather than needing to jerk my wrist around every two seconds just to see something.
- Most minimal WMs offer users finer control over their working environment and, since they aren't updated too frequently, usually provide a stable environment that only needs to be configured once in a great while.
- Newer, more powerful hardware + bloated software = wasted money, really.  If the only advantage that GNOME or KDE have to offer is making the things I do throughout the day look fancy, then I feel like I've been cheated in a way.  Spending $1200 USD on a new laptop which, in a couple of years, won't run KDE any better than my current one does now doesn't seem like a sound investment.  Running a light-weight environment on that same hardware will guarantee that it runs faster than what I have now, and will stay that way for years.  Really, the definition of "software bloat," in a practical sense, is essentially "Software which over time requires greater resource expenditure to accomplish the same basic tasks of its predecessor,"  which fits both of the big DEs.  I should also point out that I use several KDE apps and enjoy doing so; it's Plasma and KWin that eat up more than their share of resources and bog my system down.
- Frankly, the more control you wish to exercise over your own setup, the less practical the big DEs seem.  If I wish to control package management, network utilities, system monitoring, disc burning, and music playing from a terminal--while using a graphical file manager, bittorrent client, feed reader and web browser of my choice, as well and things like GIMP occasionally--then all a DE really ends up providing that I can't get elsewhere is a window decorator and a panel.  Of course, in some cases the DE's equivalents of the utilities I mentioned end up getting installed anyway, so they just eat up hard drive space without getting used (we're privileged enough to largely avoid this problem in Arch--thanks, devs!).
Really, it's a matter of personal taste; I largely agree with your view on RAM, although I don't like using anything that simply eats it up for no good reason.  I like to reserve RAM for things like web browsing, /tmp and preloading app files.