Is anyone else experiencing sentimental vertigo over seeing Enlightenment mentioned in a list of lightweight environments... and actually doing quite well? Back in 1999 things sure were different.
Enlightenment did a good job looking a great deal heavier than it actually was. Back in ~1998 or so I purchased a cheap Pentium 133Mhz laptop with 48MB of RAM (poor student), and ended up settling on Enlightement as the window manager of choice. This was a fairly brutally underspec'ed machine for the time, but Enlightment was doing a fairly good job. I had to use a relatively unflashy theme, but that was no big deal.
(I did get a bit of win running Gentoo on it... yes, I'm not kidding, about either getting a win or running Gentoo. At the time, binary distros were just beginning to consider shipping things other than 486 binaries, and gcc had enough pentium optimizations that using Gentoo could get you noticeably faster binaries, even with very conservative optimization settings. And neither disk space, bandwidth, nor CPU power was so cheap that distros routinely compiled binaries for half-a-dozen architectures like they can now. Enlightement benefited a lot from Pentium optimizations. Nowadays the Gentoo performance win is virtually gone, because $YOUR_FAVORITE_DISTRO probably already has something much closer to your target architecture already available.)
I created a pretty fancy fvwm configuration a couple years ago that matched my xmonad configuration fairly closely (except for the obvious). Never did care for the OpenLook style as much as the Motif style, though neither are fantastic.
