
A Memory Comparison of Light Linux Desktops - Tsiolkovsky
http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-desktops/
======
zalew
in case anyone is interested in a functional comparison of rather niche DEs,
check this thread on #! forums
<http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=18273> "30 Window Managers in
30 days"

Stacking Window managers

    
    
       Day 1.5 -- Housekeeping
       Day 2 -- jwm
       Day 3 -- flwm
       Day 4 -- fluxbox
       Day 5 -- pekwm
       Day 6 -- twm
       Day 7 -- evilwm
       Day 8 -- windowlab
       Day 9 -- lwm and wm2
       Day 10 -- aewm
    

Tiling Window Managers

    
    
       Day 11 -- scrotwm
       Day 12 -- wmii
       Day 13 -- i3
       Day 14 -- wmfs
       Day 15 -- dwm
       Day 16 -- catwm and dminiwm
       Day 17 -- snapwm and monsterwm
       Day 18 -- musca
       Day 19 -- tmux
       Day 20 -- ratpoison
    

Random Other Window Managers

    
    
       Day 21 -- sithwm
       Day 22 -- euclid-wm
       Day 23 -- oroborus
       Day 24 -- icewm
       Day 25 -- herbstluftwm
       Day 26 -- dvtm
       Day 27 -- sapphire and cwm
       Day 28 -- echinus and larswm
       Day 29 -- xmonad and awesome
       Day 30 -- tinywm

~~~
astrobe_
The author _completely_ missed the point about sithwm, which has actually no
virtual desktops but one big desktop and your screen is the viewport on it.

~~~
zalew
wow, after your comment I just checked out its page and it's an amazing blast
from the past <http://sithwm.darkside.no/> :)
<http://sithwm.darkside.no/menu.png> is it even that eyes follow cursor
thingie? :)

~~~
tadfisher
When I dabbled in writing a tiling WM in python, xeyes was my go-to testing
app. It doesn't grab focus ever, which is nice when you haven't yet coded up
focus grabbing (or keybindings, even).

I would test my tiling algorithms by filling up the screen with hundreds of
eyeballs in a Xephyr instance. My roommate seriously started worrying about my
mental health :)

------
bluedino
Unity and GNOME 3 would be great for comparison - I've seen over 1GB in use by
Unity at times.

It'd also be nice to try to measure CPU overhead when dragging a window around
or just displaying them. Some of the newer desktops just seem slow if you have
older hardware (such as a laptop with a C2D, Intel or older ATI graphics)

------
fusiongyro
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.

~~~
jerf
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.)

~~~
userulluipeste
I presume you wanted to write "133Mhz"?

~~~
jerf
Ha, yes. How times change, when even my cell phone is measured in GHz.

------
tangue
I know it's a bit old, but if you're into this kind of things give WindowMaker
a try. I have a 12 years laptop and it's the only window manager that runs on
it. (and it's quite a good experience IMHO)

~~~
kunai
I love WindowMaker; it has to be one of the best window managers for
productivity. The workflow is just so natural, and it's so easy to use.

~~~
tangue
Linux would have been on par with OSX if all those ressources wasted on Gnome
had been focused on GNUstep.

~~~
kunai
Work is actually being done about it. See the Etoile project:
<http://etoileos.com/>

But I agree, GNUstep is so much better than GNOME/GTK, both as a development
environment and as a working environment. I wish there were more developers
working on the project; development is so slow.

This isn't like Hurd (an unnecessary piece of software that really is
pointless); GNUstep really is a genius piece of software.

------
wtracy
I know I'm being nitpicky, but OpenBox is a clone of BlackBox, not a fork.
OpenBox is written in straight C, while BlackBox and FluxBox use C++.

------
dfox
And what about Fvwm? My setup does not really match modern UI concept (no
taskbar, iconify to desktop icon, floating panel with pager and clock) and the
whole thing with tpb and other hooks into thinkpad ACPI uses about 5megs RSS.
IIRC my friend uses fvwm with more involved configuration (taskbar and QNX-
style sidebar, the whole thing looks like QNX's Photon) that probably uses
even less memory (ie. less running fvwm modules).

~~~
fusiongyro
I loved fvwm. A pain to configure, but you could make it do pretty much
anything. I had integrated xmobar with mine and essentially copied over the
keybindings from xmonad. Not pretty or user friendly but it worked for me for
a long time. Now I'm using KDE, not because it's better especially but because
it got me to stop tinkering with my window manager. :)

You have to admit it's pretty cool what you can do though. I had a dynamic
menu generated off the current slashdot headlines too.

------
doug4hn
Maybe these need to be updated?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers>
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_Window_System_d...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_Window_System_desktop_environments)

------
pjungwir
It's great to have some numbers behind all these options.

As someone who switched to xfce around the time of Unity, but runs on a
desktop with 16 GB of RAM, this article tells me that the differences here are
not worth considering as a reason to pick one WM over another. But then again
I'm using the heaviest option. :-)

~~~
claudius
I switched to Xfwm when Metacity started killing console beeps[0], then
full[1] Xfce when Gnome 3 came around. As such, I can assure you that even
with a mere 8 GB of RAM, there isn’t much of a difference – apart from
functionality, that is.

[0] If you had a terminal window open, "echo \a\a\a\a" would not play anything
if Metacity was running.

[1] Nautilus 2.32 is still sticking around because I rather dislike Xfce’s
drawing of the desktop.

~~~
pjungwir
Slightly OT, but I think developers often over-optimize our technology
choices. That is, we spend more time choosing between two options than it's
really worth, because neither choice is bad. Nothing wrong with doing due
diligence, but at some point it's fair to say "either option is okay" or "non-
technical considerations are more important". I suspect this phenomenon shares
something in common with language wars like Python vs. Ruby.

------
jamesgeck0
Openbox isn't really a Blackbox fork. Early versions were derived from the
project, but there's been a rewrite since then. At this time it shares nothing
with Blackbox other than visual appearance.

------
dschep
Odd that this article neglects to mention that LXDE's WM is OpenBox.

------
zimbatm
dwm is configured by changing a .h file during compile time. now wonder it's
so light :)

------
ISL
Awesome. As a fluxbox user since ~2003, it's nice to see the little guys get
some HN love.

Fluxbox does everything I need, and quite a few things I don't, or need only
rarely.

~~~
fein
I'm in the same boat.

To date, I have not found a solution that works better than fluxbox + emacs +
urxvt.

------
qwertyboy
monsterwm is even smaller than dwm, with 700k of memory (grep Rss /proc/`pidof
monsterwm`/smaps | awk '{t=t+$2}END{print t}')

------
jfb
Every time I find myself in X11-Windows, I use twm. It's there, it's small, it
doesn't promise more than it can deliver.

------
dfc

       sudo apt-get install @lxde-desktop
    

Is the @ a typo? I have never seen an apt-get incantation like that.

~~~
hedwall
No, I think it is a group shortcut. As in install all packages in the group
lxde-desktop.

~~~
dfc
Do you mean task? As in a synonym for

    
    
      apt-get install task-lxde-desktop

------
cosmez
been using xfce4 for years, started because my machine was too slow, now i use
it for every single machine.

somehow, it doesnt feel as fast as it used to be.

