The Lightweight experience:A comparison of Window Managers

Let’s face it. Sometimes putting out those old computers out to pasture just seems a little too permanent. One option is looking at ‘light weight’ Linux distros that you can run on these systems, thus breathing new life into a tired old computer. Finding the right windows manager for this environment can be a tough choice, but the folks at the Linux Times have put together a great article to help you tackle this task with the quickness.

There is and will be an everlasting “Gnome vs. KDE” debate. The trend is that developers concentrate building distributions around one of the two. But not everyone wants to use Gnome/KDE, mainly because of having older hardware or not wanting to stick with the traditional panel/menu approach. After all, GNU/Linux is about freedom and choice, and there are several good window managers too choose from and to build a fully customized and lightweight desktop.

I will look at five window managers plus Xfce, considering speed, features, and configurability.

The test system was an old-school Gericom compatible laptop with a 233 MHz Intel Pentium CPU and proud 64 megabytes of RAM, running Vector Linux. On fairly new hardware, you will hardly notice any differences in performance.

One of the most popular window managers is the very simple Fluxbox, derived from the even more basic Blackbox. The developers of Fluxbox have added handy features such as window tabs, key bindings, KDE and partial Gnome support.

It’s very easy on resources, many say “it will run on anything with a CPU and RAM”. I don’t know if that statement is true, but considering speed, Flux was the clear winner on my hardware.

Distributions (such as Damn Small Linux) made specifically for older hardware chose Fluxbox as their desktop.