It's been a long time since I've had to care about how much RAM a window manager uses. I know about Fluxbox and Blackbox and e17 (if that's still a thing).

My use case: A server that sits in the same room as my main desktop. It runs a VM which runs all the network services for the house: DNS, samba, NFS, MariaDB, etc. 99.9% of the time I will SSH into it. It's connected to the second input of my monitor in case something happens with the NIC and I can't SSH in. I'd have to double-check but it only has 1 or 2 GB of RAM.

I guess the best scenario is just don't run X at all unless there's something I can't do without the GUI. But let's just say there may be some instances where it'd be nice to have a GUI already running.

What's the best WM in that situation? One of the tiling WMs like ratpoison or W3 (or something like that)? Or is Blackbox fine?

blackbox is lighter than fluxbox or e17.
i think others are even lighter - xmonad springs to mind, or dwm (suckless.org).

i still doubt the logic of your argumentation.

the x-server itself will use more resources than a lightweight wm.

also, couldn't you start an xsession only when needed? i can't think of a single reason to have it constantly running, just sitting there for the 0.01 chance of ssh failing.

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You make a good point, of course. I'd mostly just figured that out as I was writing the question and figured I'd see what people would say.

Gotta agree with ondoho. If you don't need one, why bother installing one?

Not sure it can hurt to run one I'd think. 2G ram should be OK for home use and a gui. If you do install something then install something that you can use easily. Some of the minimal ones are pretty basic and to run programs you may have to spend your day downloading ways to run gui programs.

At one time webmin was pretty popular to manage systems.

Been working on a desktop system for lfs using mostly only lfs/blfs stuff here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ct-4175542914/
Still in thevearly stages but only requires xlib/cairo/imlib2/udev for a window manager and desktop, I'm trying not to add too many large 3rd party libs like gtk etc, try it and let me know what you think, you need to build from source.

X & WM not needed; use mc, & perhaps screen/tmux.

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I know WindowMaker and E16 are nice and light. IceWM is also pretty light, and although I've never actually got around to compiling it, I imagine CDE is pretty light.

Might want to try some of these in a VM and see what you like and what you don't before you go installing them on a server.

I once tried several, all with Salix to eliminate any "distro effect", and made a note of the results. The winner was Icewm; the others tried were Openbox, Fluxbox, Pekwm, Windowmaker, and Enlightenment. If you are really mean about resources, try twm!

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