Not just the window manager [LWN.net]

Not just the window manager

Posted Nov 18, 2011 0:03 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way by nix
Parent article: Awesome: A window manager that gets out of the way

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.

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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.