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Lightweight Window Managers? 50

Posted by Cliff from the small-and-useable dept.
bcrowell asks: "We have an old Intel machine (166 Mhz pentium, 32 Mb), previously used only for playing Civilization, on which I've now got Mandrake running. The problem is, it doesn't seem possible to run KDE in this amount of memory. I've heard about Linux being a good way to run serious software gracefully on older hardware, but not having a GUI is pretty limiting, unless you just want a server. Has anyone used a more lightweight window manager that they could recommend? Are there ways of configuring X, KDE, or GNOME so as to cut down on the memory requirements?" Yes, a simple browse of Freshmeat will net you loads of answers, but I'm sure the submittor would appreciate some of your experiences with the numerous choices of WMs, out there.
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Lightweight Window Managers? More

Lightweight Window Managers?

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  • nuff said

  • XFCE (Score:2, Informative)

    by Bravo_Two_Zero ( 516479 )
    XFCE... oh yes, XFCE. You can use GNOME stuff if you want, but it isn't neccesary. It is especially freindly to laptops and older low-Pentium-class hardware. I use it on high-end systems, too.
    • And a quick addendum to what I just posted...

      FreeBSD might be even easier on the older hardware. All you need is a couple of bott disks for a network install. Plus, XFCE is an option in the ports system. It does not support the range of hardware out of the box that the various Linux distros do (but it can support a lot with a bit of work), but I like it for actually getting work done.

  • xfce (Score:2, Informative)

    by yawble ( 181792 )
    Aside from it looking a bit like CDE of pre-gnome Solaris fame, its actually a nice little wm. Totally configurable, fast as hell, small footprint, everything you could want or need. Even has its own desktop background and sound apps. I actually use this on one of my high-end Dell machines @ work, and haven't had a single problem with it.

    www.xfce.org is where its at!

  • a couple of suggestions. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mandrake ( 3939 ) <mandrake@mandrake.net> on Monday November 26, 2001 @12:12PM (#2613605) Homepage Journal
    First, I would recommend taking a look at blackbox - it's lightweight enough to run on quite a few lower-end machines nicely. Or maybe ion, which is decent for some types of work-related activities.

    And then I would say that a lot of larger desktop environments (gnome/kde/enlightenment/etc) can probably be configured to run slower systems. most of the development work on E (before 0.14), for example, was done on a p120 and a p133. So I wouldn't completely discount these systems if you're used to them - you can probably make them run happily by tweaking configurations in them. Of course, you may not be interested in that, in which case I'd stick with something like ion or blackbox.
    • I second the choice of blackbox, it is what I am using at the moment and what I have used on my old hardware as well which was a p166 with 32Mb ram for a long time, I was using that as a devel box for a long time, it has now been retired to a server.

      May I also suggest galeon as a browser, it is fast, light and should be ok on that hardware, as long as you are running mot much else.

      Good luck :) Take care - RL
    • Blackbox is a great choice - quick, useful... more stable than fvwm. I used a combo of blackbox/kde1 on my RS/6k for a while (note that gcc doesn't do shared libraries on AIX without a lot of pain, so everything takes up far more memory than it should). Blackbox was incredibly faster than kwm, and had a much smaller memory footprint. I haven't tried blackbox with kde2 (the current mess that I use), but I know that by itself it can make older RS/6ks and early Pentium-class hardware feel a lot faster. IceWM provides a little more functionality, and takes a little more memory, but I'd suggest blackbox for any limited situation.

  • Afterstep (Score:2, Informative)

    by grundy ( 151557 )
    I run Afterstep and Mandrake 7.2 (came with that version, don't know why they took it off newer versions) on a 32mb machine at home. Afterstep has a very small footprint. If you are running a different version of Mandrake you'll have to grab the code from Afterstep.org [afterstep.org] (which seems to be dead in the water as I write this)

  • Ctwm (Score:3, Informative)

    by pastie ( 80784 ) on Monday November 26, 2001 @12:13PM (#2613612)
    I use Ctwm, which is a variant of twm which looks a bit nicer but is still pretty lightweight. I've run it for years, on everything from a 386/25 to my current 1.2Ghz Athlon, and I don't find I need anything more to shuffle the windows around the desktop.

    Nice features over twm : Virtual desktops, pixmap `themes' if you want that kind of stuff. Probably others, but I'm a bit of a minimalist so I don't go for WM fluff.

    Obligatory links :
    • I use regular TWM myself. I really don't see teh need for much else. It's fairly customizable and lightweight enough to run on any system that can run X. But if you want a few more bells and whistles Ctwm is good too.
  • I use fvwm2. I like it, and it seems to run pretty well on my old laptop (486DX-50, 12MB). I even run it on my primary box (GNOME and KDE don't do much for me).

  • Some ideas... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Monday November 26, 2001 @12:16PM (#2613630) Journal
    A mandrake help doc [mandrakeuser.org] on this subject.

    WindowMaker runs fine on my 486, as will blackbox, AfterStep, bare Sawfish and the rest. Depending on what you want to do, you may want to try an older distribution instead -- Redhat 5.2 or something like that. Everything in it will be a lot lighter weight so it will be easier than trying to cut a recent distro down to size. KDE 1.x will run faster on that box than KDE 2 does on a 800 MHz system. You can still update all the console stuff to new versions with no loss of performance.

    • I've used blackbox [alug.org] as well for small linux boxes and it's got everything I look for in a window manager with the advantage of being very small.

      I'm not sure I would use an old distribution though. If you ever want to upgrade things, it's a pain in the ass because you go through this massive dependency upgrade first. I have a RedHat 5.2 server still and as soon as I can, I'm going to install a new distribution version on it rather than upgrade all the pieces one at a time.

      Instead of using an old distribution, I would suggest use a more recent distribution and uncheck all the boxes and install just the things you need. Maybe even use one of the tiny footprint distributions out there--there are a lot of them.

  • I ran X (3.whatever, but I'd think 4 would be better, if anything) and fvwm2 with no problem on a Pentium 90 and 32Mb. If it's slow, turn off opaque moves and/or resizes. Use rxvt instead of xterm. You're probably not going to be able to use the Gimp, or do 3-D design work, but it works fine as a development box. It's not the fastest box possible, but it was a nice step up from my 16M 486...

  • Call me a neandertal if you like, but wm2 [all-day-breakfast.com] is my cup of tea. It's bare bones, with a nifty little twist on the window titles. [screen shot [all-day-breakfast.com]] The same folks bring us wmx for those who want just a little more flesh on them there bare bones. I happily run this on my old 133MHz Thinkpad.

    • It's been a little while but.... is this the window manager that says, all customizations are done in the source? I know I've come across at least one wm that had that philosophy.

      Gee, you want a different color titlebar? Change the source.
      • You're probably thinking of lwm. In the description of the various X resources that lwm understands, the author says, "In addition to these ample facilities, there exists a powerful configuration tool called gcc."

        It's a great window manager, although I've moved to Ion, because I hate having to use the mouse.

        lwm : http://www.boognish.org.uk/enh/lwm/
        ion : http://www.students.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/

        (jfb)
    • Dude!! wm2 RULES!!
      It's chief bug is that "it has too many features" (from the manpage)
  • I've had a P.O.S. Toshiba satellite with 32mb of ram in it, running enlightenment without a hitch for about 2 years.

    I've had very few problems concerning ram thus far with enlightenment. I've had around 32 windows open on 16 desktops without issue.

  • Ice Ice Baby (Score:3, Interesting)

    by slobberjaws ( 265320 ) on Monday November 26, 2001 @12:22PM (#2613653)
    my friend had a pentium 100 with 16 megs of ram (recently upgraded to 32) and he had mandrake running on it quite well, for a while he used KDE but he switched to icewm and it seemed to work quite well, it ran at a decent res. and color setting unlike kde. It took me a while to get used to all the right clicking but all in all it was a decent wm
  • I've run twm on a 486 DX2 50Mhz With 12M RAM. Runs pretty good. Otherwise blackbox is also very lightweight.
    • All I ever run is twm. One of these days I'll get around to trying one of the newer window mgrs. I have plenty of memory; it's just that I don't usually work with more than 3 or so windows, and twm does the job just fine.
  • Oh shoot. Since everyone is shouting his/her favorite lightweight WM: how 'bout blackbox?

    It's the one WM we got running really fast on the uni's student server, beats KDE handsdown.

    Then again, ... whatever.

    I liked it anyway. If you want a real fast one, I suggest you try various different WM's (see the responses - including BlackBox, of course ;-) and see which one suits you best.

    --Bel.
    PS: Yes, I have a habit of stating the obvious :)
  • I'll make an obvious recommendation here - go pick up some used RAM at a local computer show or on ebay. RAM is ridiculously cheap right now (you could probably get four 16 meg 72-pin EDO chips for under $20), and you'll have a much better time running KDE/Gnome/etc on 64 megs.

    Linux in console mode will run great on almost anything, but GUIs eat a lot of CPU/RAM. FWIW, I built my mother-in-law a P100 w/ 32 MB RAM and Mandrake 7.2 from spare parts many months ago. The system used a lot of swap, and I ended up upgrading her to 64 MB, but it otherwise works fine (if you don't mind a little tedious boot time - about 60 seconds). It's no Quake machine, but it allows her to surf the web, write e-mail, and use KOffice without any complaints.

    • Re:More RAM? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by kbyrd ( 68962 )
      Some older motheroard/BIOS won't take more than 32MB of RAM. I've got an old HP Pavillion acting as a router. It's got a limit of 32MB. I have no need for a window manager on it though so it runs great!

      KB

    • Re:More RAM? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bcrowell ( 177657 )
      Thanks for the advice, and I'm sure it would be good advice for many people in my shoes. However, this particular machine (IBM Aptiva) is a real pain to buy memory for. When I upgraded to 32 Mb (in order to run Civ CTP ;-), regular generic memory didn't work for some reason, even though it was supposed to work according to specs and standards. After many conversations with a nice IBM tech support guy in Ireland, the conclusion was that IBM-branded memory was what I needed. That was expensive, and at this point, I doubt you can even get the part.

      I suspect this is a fairly common situation: on an old enough machine, upgrading becomes too much of a hassle, and isn't cost-effective either.

  • I use wmx on a laptop with similar resource constraints; I like it a lot for that application because of the inovative way it handles window labels: instead of a title bar at the top, there is a tab on the left, which is more efficient on a little 10 inch screen.
    It had good key binding to reduce mousage, which is particularly helpful with an anoying little pointing stick, but which is becoming habit forming on my desktoip as well, and supports virtual desktops.
    I also occasionally use aewm, which is also nice, configurable, and somewhat more aesthetically pleasing, in a less-is-beautiful sort of a way.
    It's kind of lame, but I had a little more trouble configuring it, which initially steered me to wmx, but that should not influence you at all: I'm a knucklehead.
    I believe that because of the window tabs, wmx excercises the X server more (shaped windows or something), but that has never been noticeable for me.

  • WindowMaker is very nice, it has a small footprint and has a very intuitive (IMO) NeXT style interface.

    I have been using it for quite some time, I always keep coming back to it. Every now and then I venture out and try a new WM but WindowMaker I think is really small and fast.

    It is compatible with GNOME & KDE as well which is nice. So you can run QT & GTK apps as well. For instance, I use that to keep konqueror around w/o running the full desktop

    Actually, I'm not sure how much of KDE starts running when you start konqueror, I know the DCOP service starts and some the other stuff, but I haven't bothered to look any more closely than that. But as far as being a nice lightwieght WM, I think WindowMaker is good.

    I think this discussion was on slashdot a month ago, I'd post the link but I'm tired :)

    • I use WindowMaker daily on my Solaris 2.8 machine. No more CDE, no BrokenWindows, no GNOME, that's for sure.

      Just plain old WM. I have almost all the features turned off -- all I want is a root menu and the ability to change the background image.

      And lots and lots and lots of xterms.

      Oh, the other feature I like is the windowshade-like function (double-click on the title bar and it rolls up).

      Excellent window manager.

      Of course, to each their own. I've also used fvwm and twm on occasion.

      Heck, I used to use a WPS replacement on OS/2 called tmenu.

      The only thing I want out of my window manager is to give me a menu and go away. Simplicity is key. :-)

      --DM

      p.s. And that's got NOTHING to do with lightweight hardware. I have a Sun Ultra 60 on my desktop (dual 450mhz procs, 1gb RAM). Massive overkill. :-)
  • My machine is a bit faster, so I took the luxury of downloading about a dozen window managers from Freshmeat, CAREFULLY read their instructions and ./configure options, built and tested them all. I'm now using oroborus on all three boxes. Its fast, its light, its easy to configure. It requires two programs, one for the wm, one for the menu. Compile it with --enable-gnome=off --disable-debug, and well you get the idea. I'm no guru, but I've found that if I have the gnome libs installed, and programs, ie oroborus, xchat or almost anything else, compiled to enable gnome support run much slower. Compiling programs that optionally use gnome to not use gnome support speeds up almost everything.

    /*---trying not to get flamed----*/
    There is nothing wrong with Gnome, its just a tradeoff between looks and speed. I happen to go for speed in this case.

    Read all the docs, and the output of ./configure --help whenever you build packages, especially for old/lightweight machines.

    here's the oroborus url
    http://www.kensden.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Oroborus /

    /* wow, I was rather redundant there... */
  • Blackbox is nice and lightweight but you could probably find a simple theme for Enlightnement also...
  • Okay, the first thing you need to do is understand the difference between a Window Manager, and a Desktop Environment.

    Gnome and KDE are desktop environments. They run on top of X Windows, providing a number of extra services and features, but they still rely on a Window Manager to handle basic window appearance, changes, etc. XFCE is kind of a hybrid choice. It is a Desktop Environment, like Gnome/KDE, and thus provides many similar features, but it was designed to be lightweight and small. Thus, it falls somewhere in the middle between running just a Window Manager, and running one of the "heavyweight" Desktop Environements. It generally doesn't provide as many features as Gnome or KDE, but it runs faster than either. It requires more resources than a simple Window Manager, but it also provides more features.

    If you want something really lightweight, what you need to do is to stop running Gnome or KDE. Now, note, if you have the Gnome/KDE libraries installed, you can still run Gnome and KDE applicatoins, even when that Desktop Environement isn't running.

    As far as lightweight Window Managers, when Gnome/KDE are not running, almost any basic Window Manager will feel lightweight by comparison. Personaly, I like Sawfish, for it's customization abilities, and scriptability. However, WindowMaker, AfterStep, fvwm2, BlackBox, etc, will all perform fine on that machine.
    • I'm not a KDE user, but I know that newer versions of Gnome uses a rather large file-navigator program to take care of files on the desktop. You do lose a bit of functionality, but I seldom use the desktop anyways. Looking at the resource usage of the running procs, and using that as a guide could help you whittle KDE down to a workable size.
  • I have BlackBox running quite nicely on a Pentium/200. BlackBox is *very* fast and nicely compact while still giving you a lot of configurability and fairly "pretty" interface. With a few rxvts and maybe an emacs, xload, xmms, or a few other utils you'll be just fine. fvwm is another good choice and I'm told sawfish, AfterStep, xfce, and WindowMaker are all compact, but I haven't been wanting for more features with BlackBox.

    I would recommend against running KDE or GNOME as an environment with resources as limited as this. Though I have KDE and GNOME installed on the machine, neither environment is launched by default and generally I only use the libraries when called for by an application I need.

    The tricky part will be to get web browsing working nicely in as small a system as this. Galeon, Konqeror, or the like are nice, but have a lot of memory overhead and will probably have you swapping out fast (obviously, spending a few bucks on memory would be a good idea first chance you get). Opera or netscape is probably the way to go, but I'm not terribly happy with either. At least lynx won't give you any issues!

    ... rjs
  • kde is C++ and while they have made improvements in makeing things strart up faster there are inherent problems in C++ that make it slower than C. Gnome is a little faster than kde (IMHO) , but with only 32Megs of RAM both are dogs.

    Windowmaker is a little better, but fvwm is probably going to be your quickest bet. There is also blackbox and if you install lestiff you can use mwm. I have also heard that there is a window manager that does not allow windows to draw over each other, but forget its name. Many bsders I used to work with loved it as it was quick and easy.

  • BlackBox! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by c.r.o.c.o ( 123083 ) on Monday November 26, 2001 @01:46PM (#2614172)
    I might be a freak, but I use BlackBox on all my computers. From a dual Celeron 466Mhz w/512Mb RAM to a k6 200Mhz w/32Mb RAM. And on my next box, it's still going to be BB.

    It is extremely light wight, extremely simple to configure (I won't call it easy, because it would sound too much like other marketing campaigns). It also accepts WindowMaker and AfterStep dock apps, has a few of its own (pager, etc). This allows you to gain some of the functionality of gnome or kde monitors, etc, without the huge memory footprint.

    It is rock solid. In the year that I have been using it, it has never crashed on me. Mozilla, xmms, quake3, rtcf, and plenty other apps managed to crash my X, but never BB.

    So give it a try, you might like it.

    Another wm I used to use (for 3 years actually) was WindowMaker. It has most of the qualities BlackBox has, but it is a bit bigger memory-wise. And it has a way of placing icons around the border of the desktop that strarted bugging me, and I could never get rid of them. But that wasn't the main reason I switched. I guess after 3 years, I got bored with the same look, and I wanted something different...

    But give it a try too, and pick the best one you like.

  • Ion is neat. It has no bells and whistles. It's the closest thing to a command-line based window manager there is, and it's tiny.

    Some info here [livejournal.com], which points to, ironically enough, here [slashdot.org].

  • lwm and Ion (Score:3, Informative)

    by nosferatu-man ( 13652 ) <spamdot@homonculus.net> on Monday November 26, 2001 @02:00PM (#2614251) Homepage
    The two best lightweight window managers are lwm and ion. lwm is like an even lighterweight twm; you can start xterms, move windows, close windows, and make windows disappear into a right-click menu. That's it; that's all it does. As an added bonus, the binary is something like 26k on an x86 FreeBSD box.

    ion is totally different; it takes over your entire screen, which is very nice for limited resolutions where you don't want pixels wasted on borders, widgets, etc.; it's controllable completely through the keyboard; it looks nothing like any other window manager (in my eyes, a big benefit, as all other window managers are broken); however, it's also quite light on the system.

    I also hear good things about wm2 and wmx, but I can't stand the little tiny title bar on the side, so I don't use 'em.

    Peace,
    (jfb)
  • This really depends on what you intend to do inside that window manager. I recently put Debian 2.2 r4 stable on a 32 MB P-120 box. I have Gnome launching under Windowmaker. Runs great. If I try to run something big under it, say, Mozilla, the disk swapping starts immediately and a page load of Slashdot takes 30 seconds or so via cable modem. Launching a second session of Mozilla or accessing the mail client will leave me with a 3-5 minute wait just to bring the window up. I avoid this by using Balsa for mail, and running Mozilla by itself when I want to browse the web. Certainly I could alleaviate some of the waiting by going with a less resource-hungry browser.

    In short, A decent window manager like Windomaker can run Gnome on a resource-limited box; you just have to stick to smaller applications and/or avoid multitasking on the desktop if you're going to run an advanced window manager or desktop environment.
  • Memory is very cheap these days.

    invest about $25.

  • XFCE (Score:1)

    by rrwood ( 27261 )
    I can not say enough good things about XFCE, a very polished environment (for lack of a better word) by Oliver Fourdan. Go here for more info:

    XFCE Homepage [xfce.org]

    Here's the blurb from the homepage:

    XFce is a lightweight desktop environment for various UNIX systems.

    The XFce project was first started because I needed a simple, light and efficient environment for my Linux System.

    There are now a lot of good environments and interfaces for UNIX based systems, but most are too heavy, or too expensive, or even both !

    I wanted something easy to use and configure, stable, fast, and, at last but not least, visually appealing...

    I believe that the desktop environment should be made to increase user productivity. Therefore, the goal is keep most system resources for the applications, and not to consume all memory and CPU usage with the desktop environment.

    From version to version, XFce became more and more user friendly and easily configurable. As XFce is made for the user, it has to be very simple to configure. That's why everything is driven by the mouse, using buttons, drag and drop, etc., and the configuration files are hidden from the user, although it is plain text.

    XFce 3 is based on GTK+, a free and powerful tool kit widely adopted by many applications.
    XFce 3.x features :

    * XFce, the main panel
    * XFwm, the window manager
    * XFTree, the file manager
    * XFClock, a clock and calendar
    * XFbd, the backdrop manager
    * XFMouse, the mouse configuration
    * XFSound, the sound manager
    * XFGnome, the GNOME compliance module
    * XFPager, the pager
    * XFRun, a small utility to run programs by pressing Alt+F12
    * XFGlob, a powerfull file search tool
    * XFDiff, a great graphical diff frontend
    * XFSamba, the new SMB browser
    * XFbdmgr, a small utility to manage list of backdrops for Xfbd
    * Plus as set of shell scripts for use as Drag and Drop actions for the XFce panel (xfterm, xftrash, xfprint, xfhelp, xfmountdev, CDE2Xfcepal, etc.)
  • I'm in a similar boat. I may be receiving an Acer P150 laptop pretty soon with 16 megs of RAM. I'd *like* to run KDE with Mosfet's Liquid engine for bragging rights at work, but I know that will require gobs of RAM. Since RAM is so cheap nowadays, how much is enough? 64, 128, 256?

    If I go with Blackbox and use KDE apps (most likely), will I still be able to take advantage of KDE's anti-aliasing in Konq & company? I seem to recall not having this ability by default on an experimental install many months ago.
  • The first machine I ever ran linux on was a Pentium 100Mz with 32MB of ram, I quickly got annoyed with KDE as you did and swithed to windowmaker. I still run windowmaker on that box, and I run it on my 500Mz Athlon with 128MB of RAM, and I would never think about switching WMs. RAM is cheap these days, but I have no need to buy any more since I never use what I have already. Even if I had the most cutting edge box on the planet, I would rather run windowmaker than other window managers because it has a nice clean interface and it runs beautifully. If you need the backing of someone with more reputation than myself, the Connectiva Linux distribution ships with windowmaker as the default window manager. Give it a try, and stick with it for a while. It isn't anything like Microsoft's interface, but once you get used to it you will find it is a much better one.
  • Not that I recommend doing it, but I've personally run KDE 1.1 under Linux on a 486 with 20 MB of memory. It ran with no snags whatsoever, other than lots of annoying paging. Of course, it was just an experiment, but it seemed successful.

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