Gnome-less desktop: which WM?
 

Hi All,

Gnome is great but can be an overkill and slow things down.
I'm thinking of not loading gnome (commenting gnome-session in .xsession) and using a lighter WM (window manager) instead of metacity.

Any suggestions on such a WM?. Requirements:
* easily configurable (defining hot-keys, pop-up menus) by text files (no code recompilations)
* compatible with wmctrl
* small memory and CPU footprint
* fast, stable
* no/minimal eye-candy.

Cheers,
Mike.

Gnome is a desktop environment, not a window manager.

Fluxbox is a minimal window manager. Basically it just
puts decorations around your menus ... hence, window
manager. Everything under the sun is configurable
in ~/.fluxbox/*

Thanks for replying.

What I meant is that I consider not loading Gnome at all (including metacity) and using only a WM.

Cheers,
Mike.

Awesome meets all five of your requirements... but it's not for everyone.

Cheers,

Evo2.

Thanks. What exactly does that mean?.

Well, I'm going to chime in with Icewm, and Fluxbox is also a good choice, as noted above.

You could install a few of the light-weight WMs mentioned above and give them a test-drive and see what you like.

I have KDE4, Icewm, and Fluxbox environments on my computer. I use Fluxbox or Icewm when I want to actually get things done, without the distractions of KDE4. I can't decide whether to keep Icewm or Fluxbox installed, so I've kept them both for the past 5 years.

you can also look into Xfce, its a desktop environment like Gnome. but much leaner and faster.

It does both stacking and tiling window management and is configured in lua.

Most people aren't interested in learning lua (even thought it is a very simple language), and most people seem to prefer to manually manage windows with their mouse rather that have their window manager do it for them.

Cheers,

Evo2.

LXDE was already mentioned, but I'll mention it again, as it's my current favorite desktop environment. If you really just want a window manager, openbox is used by LXDE, but not dependent on it in any way. Another wm you might want to consider is jwm (the default wm for Puppy Linux). Then there's always e17.

Thanks everyone for replying,
Mike.

Fluxbox meets your criteria.

Configurable menu, configurable hotkeys, fast, small, and versatile.

It has been my window manager of choice for at least three years.

You do not have to remove and replace Gnome or KDE or any other desktop environment or window manager. Heck, my Slackware box has about seven or eight environments. If I need to, I can switch into KDE or XFCE, but Fluxbox is my default on all my computers.

I gave a presentation about it to my local LUG. The handout might give you an idea of Fluxbox's versatility.

Thanks Frankbell. That presentation looks interesting.

So what are the major differences between fluxbox and icewm mentioned above?.

Also LXDE mentions openbox
http://lxde.org/lxde

Any experiences with that one?.

Cheers,
Mike.

Openbox, absolutely.
I think all of the *box-WMs will do the job.

I only use Fluxbox without any other desktop environments or windows manager and it works great. It even looks pretty good in it's simplicity. I never understood those desktop filled with graphics, icons and taskbars like you have to maneuver a space rocket and not an usual computer.

"Easy" is a subjective term, but going farther, "code recompilations" is also a bit subjective. Well, not that much, but there's really not much difference between using Lua in Awesome versus using Haskell in Xmonad, even if in the former case you don't recompile anything...

You didn't say whether you would be willing to use a keyboard-driven tiling WM, so you probably wouldn't.

About every modern WM is. Specifically, wmctrl works with EWMH/NetWM hints, so any WM obeying these will work with wmctrl. *But*, really, most modern standalone WM's do not need wmctrl for anything because they already have lots of functions builtin. There are some like Openbox that are quite configurable, there are some that are simpler (Fluxbox), there are some that are dumb (Metacity, WindowLab, EvilWM) and there are some others that are really configurable like Fvwm, Awesome and most tiling WMs.

This is a bit subjective as well, there are WM's that will take less than 1 MB, *box WMs will take several MB's. Fvwm can be as light or heavy as you wish but it's probably the one that will give you the most functionality using only 3-4 MB of ram. Once you start loading modules the story is quite different.

They all are small enough so they are well tested and stable, even if you use development versions. In which regards speed, it all comes down to what do you understand by that word. In WM's you can measure speed in many ways (boot time, time to map a given window, responsiveness...).

I'd start with fluxbox, then try openbox if you need extra power, if that's still underpowered for you then go fvwm, sawfish, awesome or something else.

Thanks for the detailed reply i92guboj.

I've actually tried xmonand before. The auto-tiling concept sounds promising in theory but in practice, at least for me, it didn't work well.
For example, applications which open multiple windows (such as gimp) get poor window layout. Specifically for xmonad, it uses haskell for its config file and haskell isn't the easiest language to learn (I'll refrain from debating whether it is reasonable for a WM to require users to learn a new programming language in order to configure it).

Cheers,
Mike.

You can have different (more typical) window layouts for different apps like gimp. Xmonad can work quite well, in my experience much better than other tiling WM (specially when it comes to multihead systems) but it requires quite a bit of learning and manual fine tunning to suit your tastes.

Openbox is a nice window manager. Note that it does not have a biult-in taskbar, so you need to find a panel app you like.

You can also use it without a panel: right-click on the desktop for a customizable menu (by default it contains a few launchers for popular apps), and middle-click on the desktop for a menu of all windows on all desktops.

sawfish
 

I only saw the wikipedia page, but openbox sounds good too.
I want to recommend you "sawfish". Fluxbox is not bad, but I think it has an ugly bar you can't delete... when I was, like you, searching for a gnome-less option, I tried it for a while too, but only till I found sawfish. sawfish uses rep, a lisp like programming language to write any kind of configuration script you want, so if you know emacs lisp, for example, you can add your own scripts. But without knowing any lisp whatsoever, you can use the customizable options to match a window and move it to a desired desktop, change any binding, make your own bindings for only the programs you want to, have windows use different frames, control the WM from the command line, etc.
And the best part (in my opinion) is that it doesn't bring anything more than the customizable menu that pops up when you press the middle mouse button.

Since 0.9.4 you can use ./configure --disable-toolbar to avoid building it. You have to compile it yourself probably though.