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Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the wayAwesome: A window manager that gets out of the wayPosted Nov 17, 2011 9:56 UTC (Thu) by simhay (subscriber, #72874)Parent article: Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way
I switched to awesome after Ubuntu's switch to Unity as the default window manager, (I haven't really taken to Unity), and after switching I'm a total convert, awesome now runs on my work desktop, my home and laptop. The configuration is so flexible and the main benefit for me is that I don't leave the keyboard as much and this wm really does stay in the background as I want the applications to be my focus.
The fact that it has a very small footprint is great and I like how it doesn't try and do too much, just enough and nothing else.
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Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way Posted Nov 17, 2011 13:14 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
<blockquote>
The fact that it has a very small footprint is great </blockquote> I don't understand why anyone other than those on antique hardware care about this. These days footprints only impact what you are doing with your machine if they are titanic (e.g. OpenOffice), if you run lots and lots of them (e.g. shells), or if they use a large amount of CPU time and thus the effect of increased icache/dcache hit is significant. But a window manager? You run one of it and it spends 99.99..% of its time asleep. Why would anyone with modern hardware care if it occupies 5Mb or 50Mb? (Hell, I personally wouldn't care if it occupied 500Mb, but I do realise that my desktop is overspecced.)
Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way Posted Nov 17, 2011 14:03 UTC (Thu) by chsnyder (guest, #52714) [Link] The fact that it has a very small footprint is greatI don't understand why anyone other than those on antique hardware care about this. Efficiency is still valuable, even in a world of limitless resources. Less code means fewer bugs and easier maintenance. It tends to indicate that a lot of intelligent thought went into design and development. Also, absent actual benchmarks, perception is nine-tenths of performance.
Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way Posted Nov 17, 2011 17:15 UTC (Thu) by krakensden (subscriber, #72039) [Link]
He's probably noticing that Awesome doesn't have the lag and jitter problems that compositing window managers have, and is erroneously attributing it to the small footprint.
From a user's point of view it's very reminiscent of the bad old days when swapping was common. But don't worry guys, even Windows 7 and Lion (Apple has been working on the compositing thing for what... ten years now?) still stutter and stall just like Compiz. I'm sure it will be like this forever.
Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way Posted Nov 17, 2011 21:29 UTC (Thu) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link]
Indeed, what you point out about lag is true. Look no further than this: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2011/08/rendering-a...
Although machines may look over-specced, we still get various lags introduced by drawing. For example one thing I seem to replicate frequently with KWin is starting a high resolution video full-screen, and running KSysguard at the same time: the video will stop for a short instant every second, with metronome regularity. Fortunately at least memory is cheap enough swapping is history.
I guess these disappear only after you take every code path and ensure none takes takes more than a fixed period of time, in a sort of RT systems fashion.
Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way Posted Nov 17, 2011 17:56 UTC (Thu) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link]
One reason why I still care about a small memory footprint is that even though I have a sensible amount of memory for my devices every now and then I run something demanding huge amounts of memory.
Having to wait for far too long till the 2-6GB of Memory used by desktop applications are paged in again afterwards is a really annoying pita. And I definitely want them paged out while I need the memory for something else...
Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way Posted Nov 21, 2011 14:54 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That's a very good point. As soon as *anything* exhausts memory, the footprint of *everything* starts to matter... mea culpa, I'd almost forgotten what it was like to run with seriously constrained storage.
Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way Posted Nov 21, 2011 15:19 UTC (Mon) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link]
Thanks for agreeing ;)
Not sure what youre refering to with constrained storage though. The system I notice this most is a low-end server class/high end workstation hardware...
seconds. Yuck.
Obviously in reality it won't be quite that bad and the situation can improve considerably if many process are swapping in (because then you suddently don't have only one synchronous request going on at the time) or if you start doing readahead on swap...
Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way Posted Nov 21, 2011 22:31 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The "constrained storage" I meant was "you have run out of memory", really. I was just being excessively general in my terminology...
Not just the window manager Posted Nov 18, 2011 0:03 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I don't understand why anyone other than those on antique hardware care about this. [...] But a window manager?Antique hardware is not the only reason, and the window manager is not the only problem. The overhead of "modern" desktop environments can be pretty high: hundreds of MBs are not atypical. Having a netbook as my primary machine has many advantages: it's light, silent, has an integrated UPS, and I just unplug a few cables and put it in my backpack when I need to travel. However my Eee PC 1000H only supports 2 GB of RAM (recently upgraded from 1 GB), and I don't like swapping to disk; so if I want to get some work done (I'm looking at you, Android SDK) and have a couple of open browsers at the same time with 10s of tabs, I basically need a low resource window manager. I realize that XFCE can be considered "bloated" as compared with e.g. awesome, but it is familiar and it basically works for me, so I have not really researched any alternatives.
Not just the window manager Posted Nov 18, 2011 8:04 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
This is a similar thing which got me to drop to a custom setup. Okular triggering X to get the OOM kill in the middle of a presentation was unacceptable. Sure, the machine had 512MB of RAM, but it's what I had.
I got that machine booted on a stripped down Fedora (still the default kernel) with ~60MB of RAM used. 80MB after starting X. It also rebooted in 45 seconds (Internet to Internet...manual login and ifup) with Fedora 13 or so. My F15 machines boot with around 200MB used, though Rawhide has it back down to the low 100MB range.
At work, I have a system in a VM that needs quite a bit of memory (relatively; 6GB has usually enough, but my machines have only 8GB), so stuffing my system in beside it for some development (though not too many builds) pretty much rules out the DEs as usable.
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