Memory Comparison of Really Light Linux WMs / Desktops
 

Hello,

I would like to share herewith a graph that allows to compare the memory usage. I stick to low footprint WMs, and I tried to avoid Gnome, KDE,... which would not fit into the graph ;)

* Low footprint:
Evilwm and CTWM are really the best compromise.
JWM is pretty ok.
TWM and FVWM95 are actually both winner (feature + memory usage).

* Much higher memory usage:
Openbox, Icewm, MWM,... are ranked into same category, taking lot of memory.


In conclusion:
Tinywm, Evilwm, JWM, Twm and the fantastic CTWM are today the best Window Manager in the category low footprint.

Which one you rather use?


--
CSV Datafile of mem output:
mwm 13224
jwm 9704
ctwm 4272
evilwm 3872
tinywm 3720
dwm 6288
lwm 4164
wm2 5360
pekwm 12816
lesstinywm 3720
9wm 5288
icewm 19948
twm 7776
jwm 9716
aewm 9380
openbox 24760
fvwm 19864
lxpanel 57356 (added for info)
fvwm95 4308

Interesting summary. I find Fluxbox is not much heavier than dwm and lighter than Openbox - would have been worth testing.

Interesting info, but I've been using Fluxbox for most of my Linux & BSD days, it has more than I need, but is easy to use & maintain. :)
(Previously, I had used Blackbox.)

When I tested various things on Salix, the memory usage (in multiples of 10 MiB on a 32-bit system) was
Icewm 6
Fluxbox, Windowmaker, Pekwm 7
LXDE 8
Enlightenment 9
Mate 13
Xfce 14

But you can get a lot of variation between distros. For Xfce, I got
ZevenOS 9 (98 tasks running)
MX, Vector 12
PCLinuxOS 13
Salix 14
Sparky, SolydX 17
Manjaro 18
Black Lab 20 (140 tasks)

fluxbox and openbox have become very heavy.

no, no, you should really fork tinywm or evilwm and you'll see what it really means performances ;)



what you post is bloated and heavy dependencies dependent.

Here this thread is destinated to tiny WMs, not KDE like wms ;)