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:
(http://ompldr.org/taDU1Mw) (http://ompldr.org/vaDU1Mw)
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? :)
NICE........ Been a very long time since Ive messed with Window Maker so maybe its time to have some fun :D
Thanks for sharing!
You Guys and Gals should have a look at Livarp.
A great selection of low resource usage WM's
http://arpinux.org/livarp/ (http://arpinux.org/livarp/)
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?
88mb is pretty sweet, so is wmaker.
Doesn't beat my record on FreeBSD though, 45mb on boot :)
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!" ;D
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.