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!
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.
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.
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.
I liked messing around with openbox but I’m very aesthetically challenged so I never managed to make it look good. Any tips?
Protip: It’s impossible to make it look good.
Find someone else’s config that you like online.
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
i3wm is pretty light on resources
Probably LXQt or MATE
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)
Maybe dwm or dwl. I’m a hyprland user but this would be the minimum you should go for
Icewm, antix linux uses it and whole system on startup uses ~200mb ram
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
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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.
I am old school and still use Fluxbox for that kind of work load. Wish they had Wayland support!
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.
Lxqt
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
