Hack #73. Maximize Resources with a Minimalist Window Manager
Using window managers rather than desktop environments can improve the performance of slower systems or simply leave more system resources available for actual computing.
Graphical user interfaces such as KDE and GNOME are slick and easy to use, but all that eye candy has a price—executing and managing all of those graphical bells and whistles requires a certain percentage of system resources. A typical idle KDE desktop on SUSE 9 Enterprise occupies around 370 MB of RAM. For today's servers with multiple gigabytes of RAM, this may not be an issue. However, if you're running a legacy server that contains less than a gig of RAM, you could certainly benefit from the use of a more modest graphics system, known as a window manager. Window managers focus on displaying and managing windows, not drag and drop and other luxuries. One of the best lightweight window managers is Fluxbox, an open source software package available online and derived from the Blackbox window manager, which is itself an open source clone of the window manager used on old workstations from NeXT. Using Fluxbox can decrease the amount of RAM required by your GUI by over 100 MB, and also eliminates the ten zillion background processes that desktop environments such as KDE start to support things like drag and drop, automatic file associations, and so on. This hack explains how to build and install Fluxbox so that you can devote more of your system's memory ...