Light-weight Window Manager, Recommendations

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So, I’ve mentioned that I’ve got an original netbook, circa 2009, and I’m going to put CentOS on it. 32 bit. Not huge disk, old Atom processor, not tons of memory. Any recommendations for a light-weight window manager?

Before I went to KDE, I used fvwm2, and all I’m going to do is use it to read webmail and browse, read news, etc, so I don’t need a lot.

mark

4 thoughts on - Light-weight Window Manager, Recommendations

  • I’ve got an Asus eeepc 901, originally with their brain-damaged Linux (which means it has a 4 gig and a 16-gig ssd, whereas the windoze version had 4 and 12. go figure.)

    I used to run fedora on it, with Gnome. before Gnome went to the awful thing they produce now. I mostly don’t use it for much of anything anymore because it is so g-awful slow. I upgraded it from
    1 gig RAM to 2 gigs some years ago.

    I dealt with the split storage by installing /usr on the 16-gig drive, leaving enough room on the 4 for all the rest of root. right now I forget where I was putting swap. Since Fedora removed the ability to split /usr off from the rest of the root filesystem I
    haven’t really messed with it. I suspect it would get pretty tight on that limited storage.

    I also have an Acer Aspire One netbook, somewhat younger than the Asus, it has a dual-core Atom (with hyper threading) but it is still pretty slow, just somewhat less so. It also has 2 gigs of RAM, up from the original 1 gig.

    I use the Mate desktop on it, but I don’t know how that rates in terms of being “light”. I keep, halfheartedly, looking for a lightweight distro to put on it with hopes it won’t be such a dog, but every one I’ve seen that really is lightweight is missing so many features/tools/
    apps that I can’t bear to actually use them.

    So, I don’t know what would be light enough to make it non-painful to use. Should you find something, please post here so I can also give it a try.

    thanks!

    Fred

  • I use Xfce. Got into it on my arm boards with Fedora-arm, and run it on my notebook with Fedora_x64.

    Thing is that it is not a group for CentOS, you have to do the install by apps which I can help with, as I have installed it on a ClearOS7
    server. A few things ARE missing and I really need to submit a bug report about that…

    But Xfce is really good to work with.

    Bob

  • Oh,

    I should mention that I have an Asus ee900 running F21 with Xfce. Works great for what I want it for…

    Bob