1y ago

recommendations for lightweight window managers for an old netbook

Hi, I've got an old netbook from Samsung that has an old Intel Atom CPU (Intel Atom N455 1.66 GHz). I installed Arch on it and am now thinking of a suitable window manager. I tried Hyprland (kinda expecting it to not work really) whick didn't start at all. Before I had Debian with Gnome, which technically worked, but everything was extremely slow.

I've used Gnome for a long time, but I know that there are a lot of other window managers out there. I would like to have one that avoids graphical gimmickry in order to be fast. (I like some nice little graphical details, but only if it's still running buttery smooth).

If you have some tips that would be very nice!

EDIT: thank you for all the recommendations I'll try out a few!

37 comments

Xfce
https://xfce.org/download
- Xfce is the best bang for your buck. Lxde isn't much lighter and I never enjoyed using it. I think Lxqt is somewhere between them.
- I second xfce. Stable, lightweight, easy to use, and modern (enough).

Almost everything that's not Gnome can be considered lightweight, to be honest.
- Maybe except KDE
  
  No. S/He's right. Anything (including KDE) is better than gnome.

Could try openbox, its old but works. Highly customisable but still lightweight.
- +1 for openbox. It’s fast and lightweight.
- Since Wayland is lighter than X.org, LabWC could be another option. It is not fully compatable with Openbox, but most Openbox configs work on LabWC
- I liked messing around with openbox but I'm very aesthetically challenged so I never managed to make it look good. Any tips?
  
  Find someone else's config that you like online.
- A bit late to the party, but especially for an older machine I'll take Openbox any day. I still have some low range 2015 laptops running just fine where something like KDE would choke them up completely.

i3wm is pretty light on resources

Probably LXQt or MATE

Maybe dwm or dwl. I'm a hyprland user but this would be the minimum you should go for

Just a window manager? Not a DE?
Under X11 there is Openbox, bspwm, herbstluftwm, dwm, i3, Awesome, Ratpoison, spectrwm, Qtile, ...
Under Wayland: Weston, LabWC, Wayfire, Sway, River, Cagebreak, dwl, ...
I keep things pretty dull and use Openbox + LXQt. It is a stacking WM that is stable, and LXQt is snappy.
If you are looking for a light DE LXQt is very light, Plasma is lighter than it used to be, but it also has loads of features. Xfce has more options for configuration than LXQt and I think it isn't quite ready for Wayland.
Maybe Sway would be up your alley?
(Note to self: check https://arewewaylandyet.com)

Icewm, antix linux uses it and whole system on startup uses ~200mb ram

Used to have an Eee PC running CrunchBang (Debian + Openbox). Really lightweight and simple (some potential for customization), and it was enough to carry me all the way through university.
- I loved CrunchBang. Wish it was still around.
  
  There is BunsenLabs, I think that's its most immediate successor. https://bunsenlabs.org/
  
  There is crunchbangplusplus. Check it out and relive it.

Arch user here. Never had any problems with Sway and Hyprland, but still... ratpoison is what you are looking for.
- Well that's a disgusting yet easy to remember name

On my old asus eeepc I used to have arch with i3 as a tilling window manager for a while. It was taking a bit to get used to but once I worked it out and configured it how I liked it, it was fantastic. Used it for several years until I had to write my thesis and needed something stable for my operating system.

Try qtile, it's got great documentation and is relatively easy to configure, as it's configuration is done in python.

Lxqt

I am old school and still use Fluxbox for that kind of work load. Wish they had Wayland support!

I have the exact same netbook and specs and I installed fedora lxde a couple months ago just to see how it would go and..it's pretty decent performance if you use it just to browse the web or text editing.. Installed vscodium and it got laggy as hell though ... Had to use geany instead

why not Dwm ?

dwm (or dwm-flexipatch if you dislike patching manually)
- This or any tiling window manager, because small screen. If dwm is hard for you, try with bellow options.
  i3wm was my first, but now I'm happy with my actual dwm config.
  Awesomewm starts as a dwm fork, but with all included and easier for beginners.
  There are a lot more, but I start with this.
  You get better screen use space and smaller memory requirements.
  But your real big problem, is going to be web browser, all of them consume insane amount of RAM because of web bloat, and always is going to be a problem. Just 1 tab open and a lot of patience.
  My old netbook had just 1GB ram, later I did an upgrade to 2GB and was the maximum possible.
  
  i guess the best you could go for web browser lightweightness would be qutebrowser, or maybe emacs' eww?

for lightweight, i would recommend LXQt (qt) or LXDE (gtk). XFCE also seems pretty nice.
also, you could check out i3 and bspwm if you a tiling window manager.
i would've recommended sway, but it sounds like you didn't have a very nice experience with hyprland, and that could be because it uses wayland.

Is you specifically want a wayland compositor like hyprland, you can try sway or qtile. I've also heard good things about river but never used it myself.

- Reading is hard.

37 comments