10 ms·

What's window manager they are using? It must be light weight to run on just on 1G of RAM.

by wildduck 7y ago

Koshkin 7y ago
To be fair, WMs do not use much RAM, it’s DEs that do.
- wildduck 7y ago
  What is the distinction between DEs and WMs?
  - cipherboy 7y ago
    A DE is a desktop environment and includes niceties like text editors, settings applications, music playered, and things that make an ecosystem. Gnome and KDE are the two most popular DEs. WM is a window manager and just handles well, window management. Sometimes that included decoration and styling, usually it includes moving and closing and minimizing them. Think, Mutter, Sway, or fvwm. A WM is a subset of a DE.
  - cat199 7y ago
    wm just manages windows, DE is usually this + a full application suite e.g. preferences UI, File Browser, web browser, photo viewer, etc, etc, etc and some kind of 'component' mechanism so that those pieces can interoperate better (e.g. file browser reads from some settings application to determine what photo app to open things with)
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    A DE manages user’s view of applications and, in general, the overall user experience (usually in the GUI setting); it also provides an API for applications to seamlessly fit that experience. Window management is but a small part of this.
e12e 7y ago
Oh wow, now I feel old. I remember compiling and running Java course work on a laptop with 8MB of RAM. The display was monochrome, and the compiler literally took ten minutes to spin up (as go get, and drink a cup of coffee before it's done - probably swapping like mad). But it worked well enough with x11 and fvwm. I see i was on a supercharged "pro" workstation with that much ram, though: http://www.fvwm.org/history/ http://www.fvwm.org/history/ > There were two or three reasons for starting FVWM and RXVT. First, I had a need 33 MHZ 486 laptop PC with only 4 MB of RAM, and I thought linux and X11 were way better than the windows versions of the day. X11 with TWM and xterm would run on my PC, but just barely.
- wildduck 7y ago
  Wow. Looks like a lot of old computer can be put to good use.
- anthk 7y ago
  fvwm was always faster than TWM, even if at a first TWM runs faster. Also, TCL would be faster than Java :)
  - earenndil 7y ago
    Maybe back then, but nowadays I'm pretty sure java is a lot faster than tcl.
    - e12e 7y ago
      Actually the small Java gui app (tick tack toe, or something like it, I think) ran fine. And I think the startup problems with javac might have been solved too (use less ram) - but I never did get around to it. I think I tried IBMs "jikes" compiler, which I think was (at least partially) implemented in c++. But mostly I was just shocked anyone could think running a wm could reasonablyrrequire a gig of ram...
      - anthk 7y ago
        >But mostly I was just shocked anyone could think running a wm could reasonablyrrequire a gig of ram... Eh, most people run Fvwm/Blackbox/WMaker with 16MB/32MB of RAM. 8... well. To be confortable enough, maybe with NetBSD, FVWM, URxvt, a ultraslimmed kernel and jikes/any tiny Java compatible VM.
earenndil 7y ago
...huh? My window manager is currently taking about 65K of RAM, and X is using ~800K. Granted, I run a pretty lightweight setup, but a 'normal' ship can't be 4 orders of magnitude higher, can it?
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  Maybe for "normal = GNOME/KDE"?
- exikyut 7y ago
  I cannot believe those numbers. I've never known X to use 800KB of RAM. IIUC it needs to hold at own one screen-sized framebuffer in memory, which is ~5MB on my system. Practically speaking Xorg right now is using 460MB of virtual memory, 39MB resident, and 22MB shared (and that's _without_ Chromium running, ha). And i3 is using 56MB virtual, 33MB resident, 32MB shared. Also, for reference, "sleep infinity" uses 2324K virtual, 704K resident, and 640K shared. You might be able to beat that by working entirely in assembly language and using hair-raising allocation tricks like using the few KB of stackspace kernel gives you as your heap...? I'm not sure.
  - anthk 7y ago
    OpenBSD: SIZE RES 47M 41MB Xorg 2324K 9328K cwm
  - earenndil 7y ago
    Won't the screen-framebuffer be on gpu? Also, virtual memory shouldn't really matter. Anyway: $ ps aux|egrep -i '(xorg|fvwm)'|awk -c '{print $2}'|xargs sudo pmap -x|grep 'total kB' total kB 808332 124808 86204 total kB 64920 15724 2984 total kB 61656 14428 2400
    - lokedhs 7y ago
      That's 800 MB, not kB. Even the smallest process in your example is 14 MB.
    - 7y ago
sigzero 7y ago
It looks like Openbox. I see openbox and xfce in the packages listing.
winrid 7y ago
I'm pretty sure regular Ubuntu would even run fine on 1gb! Would probably eat half your ram at idle though.

What's window manager they are using? It must be light weight to run on just on 1G of RAM.

Koshkin 7y ago

To be fair, WMs do not use much RAM, it’s DEs that do.

wildduck 7y ago
What is the distinction between DEs and WMs?
- cipherboy 7y ago
  A DE is a desktop environment and includes niceties like text editors, settings applications, music playered, and things that make an ecosystem. Gnome and KDE are the two most popular DEs. WM is a window manager and just handles well, window management. Sometimes that included decoration and styling, usually it includes moving and closing and minimizing them. Think, Mutter, Sway, or fvwm. A WM is a subset of a DE.
- cat199 7y ago
  wm just manages windows, DE is usually this + a full application suite e.g. preferences UI, File Browser, web browser, photo viewer, etc, etc, etc and some kind of 'component' mechanism so that those pieces can interoperate better (e.g. file browser reads from some settings application to determine what photo app to open things with)
- Koshkin 7y ago
  A DE manages user’s view of applications and, in general, the overall user experience (usually in the GUI setting); it also provides an API for applications to seamlessly fit that experience. Window management is but a small part of this.

e12e 7y ago

Oh wow, now I feel old. I remember compiling and running Java course work on a laptop with 8MB of RAM. The display was monochrome, and the compiler literally took ten minutes to spin up (as go get, and drink a cup of coffee before it's done - probably swapping like mad). But it worked well enough with x11 and fvwm. I see i was on a supercharged "pro" workstation with that much ram, though: http://www.fvwm.org/history/ http://www.fvwm.org/history/ > There were two or three reasons for starting FVWM and RXVT. First, I had a need 33 MHZ 486 laptop PC with only 4 MB of RAM, and I thought linux and X11 were way better than the windows versions of the day. X11 with TWM and xterm would run on my PC, but just barely.

wildduck 7y ago
Wow. Looks like a lot of old computer can be put to good use.
anthk 7y ago
fvwm was always faster than TWM, even if at a first TWM runs faster. Also, TCL would be faster than Java :)
- earenndil 7y ago
  Maybe back then, but nowadays I'm pretty sure java is a lot faster than tcl.
  - e12e 7y ago
    Actually the small Java gui app (tick tack toe, or something like it, I think) ran fine. And I think the startup problems with javac might have been solved too (use less ram) - but I never did get around to it. I think I tried IBMs "jikes" compiler, which I think was (at least partially) implemented in c++. But mostly I was just shocked anyone could think running a wm could reasonablyrrequire a gig of ram...
    - anthk 7y ago
      >But mostly I was just shocked anyone could think running a wm could reasonablyrrequire a gig of ram... Eh, most people run Fvwm/Blackbox/WMaker with 16MB/32MB of RAM. 8... well. To be confortable enough, maybe with NetBSD, FVWM, URxvt, a ultraslimmed kernel and jikes/any tiny Java compatible VM.

earenndil 7y ago

...huh? My window manager is currently taking about 65K of RAM, and X is using ~800K. Granted, I run a pretty lightweight setup, but a 'normal' ship can't be 4 orders of magnitude higher, can it?

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
Maybe for "normal = GNOME/KDE"?
exikyut 7y ago
I cannot believe those numbers. I've never known X to use 800KB of RAM. IIUC it needs to hold at own one screen-sized framebuffer in memory, which is ~5MB on my system. Practically speaking Xorg right now is using 460MB of virtual memory, 39MB resident, and 22MB shared (and that's _without_ Chromium running, ha). And i3 is using 56MB virtual, 33MB resident, 32MB shared. Also, for reference, "sleep infinity" uses 2324K virtual, 704K resident, and 640K shared. You might be able to beat that by working entirely in assembly language and using hair-raising allocation tricks like using the few KB of stackspace kernel gives you as your heap...? I'm not sure.
- anthk 7y ago
  OpenBSD: SIZE RES 47M 41MB Xorg 2324K 9328K cwm
- earenndil 7y ago
  Won't the screen-framebuffer be on gpu? Also, virtual memory shouldn't really matter. Anyway: $ ps aux|egrep -i '(xorg|fvwm)'|awk -c '{print $2}'|xargs sudo pmap -x|grep 'total kB' total kB 808332 124808 86204 total kB 64920 15724 2984 total kB 61656 14428 2400
  - lokedhs 7y ago
    That's 800 MB, not kB. Even the smallest process in your example is 14 MB.
  - 7y ago

sigzero 7y ago

It looks like Openbox. I see openbox and xfce in the packages listing.

winrid 7y ago

I'm pretty sure regular Ubuntu would even run fine on 1gb! Would probably eat half your ram at idle though.