Pro/Con Openbox versus Blackbox?
 

Hi, I would like to open this thread about sharing user feedbacks on the subject of Openbox and Blackbox Window Managers. Which one do you prefer, which advantages / disadvn. would you give about them?

Openbox uses more memory than Blackbox.
Openbox is very nice and efficient.
However, based from official WM's dependency list, Blackbox is fine: https://pastebin.com/raw/Jy0tznpC

So far, both are comparable.

THANKS And Best Regards,
Pat'

The last time I used Blackbox was before Fontconfig and Pango. How is it these days?

Blackbox has remained stable, actually very stable. The source code is good.

Openbox uses XML, which is actually not a good thing.

blackbox still worked the last time i tried it (maybe a year ago) but - and i rarely say this - it is dead.
there's no development.

there is no dev, does not mean that it is dead, but perfect !

Blackbox has worked well for me but bbkeys has some issues from time to time. I am a heavy keyboard user and if bbkeys isn't working, I'm stuck. Every once in a while it will just go unresponsive for a short time and then "wake up". No clue why. Switched to fluxbox and never looked back.

Can someone explain why xml is bad for a configuration? It's just a text file format - why would this be undesirable for a configuration file? I get that it was not originally designed for configuration but not sure why this is an issue.

With OpenBox, that actually is the reality here.

Ask anyone who actually uses it.

OpenBox, because more than one other person uses it: I like themes and configs that people make and share.
You nailed it: it's just not that great for configuration. I'd be willing to bet that the choice to use XML had more to do with the fact that it was more convenient to use a library for a known format, even if not the best fit, instead of a bespoke design. In practice it's not a fatal issue.

Understood - XML was designed as a data exchange format because it can not only contain data, but data descriptors. But I digress...

I actually like Blackbox but the bbkeys glitch always makes me dump it after a few days of usage.

I've never used blackbox but openbox is my favorite wm, I like it's ability to be used without any clutter, and it is very customizable.

When Blackbox first came out I used it a lot. Then when Blackbox changed to use bbkeys, it caused people to fork it to create Fluxbox. IIRC that was due to the memory requirements of bbkeys. There were a few flame fests about the change in USENET.

I stayed with BB it because I liked bbkeys and there was something with Fluxbox I did not care for at the time.

Fluxbox improved quickly and BB development was stopped. These days and for quite a while, Fluxbox does everything BB did plus it has some additional functionality.

So the point of all this, if you use BB you will probably not notice any difference if you switch to Fluxbox. I think Fluxbox can still use your old BB style files.

John

^ fluxbox also provides the environment with a "BLACKBOX_PID" variable or some such :)

i used blackbox on windows xp just before i started using linux.
it was good, and had a lot of functionality.
the menu was essentially a filemanager too, and in the eyes of the hardcore users you weren't one of them when you still used explorer :rolleyes:

BB has the smallest memory usage. It takes even much less resource than Openbox, which is of major importance.

If you have a small amount of ram. All of the "box" window managers are efficient with respect to ram.

The problem with RAM is that cheap notebook PC's are usually getting slow, during web browsing. If one keep it very slight in terms of memory, it is possible to increase machine efficiency.

A slight WM is good, i.e. as you call "box", to save memory.

Example: Case of a Raspberry, it is particularly important. KDE runs on it relatively slow, once any web browser is started.