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features not important. only lightness, so light you could run it on the most ancient of machines...
what's the lightest out there?
specifically for my case:
i've been looking a while.
one use i plan to put my discovery to is my gimpstick a usb install of just enough to run gimp (thought about calling it jerg. ) and i want to squeeze the most out of old hardware for the gimp, so, which is it? which is the lightest and will enable the correct layout display of gimp?
tho im sure this collaboration of knowledge will help others too of course. the way of the forum.
Last edited by Siljrath; 10-16-2009 at 10:10 AM.
Click here to see the post LQ members have rated as the most helpful post in this thread.
Actually, I guess there are quite a few opportunities for SW that consumes almost no resources and----does almost nothing!!
Is twm what you get if have nothing in /etc/inittab or ~/.xinitrc and you just type "startx"? I've always admired the simplicity and elegance of the 3 terminal windows---not to mention the impression of being TOTALLY USELESS!!....
features not important. only lightness, so light you could run it on the most ancient of machines...
I'll name a few WM's during this post, but really, even the most ancient hardware that can run linux (that's i386) can run without a single problem much heavier WM's.
Quote:
what's the lightest out there?
Probably one of these: 9wm, aewm/aewm++, antiwm, dwm, larswm, quark, ratpoison or tinywm. Maybe also windowlab and evilwm. From between these, the most feature rich are ratpoison and dwm without a doubt and by far, they are also the less conventional ones and pretty much depend on the keyboard to a big extent.
There are probably some other projects that I am not aware of, and this might be subject to some parameters like architecture, compilation time flags and some system specific settings.
Quote:
specifically for my case:
i've been looking a while.
one use i plan to put my discovery to is my gimpstick a usb install of just enough to run gimp (thought about calling it jerg. ) and i want to squeeze the most out of old hardware for the gimp, so, which is it? which is the lightest and will enable the correct layout display of gimp?
I would choose whatever suits the job better. gimp is going to use hundreds of MBs of ram, and, sincerely, the fact that your WM takes 200kb or 4MB or ram is completely pointless here. It's a drop in the middle of the ocean.
Quote:
Originally Posted by XavierP
I suspect that twm is the lightest - it comes built into X and has no features at all!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Elv13
DWM is the lightest, followed by TWM. You can go for an old version of DWM, it is even lighter.
Twm was never been an example of elegant and efficient code. In fact, in the past fvwm was originally forked from twm (thanks to Robert Nation) as a reaction to the low quality and all the bugs and performance problems that it had. Nowadays twm is stable and a lot of leaks and problems have been fixed, but it's still not the lightest wm around. In terms of resource usage, twm is more in the league of fluxbox or fvwm I think (haven't tested lately I'll admit), which is in the middle range. It's takes only slightly less resources than these, while having almost zero features. That qualifies it for the worst WM ever
dwm is one of the lightest, and it's a good compromise between features and weight. But my personal bet would be fvwm. You can get it running with a very small memory footprint if you compile it without xtf, png, svg and all the goodies if you don't need them. This adds only aesthetic goodies. And you will still have access to all the power of fvwm without these.
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