Why would a light windows manager do me any good if I have a good amount of ram?

[Wallex]

I've been using KDE up to now, and suddenly I decided to give a try to the other window manager that came with SuSE: WindowMaker. Well... it was quite a shock, such a different way to manage things... then I thought I should perhaps go see which window manager I liked because each one of these would need to be 'setup' before I could regularly use it. When it comes to desktop enviroments it always seems to be about the 'resource hungry and nice looking' (KDE and Gnome) versus the light managers. I know the light managers are chosen when one is low on processing power or RAM, but I have 128MB of RAM with 256MB swap, in which way would having a light windows manager benefit me if I don't really run out of RAM anyway?
EDIT: Also... does my choice of windowmanager have any 'significant' effect on the programs I run (maybe up to the point of not allowing it to run)?

[slacker_x]

You don't really want to be using swap or else your computer will really slow down. 128 megs is not really a lot of memory.

$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 407 390 17 0 27 268
-/+ buffers/cache: 94 312
Swap: 243 5 238


That means that I am really using 94 megs of memory right now. I am running fluxbox. I have galeon, x-chat, a couple aterms, xmms, gkrellm, and gabber on my desktop right now. I am running a few services like apache and proftpd. You can see how it really begins to add up. I don't have KDE installed right now, so I can't check and see how much more RAM it would use.

You should check though. I find that KDE is a little too CPU intensive and that I can manage my desktop better with fluxbox anyway.

[Wallex]

Well... okay, sorry for saying I 'had a good amount of RAM', 128 isn't a lot... well, it is for what I do, I normally under KDE don't reach above 80% of my actual RAM usage (maybe because I have not yet tried to push the limits of my machine), an interesting thing is that I tried free -m under kde and windowMaker, and there wasn't any difference (running the same programs).. maybe it was because I just recently opened the programs in KDE when I did the measuer while I had the ones in WindowsMaker running for a while? I don't know... anyway, I am gonna try Fluxbox now since I've heard good things of it... might think of trying enlightment as well. You know.. this 'freedom of choice' thing in Linux is kinda addictive.

[Timothy L. Miller]

Ain't it though?

[blakelock]

Originally posted by Wallex
Also... does my choice of windowmanager have any 'significant' effect on the programs I run (maybe up to the point of not allowing it to run)? [/B]


I'm a n00b so correct me if I'm wrong but I think there are some KDE programs that might not run in other window managers. I'm actually also playing with WM as a replacement to KDE (WM has got a seriously slick look) but got an error message (something about a grpahic setting/capability missing) when I tried to run some KDE program (Koffice I think). However, it might just take enabling of some graphic feature to run the KDE software in another window manager. Anyone know?

[Jomboni]

You shouldn't have any problems running programs designed for one window manager in another. You can even, for example, run KDE programs without having kde installed (you will need kde's libraries installed though.)

The only problem I've ever had was with KOffice under Gnome, in Redhat. It would work but the fonts wouldn't display correctly. I never could figure out why... but I haven't had that problem in debian yet.

[Wallex]

Hypothetically all programs should run under all windows managers as long as you have the libs needed. Altough this doesn't seems to always hold true. When I run Konsole under Fluxbox, the transparent background messes up (it does not get refreshed, so it ends up getting all messed up), that's not a real problem since I am now more used to xterm (it loads way faster). A program that I can't make run under Fluxbox is... ironically enough, fluxconf, it gives me a segmentation fault. I ran it under KDE with no problems and configured Fluxbox from there, so I really don't need that program anymore (plus, all which could be done there can be done from the config menu of Fluxbox).