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Table of Contents
Stacking window manager: Comparison
- cwm a lightweight and efficient stacking window manager for X11
- fluxbox very lightweight window manager, easy to handle but yet full of features
- icewm lightweight window manager which resembles the UI of Windows 95
- openbox highly configurable stacking window manager
- windowmaker a window manager designed to emulate NeXTSTEP's GUI
- twm very simple window manager, included in the Xorg distribution
- fvwm3 Next generation of fvwm
- jwm window manager with an interface similar to Windows 98
RAM usage
On: Artix Linux
From high to low in kB
Recommendation
Recommending a window manager is not easy, because it is also a matter of taste. We did a little non-representative poll at Mastodon and here are the results:
| openbox | 9 Votes |
| fluxbox | 8 votes |
| cwm | 4 votes |
| icewm | 4 votes |
| windowmaker | 2 votes |
| twm | 1 vote |
| fvwm3 | 0 votes |
| jwm | 0 votes |
The recommendation is a mix of these poll results and our criteria. Actually, we have two recommendations.
For beginners
Many stacking window managers are easy or very easy to use for novice users. Some do resemble a classic layout from Microsoft's proprietary OS. So we did choose the most lightweight of this easy to use window managers, and this is Fluxbox
Fluxbox is one of the most popular lightweight window managers. It is usable right out of the box and highly configurable. The the most similar competitor is Openbox, which is no surprise, because they share the same ancestor Blackbox.