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My machine is seriously underpowered, and I think I need to start conserving every spare cycle. I know that my Gnome environment seems to underperform compared to my coworkers' KDE setups. But if I'm going to make that big of a switch, I might as well consider running something even lighter.
Is it possible to survive on a lightweight window manager and still run modern apps (Firefox, Eclipse, OpenOffice)? What's a good candidate window manager for me to try, and what do I need to know?
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Blackbox — Fast, lightweight window manager for the X Window System, without all those annoying library dependencies. Blackbox is built with C++ and contains completely original code (even though the graphics implementation is similar to that of WindowMaker).
XFCE is one of the most popular lightweight Linux desktop environments around. This is because it seeks to a fairly rich user experience that is appealing and easy to use with minimal resource utilization. Xfce is the default desktop environment in Xubuntu, Linux Lite, Uberstudent, Manjaro Linux and Blackbox.
Xfce is one of the best desktop environments for old computers. It's simple, lightweight, and fast. Most Linux distributions built to run on older hardware use Xfce as their default desktop environment. If you're looking to run Linux on an ancient computer, try Xfce.
The window managers listed below all subscribe to the lightweight and fast approach. They are faster than fully fledged window managers like KDE or Gnome and trim down on most visual distractions. Which one you pick will be mostly determined by your own taste and what you can get to run.
There's a subfamily of these window managers, notably those which attempt to let you do everything by keyboard and let you tile your applications with minimal screen real estate waste. These can feel funny if you come from mouse-oriented window managers. XMonad and ratpoison are members of this family.
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answered Oct 04 '22 03:10
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