XFCE - who knew?

Well, my brother called me yesterday to tell me that he loved me. Well, no, but he called me to tell me that I should use the XFCE desktop with my linux box instead of the Gnome desktop that is bundled with Ubuntu. So what does that mean? Well, as I understand it Linux is the actual operating system that interacts with the hardware and handles things like memory allocation and so forth. The desktop is a separate program that runs in the background and manages things like menus, icons, shortcuts, and other "environmental" variables. The fancier the desktop, the more resources are used, and the less resources available for things like, oh I don't know, the programs you want to run. Soooo, when I use XFCE, which is a "lightweight" (i.e., less resource intensive) desktop there is more processor capacity and memory availablef or applications and .... drum roll please ... I can play MOO on the linux box :o) And sure enough, my bro is right, and XFCE is less of a resource hog and so all is right with the linux box. I still may upgrade it, but more for the fun of it. And yes, this post is brought to you by linux. Linux is definitely turning into a Learning Experience for me. If you want to get confused, try reading some of the "non newbee" forums for linux. It's like martians speaking ancient greek underwater :o)

What is actually pretty impressive is that I am positive if I was running Windows this rig could NOT run MOO on Dosbox because Windows is very resource intensive. All that pretty stuff on Windows eats up a lot of capacity, and usually just leads to software conflicts anyway. So, go linux.