Just got around to upgrading the fleet (5 years late) and was content enough with my setups that I haven't kept up with changes over the years. When I'm using virtualbox I prefer the most minimal X environment possible, so I can allocate more resources to the guest. Are the *box wm's still king of the hill in this regard?

Do you mean Blackbox and Fluxbox?

I guess, unless you like tiling window managers, they probably are. I mostly use Fluxbox.

Yeah, I'm a fluxbox user myself. I like the configuration options being very open and editable too. I was just wondering if any new lightweight wm's have proven their worth over the past 5 or so years of my inattention, if so I'm in a try-it-out type of mood during setup. Currently using LXde on Debian 10, and I've used IceWM and Xfce but they're a little heavier than needed for the application (though not by much). The desktop in mind for this is just for running FreeCAD, Blender, and virtualbox to run Matlab, Mathcad, and SolidEdge in Windows(tm) if needed. Basically I need just enough "X" to open gui windows.

I haven't heard of any new WMs being released in that time.

The only new,significant lightweight WM released during that time period that I can think of is LXQt which is basically a rewrite of LXDE from Gtk to Qt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXQt

It might be worth a look if you really like Qt but other than that fluxbox sounds perfect for your described use case.

I would consider LXQT to be more of a light-weight desktop environment than a window manager.

I haven't used it, but I have used LXDE and, I must say, it was quite nicely done.

It's not a window manager, it's a desktop environment, and it still uses openbox as its wm, just like LXDE does.

I also use openbox, for many years now. Without any LX* DE.

OpenBox and i3 are quite popular, and I like them both.

I always use fluxbox except on my laptop, where I like IceWM because it has a builtin battery monitor.

I've used the GKrellM system monitor for years (I like its compact footprint). I use it, and it has a built-in battery monitor.

Openbox and Fluxbox are my lightweight WMs of choice, but I don't think there are any kings of the hill. I was just taking a look at antiX-19, which ships with multiple WMs but has IceWM as the default. Of course, lots of other users prefer a tiling WM. From what I've seen, not much has really changed over the past several years with the WMs out there.

And you can set up the battery monitor to spam you with xmessage(1) when the battery level falls below a specific percentage. That has saved me many times when I forget to check the monitor in gkrellm

John

I've been using the tint2 panel with Fluxbox, instead of the Fluxbox toolbar. tint2 has a built-in battery option that shows the battery charging status.

You know, it just occurred to me that one could write a simple battery monitor using gtk. Basically it would be a small docked window containing a vertical progress bar. The program would run in a loop, reading the current charge from /sys/class/battery, turning it into a percentage of the original charge, and then updating the progress bar with that percentage. It could bleep in warning when a certain level was reached.

Lots of WMs have toolbars these days, & aren't much heavier on resources, so it's just a case of picking one that you like.

I've been using fluxbox for years, but openbox is just as good, or you can have a quasi DE like IceWM or JWM, still very light weight.