Smallest Xwindow for Linux

Question

Hi,

What is the smallest, friendliest Window Manager that I can run on Linux. I currently use Gnome which is a bit heavy.
All I would be needing it for is to run Firefox.

Xfce?

Answer 1

xfce runs much smaller than gnome and is full featured. If you want to go a bit more spartan I'd suggest fluxbox, but there's lots of other choices.

Here's a list of lots of choices, basically anything that's not KDE or Gnome will be smaller.

Answer 2

smallest is probably xfce, most friendly is entirely subjective

Answer 3

I think you mean manager? Anyway, I use a little gem called "evilwm". Takes some getting used to, but it has the smallest memory footprint of any WM I know of, and the single-pixel window borders w/o decorations yields tons of screen real estate, which I use mostly for xterms anyway.

I launch firefox by way of a shell alias, rather than rely on menus icons. Works great!

Answer 4

Gnome is not an Xserver, but a (set of) X client programs. The X server that both you and I are running most likely is X.org.

On top of the X server, you typically have several client programs. The smallest X setup is when you just run an xterm. Invoke "xinit" on a Linux console to find out how that looks like.

A sole xterm is fairly unfriendly, so you typically also use a Window manager. The smallest window manager might be wm2; see http://xwinman.org/ for a list of options. It seems that Blackbox is also fairly small.

Answer 5

You seem to have a terminology problem here.

• Gnome is a X desktop environment. It includes a variety of interaction support libraries, a file manager and importantly:
• A window manager --- which puts decoration on windows, deals with moving, hiding, expanding etc. them

They both run on top of the X server, which really only provides the graphical environment and abstracts the input devices.

So, do you want a minimal desktop environment (XFCE?), and bare minimal windowmanager (TWM?), or a small X server?

Answer 6

Try Awesome Window Manager. It's a lightweight tiling window manager. After learning the hotkeys, it can become a very productive environment.

Answer 7

I always liked FluxBox It's lite, it's quick and it's easy to setup :)

Answer 8

I too think you're asking for desktop environments (like KDE, Gnome, FluxBox, etc), or at least window managers (kwin, metacity, tvwm, twm, etc) and not X servers. If so, FluxBox, xfce or even tvwm might be your best choice.

But.... if you really want to go lower, first replace X.org with KDrive. It's the one used by DSL (Damn Small Linux) and it's much lighter; mostly because it has very few drivers, mainly using directfb API.

Or, you can also skip X completely, and use FF on top of just directfb. here's an old proof of concept patch, and a more recent discussion. (disclaimer, i haven't tried any of these)

Answer 9

try a tiling window manager like xmonad or ratpoison