actually, no.
it is NOT of major importance.
the amount of ram that a window manager uses is negligible, compared to what other applications use.
simple example:

my web browser with 14 tabs (all of them LQ) uses 6% of my roughly 7000MB RAM, that's roughly 420MB.
mocp plays internet radio and needs 1.42% for that, roughly 100MB.
openbox uses 0.3%, that is roughly 21MB.
even Xorg itself uses more: 0.9%, that's roughly 63MB.

so with these numbers you can see that even if you have only 1GB of RAM, and even if blackbox uses only 5MB, it is NOT of any importance.

Might be. This biggest issue is probably those 420 MB. That's really a lot. OK, RPI3B has RAM: 1GB LPDDR2 (900 MHz).

If you run it on an oldest pentium III or IV, you cannot open a website. AntiX hopefully use a good openbox/*wm manager.

antiX does not use openbox. It comes with IceWM, fluxbox, jwm and herbstluftwm.

Did you see this phrase ?


It was not BB that had the large memory increase, but bbkeys. bbkeys was needed if you wanted to use the keyboard with BB. Kick it off yourself and you will notice it's memory, it may even be more that what blackbox uses. The need for bbkeys is what cause fluxbox to be forked (IIRC).

John

This is probably a good opportunity to ask:

has anyone here used OpenBox without Tint2? I'm thinking of setting up OpenBox again, only with Tint2 replaced with a separate dock and bar (probably Plank and Polybar).

Yes i have, in fact I have a box like that right now, it has tint2 installed but I rarely start it. One of the neat things about ob is just click mmb for your minimized/open apps, no dock needed.

it's things like these that people tend to overlook when they compare windowmanagers.
or even worse, compare window managers to desktop environments.

sure, with xfce4-panel, lxpanel, and fbpanel (fond recommendation for the last).

Yes, not a fan of bars/panels so set some keyboard shortcuts for apps (browser, terminal, files) and customize the root menu to my liking after running menumaker. It's light and fast and being a keyboard junkie, it works for me. The config is sort of wonky being xml but I can live with it.

Then, why not using EVILWM ? There is nothing, bare bone wm ;)

EvilWM is too extreme the other way. Not looking for totally minimal, just a good balance. I have Openbox customized and working well. My machine is a beast and can handle pretty much any DE or WM but I like the snappiness of a (relatively) minimal WM like Openbox. Fluxbox is great too but the I'd have to autohide the bar. I guess I could see if needs to be shown at all - never configured it to do that.

Fluxbox is quite the same as Openbox. You may change the autohide in the source code by commenting it.

Testing with apt-get gave me these results. Blackbox requires just:
while openbox requires:

EDIT @Ondoho:
actually, yes.
it IS of major importance.

Hey are both of those commands run on the same Os?

I get it but I have a ton of disk space and system resources and BB doesn't work for me: bbkeys always freaks out and stops working several times a day. Although I like the look and speed of BB, I am a heavy keyboard user so not having it is a deal-breaker.

Debian is a completely different beast than Void. Dep list for openbox on void:

[paul@bigzbox ~]$ xbps-query -R -x openbox
glib>=2.18.0_1
libX11>=1.2_1
glibc>=2.8_1
libXcursor>=1.1.9_1
startup-notification>=0.10_1
libopenbox-3.6.1_2
libSM>=1.1.0_1
libICE>=1.0.5_1
libXinerama>=1.0.3_1
libXrandr>=1.3.0_1
libXext>=1.0.5_1

bbkeys needs a bugfix.

You can use xbindkeys. It is rather a good one. You can setup with xbindkeys -k >> mynewkeys. The config file is .xbindkeysrc.

Wow, did not know that, thanks for the tip! I love the simplicity of BB but the bbkeys issue always made me switch.