"Light-weight" WMs - How low does yours go?

[busprof]

In Linux communities like this, sooner or later someone will start a "my WM is lighter than your WM" thread.  Might as well be me this time

My primary WM is and has been Window Maker for a good long while now.  I know I'm in a distinct minority, but there are a number of reasons for my preference, and the "lightness" of Window Maker is just one.  I've been working on a recent Debian Wheezy netinstall on an older laptop, and I happened to check resource use with htop a few minutes ago.  Here's a screenshot of the output:



That's right, friends - 88Mb!  I've used i3 and some other very light WMs, and I don't recall seeing anything much less, even with all the bells and whistles Window Maker provides compared with the tilers out there.  Granted, this is with only a few applications / services running (two terminal instances, htop, a weather app, an acpi monitor and a few of the usual background things that are largely unavoidable) but really, if you are looking for a light WM - why not Window Maker?

Anyway, I've started the "how low can you go" thread, so I guess the VSIDO forum is on its way to maturity, right?

[lwfitz]

NICE........ Been a very long time since Ive messed with Window Maker so maybe its time to have some fun

Thanks for sharing!

[mrneilypops]

You Guys and Gals should have a look at Livarp.
A great selection of low resource usage WM's

http://arpinux.org/livarp/

[busprof]

It seems to me that a previous livearp release had Window Maker along with the other WMs included.  Linuxbbq's "Oyster" (maybe?) also has - or had - Window Maker + a baziilion or so other WMs.   I wonder why the livarp developer(s) dropped Window Maker?

[dizzie]

88mb is pretty sweet, so is wmaker.

Doesn't beat my record on FreeBSD though, 45mb on boot

[Digit]

had the arch version of rowan witch happily sat on the (scrotwm) desktop, with the tilda terminal and htop open... 24mb.   someone once said they saw 19mb.  i had the scrot of at least 25mb iirc.  ... but i dont have it anymore (not that i know of, havnt looked)...  so i suppose that didnt happen, and i'll be quiet now.

... but do check out scrotwm.  it's a lovely lightweight tiling wm, easy to configure for basic stuff you're likely to need, no weird "you must recompile to configure" suckless-philosophy (as in dwm) and no "you must start fathoming haskell and hackagedb and xmonad's library to reconfigure" (as in xmonad, obviously).

i imagine "sscrotwm" will be even lighter than "spectrwm".
(no that wa not a typo, two "s", the extra one for shrivled)

and.. what say ye of tinywm...  is there tinier?  but does it still have a tiny footprint while running.


...bet i've seen though, not just wm, but the whole system of course, was rat gentoo.  how does 10mb apeal to you?  with some lighter choices, i bet that could be even less. 

but when you get to that level, you are making decisions and compromises too far into loss of features.   i prefer to think in terms of features to footprint ratio, rather than just a bottom line number for the footprint, with no awareness of features.  ...  otherwise, we'd just not run a computer at all!  "look!  zero mb!" 

nice thread.   will keep an eye out for anyone dropping past with some great tip, or new ultra-light wm, or some old revisited obscure wm we never gave the time.