I've been doing a lot of informal memory usage testing recently, and I have also been doing a lot of Web browser testing - and checking memory usage while I am at it. What I have found is that IceWM actually consumes a few MB less virtual, resident, and shared memory than Fluxbox. That might be a surprise to some people, but it is something I've thought for some time and it turns out to be the case. If you want to be memory stingy, JWM is about the only window manager, other than some really unusual ones, that consumes fewer memory resources than IceWM. I think we have some good choices in IceWM and Fluxbox; neither of them are pigs, and both seem to be easily customizable. IceWM caters, in my opinion, a bit more to the typical newcomer, whereas Fluxbox seems to cater to the tinkerers, so it is good to have both of them since they are modest in size.

Concerning Web browsers, I've personally been more of a Seamonkey fan than Firefox, but there are a few things you can do more conveniently with Firefox, and that, of course, is to customize it. You can customize Seamonkey, too, it is just a bit more involved, and there are many more Firefox customizations readily available than Seamonkey customizations. But did you know that Seamonkey actually consumes, at least at startup, fewer memory resources than Firefox - and that even holds true if you start up the Seamonkey Email component?

Memory growth in Seamonkey and Firefox is similar, when you add Tabs or view sites with a lot of rich content.

Both the nightly build trunks of Seamonkey and Firefox (Shiretoko is the build that is about to be released - 3.5; Minefield is the usual Alpha test nightly build) can be upgraded every day. Upgrades are generally available between 1-2 AM PST (Pacific Time) - which is 4-5 AM EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) and generally 8-9 AM UTC. To me these nightly builds are worth using; I have not had any stability issues with them, and I personally believe that they run better than the versions they replace. They could be volatile and act up but that has not been my experience; both have worked well.

Beyond that, the Webkit based browsers are starting to look and act very well. On sites exclusively with AJAX content - basically a lot of Javascript, such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and PHP based sites seem to do well with these browsers. Google Chrome is now available on Linux in .deb format from Google, and Midori is available in Debian repos. The Sid version works well; I cannot vouch for Testing; not sure if it is there or not; it was terribly unstable a few months ago, but works well with Google sites now, so if you are going to be Googling a while, Google Reader, Gmail, and iGoogle all work well with Midori.

Brian:

Thanks for all the information. I find that DWM uses up about 10 MB less RAM (at least according to conky) than fluxbox in my system. Did you try DWM in your tests?

Regards,

Pedro

plvera wrote:Brian:

Thanks for all the information. I find that DWM uses up about 10 MB less RAM (at least according to conky) than fluxbox in my system. Did you try DWM in your tests?

Regards,

Pedro

Hi Pedro, no, I did not try every possible window manager combination; I did try Fluxbox and IceWM from our collection, added Openbox, since that has been a popular WM recently, and I added fvwm (and fvwm-crystal, to see how much more the crystal additions add to the equation).

My study was actually conceived because of some other interests in desktop environments, especially the new KDE, and I was wondering if the new KDE would still work on a system nearly a decade old? It will, albeit not very rapidly. That led me to checking a bit into what would work. Basically, most Linux environments would still work, but simple environments along the lines of what we have in antiX turn out to be, at least in my opinion, the best compromise between lightness and speed while offering a reasonably full set of features and functionality. I did not really go up and down the list of all possible desktop and window managers, but I did try out at least five or six different ones.

Thanks for the info on web kit browsers. I've been waiting for the linux version of chrome to get a bit farther along. Midori was fast; I guess I'll have to try it again now that it does google apps.

mariel77 wrote:Thanks for the info on web kit browsers. I've been waiting for the linux version of chrome to get a bit farther along. Midori was fast; I guess I'll have to try it again now that it does google apps.

Keep an eye on both Chrome and Midori, as well as Arora. All three of them are available in the Debian Sid repos - but only Arora is yet available in Debian Testing. I have found Chrome and Midori to be useful (in the Sid implementations). I have not found them quite ready to take over for everything, but I do find them useful to use for the Google based apps.