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!
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.
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)
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Could try openbox, its old but works. Highly customisable but still 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.
