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Wterm vs cool-retro-term

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When comparing Wterm vs cool-retro-term, the Slant community recommends cool-retro-term for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” cool-retro-term is ranked 18th while Wterm is ranked 28th. The most important reason people chose cool-retro-term is:

Cool-retro-term mimics the look of old cathode screens. This is just aesthetic, but great for people who want a more retro feel.

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Common Questions

What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?

Pros

Pro
Fast

Wterm is very fast despite using very little memory.

Pro
Memory efficient

Each instance requires only about 6.3 MB of RAM, even with 10.000 lines of buffer.

Pro
Mimics the look and feel of the old cathode tube screens

Cool-retro-term mimics the look of old cathode screens. This is just aesthetic, but great for people who want a more retro feel.

Pro
Good rendering

If you disable every special effect and the framing, the rendering is actually quite comfortable and readable making a good terminal option if you have CPU cycles to spare.

Pro
Good fun

For simple tasks this is wonderful - anyone seeing it will love it, takes me back to using the Commodore Pet in college in the early 80's.

Pro
Available in multiple repositories

This terminal is available for download from repositories in all the most popular distros, making it easily available.

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Cons

Con
The official repository is inactive

The official repository for Wterm seems to be inactive, with open bug reports as far back as 2006.

Con
Not very practical by today's standards

While it certainly has an aesthetic feel, cool-retro-term is nothing more than a cool trick if you want to play around. It's not very useful in this day and age.

Con
Extremely heavy and impactful on resources

A massive amount of resources are used as graphical processing in cool-retro-term. They are ridiculously heavy for the terminal's intended use.

Con
Large dependency on kde

It looks like many of the effects present here are provided by more or less stock kde effect libraries. For Gnome-based systems, installing this will pull in a large handful of kde libs.