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!

    • Bipta
      5•1 year ago

      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.

    • Josh
      4•1 year ago

      I second xfce. Stable, lightweight, easy to use, and modern (enough).

  • S410
    17•1 year ago

    Almost everything that’s not Gnome can be considered lightweight, to be honest.

    • edric
      7•1 year ago

      +1 for openbox. It’s fast and lightweight.

    • @AlolanYoda@mander.xyz
      2•1 year ago

      I liked messing around with openbox but I’m very aesthetically challenged so I never managed to make it look good. Any tips?

    • HandlesEnglish
      2•11 months ago

      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.

    • @Cwilliams@beehaw.org
      2•1 year ago

      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

  • bbbhltz
    5•1 year ago

    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)

  • bruhduh
    4•1 year ago

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

    • @library_napper
      4•1 year ago

      Well that’s a disgusting yet easy to remember name

  • @rustydrd@sh.itjust.works
    4•1 year ago

    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.

  • RBG
    3•1 year ago

    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.

  • callyral [he/they]English
    3•1 year ago

    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.

  • fernandu00
    2•1 year ago

    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