A bit of fun, but also serious and looks at RAM usage.
This is for windows managers, so forget about Xfce, Mate, kde (shudder). I'll allow for enlightenment (e16 or e17). No rox/spacefm desktop, just the wm.
My latest tests using the soon to be available antiX-15-beta1-V-386.iso on my hardware in VirtualBox show the winner to be ...
blackbox at 32.6MB RAM
dwm - 34.7MB
spectrwm - 37.9 MB
jwm - 38.3MB
wmii - 38.5MB
fluxbox - 39.4MB
icewm - 39.8MB
herbstluftwm - 40MB
openbox - 45.1MB
e17 - 60.7MB
topic title: Which is the lightest wm on antiX?
6 posts
• Page 1 of 1
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anticapitalista
Posts: 5,955
- Site Admin
- Joined: 11 Sep 2007
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rokytnjiPosts: 4,164
- Joined: 20 Feb 2009
#2
Lightest but easy peasy/
1. Icewm
2. Fluxbox
3. JWM
4. OpenBox
5. E17
The rest. WTF do I know? Just a scooter tramp with limited skillz.
Luser.
Everybody has their own choices/list also. Like ratpoison.
1. Icewm
2. Fluxbox
3. JWM
4. OpenBox
5. E17
The rest. WTF do I know? Just a scooter tramp with limited skillz.
Luser.
Everybody has their own choices/list also. Like ratpoison.
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fatmacPosts: 850
- Joined: 26 Jul 2012
#3
Blackbox was the first lightweight WM that I ever used, it's nice but for some reason I went over to Fluxbox. I had a brief flirtation with IceWM when using Slackware & Debian, before finding AntiX. But my favourite is still Fluxbox. (Even on OpenBSD.) __{{emoticon}}__
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SamKPosts: 1,028
- Joined: 21 Aug 2011
#4
I hope I've understood correctly that"Lightest but easy peasy" means there is a balance to be made between lightest use of RAM, and usability.
In my opinion antiX (i.e. anticapitalista) already does a remarkable job with WMs. I tend to favour ease of use (aka being obvious and intuitive to use) over the amount of RAM used. The above three represent a superb compromise in this respect and should be retained as the core WMs.
The WMs that use less RAM than the above, tend to be much less intuitive (read more difficult) to use. Before being able to work with them, the user is involved in a learning curve to acquire the required skills. This means the user has to be either particularly interested in one of them or motivated to make antiX work on a particular piece of resource limited kit.
The exception to this is Blackbox. If my memory can be relied on, Fluxbox was forked from Blackbox. In this case they will share a similarity of use which will mean Blackbox has a familiar"feel". In turn this will make it a good candidate for those who want to minimise RAM usage yet retain a comfortable GUI.
Just as a final thought, instead of WMs that present as a CLI, how about sticking with WMs that present a more usual GUI and use something like tmux within them.
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://tmux.sourceforge.net/"
linktext was:"http://tmux.sourceforge.net/"
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I agree with this but would place JWM in 2nd position and Fluxbox in 3rd position.rokytnji wrote:Lightest but easy peasy
1. Icewm
2. Fluxbox
3. JWM
[...]
I hope I've understood correctly that"Lightest but easy peasy" means there is a balance to be made between lightest use of RAM, and usability.
In my opinion antiX (i.e. anticapitalista) already does a remarkable job with WMs. I tend to favour ease of use (aka being obvious and intuitive to use) over the amount of RAM used. The above three represent a superb compromise in this respect and should be retained as the core WMs.
The WMs that use less RAM than the above, tend to be much less intuitive (read more difficult) to use. Before being able to work with them, the user is involved in a learning curve to acquire the required skills. This means the user has to be either particularly interested in one of them or motivated to make antiX work on a particular piece of resource limited kit.
The exception to this is Blackbox. If my memory can be relied on, Fluxbox was forked from Blackbox. In this case they will share a similarity of use which will mean Blackbox has a familiar"feel". In turn this will make it a good candidate for those who want to minimise RAM usage yet retain a comfortable GUI.
Just as a final thought, instead of WMs that present as a CLI, how about sticking with WMs that present a more usual GUI and use something like tmux within them.
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://tmux.sourceforge.net/"
linktext was:"http://tmux.sourceforge.net/"
====================================
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thrifteePosts: 604
- Joined: 27 Feb 2009
#5
Hmmm, I disagree a bit. I think JWM is lower than IceWM or Fluxbox once you have a tray and background included.
When you calculated, what tray and background setter did you use? JWN has the tray built in.
When you calculated, what tray and background setter did you use? JWN has the tray built in.
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johnjPosts: 21
- Joined: 06 Jun 2015
#6
This is why I'm picking away at learning JWM. It seems to have all the functionality I want with a very low memory profile and still has a reasonably low learning curve.