Here's a nice selection of fast & efficient window managers in case KDE, Gnome & the likes run too slow.

IceWM ( Nodsu's favourite )



FluxBox



PekWM



You can also mix them, for example use fluxbox with Gnome ( instead of the default MetaCity WM ).

There are quite a few of those faster, more "subtle" WM, if you have any good ones, post them here.

FvWM ( probably one of the oldest WMs )



BlackBox

You left out WindowMaker..

Fedora Core 1 on my work machine:

I did not forget, I just want to leave the chance for a few others to participate.

AfterStep

I guess I'm a sort of extremist here - either full KDE or no X at all

I used to use Gnome + Enlightenment some years ago but changed to KDE (for personal reasons )

Well either KDE or Gnome were way too slow on my K6-2 450mhz. It wasn't a ram problem since that machine has 384mb & more then half of it was empty. I installed WindowMaker & IceWM & they're blazing fast on that machine.

Most of the time it's in Runlevel 3 anyways, since it's only crunching seti but I sometimes use it for something & Gnome/KDE are so unresponsive on it, I sometimes just go back Runlevel to do the commands.

I'm gonna play around with the other available WMs & see which I decide to keep.

Kahakai

BlackBoxWM



*Edit* BlackBox is no longer maintained. Some of the BlackBox programmers are now working on either FluxBox or Kahakai.

XFCE

Here's a review of some of the aforementioned WMs:

NewsForge | Four alternative Linux window managers