What window manager do you recomend for lowering ram usage?

[sunjam]

Currently on Manjaro Arm Plasma, but I'd love to use something that is even lighter.  Suggestions?

In the past I enjoyed Openbox and Ratpoison.  Hear good things about i3, but haven't run it.

[Arwen]

I don't know how light it is, but XFCE4 is pretty light weight. After the Gnome 2.x -> 3 debacle, (meaning Gnome 3 was so different, it might as well been a different product), I moved to XFCE4. It seems pretty well supported. I use Gentoo Linux on my 3 other computers, and my prior job gave me a RedHat 7.x laptop that also supported XFCE4.

[sunjam]

Thanks, I did use Xfce on the original Debian release for the Pinebook Pro.  It has similar memory consumption to Plasma, maybe 100mb usage difference.  I'm wondering if there is a different window manager out there that is even lighter... perhaps I can build something with Manjaro ARM minimal installation - https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/a...-installer

Thanks for the suggestion.

[KC9UDX]

You can't beat twm.  ctwm might also be good enough, but is more modern-friendly.  To make either one a little more modernish, you can add a panel from xfce without installing all of xfce.

[shjim]

Currently on Manjaro Arm Plasma, but I'd love to use something that is even lighter.  Suggestions?

In the past I enjoyed Openbox and Ratpoison.  Hear good things about i3, but haven't run it.

Manjaro i3  is very well done ,stable and easy to use ..  I removed Plasma and installed Manjaro i3  and never looked back while i was on manjaro  ..

[appelgriebsch]

Currently on Manjaro Arm Plasma, but I'd love to use something that is even lighter.  Suggestions?

In the past I enjoyed Openbox and Ratpoison.  Hear good things about i3, but haven't run it.

Manjaro i3  is very well done ,stable and easy to use ..  I removed Plasma and installed Manjaro i3  and never looked back while i was on manjaro  ..

You might also check out the ManjaroARM Sway image... a good starting point is (ahem) my blog post about it: https://www.appelgriebsch.org/004-manjaroarm/

The very cool thing on the Pinebook Pro: just flash an image to microSD and test it first before deciding to install it on eMMC..

[Surehand53]

Currently on Manjaro Arm Plasma, but I'd love to use something that is even lighter.  Suggestions?

In the past I enjoyed Openbox and Ratpoison.  Hear good things about i3, but haven't run it.

I find LXQt provides a good compromise in size and usability. It is even a bit 'lighter' that Xfce. You end up in the ~300-400MB at startup area.

You could even use KWin as window manager, which will use the OpenGL acceleration and allows for a bit more blink blink.
That gets you roughly to ~450MB at startup. As you have plasma already, you can just try it. The only thing is that the configuration is then splitt between LXQt and KDE for the wm settings. Still, works well.

You can get much lower with a tiling window manager like e.g. i3, awesome-wm, spectrwm or sway but you loose also a bit of out of the box functionality.

Also interesting is wayfire for Wayland. Like Sway there is still a lot of active development around the wm and Wayland itseelf, but I find it quite pleasant already.

[xyzzy]

Does fvwm still exist? That was my go to WM back when 8 MB (yes, megabytes!) of RAM was enough to run X with only a little swapping.

[sunjam]

You can get much lower with a tiling window manager like e.g. i3, awesome-wm, spectrwm or sway but you loose also a bit of out of the box functionality.

Also interesting is wayfire for Wayland. Like Sway there is still a lot of active development around the wm and Wayland itseelf, but I find it quite pleasant already.

Thanks for these suggestions.  I'm certainly open to switching over to tiling since I've used Ratpoison before and generally find myself keeping things simple since the PBP is a simple device with only 4gb ram.  I hear lots of great thoughts about i3.

Wayland definitely sounds interesting.  How heavy is running Wayfire or sway?  I'm okay with jumping over to it since X is not important to me on this particular laptop.

[rimaille]

As an openbox fan, i tested xorg on the pbp, but the experience is much more satisfying with wayland (main developers of the graphic driver panfrost use wayland).
At boot, with sway, 231Mo are used.

And if 4Go are short, why dont you use zram ? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/imp...m_or_zswap
I use it and cpu impact is low enough for me to forget compression is used.