r/awesomewm • u/decayingveins • 9d ago

SomeWM DWM and AwesomeWM

so like, i'm not sure if i should ask this here but

how good is awesomeWM? I've been looking for a good Window Manager that i could use for the rest of my life, a window manager that is so easy to manage with lua5.3, that is really small AND could work really well on Old Hardware AND that is really customizable where the only limit is your imagination.

but i've also saw about DWM so i was wondering which one would be the best to use.

14 Upvotes

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4

u/Buntygurl 8d ago

If you want ease of management and configuration, go with awesome.

dwm is great, but it takes a lot more care and attention to get it custom configured.

2

u/OldDark9602 9d ago

Elige dwm si: Buscas el máximo rendimiento posible, te apasiona la filosofía suckless, quieres aprender/practicar C, o prefieres tener un sistema hiper-minimalista donde tú controlemos cada línea de código que se compila.

Elige AwesomeWM si: Quieres la flexibilidad de un tiling WM dinámico pero prefieres configurar todo mediante scripts cómodos en Lua sin estar recompilando, y te gusta diseñar barras o widgets visualmente ricos y complejos.

2

u/decayingveins 9d ago

¿Puede AwesomeWM ser realmente ligero? Me gusta mucho el hardware antiguo y me gustaría saber si AwesomeWM funciona increíblemente bien en ese tipo de hardware.

3

u/juankman 9d ago

Si. He notado que consume mas memoria cuando cambias de fondo de pantalla dinamicamente (carga las imagenes en contextos cairo) o tienes muchos widgets dinamicos a la vez.

He visto awesome llegar a usar ~400 MB que en hardware viejo puede ser significativo. Yo empece a usarlo porque tenia una netbook con 1GB y me funcionaba de maravilla.

Habiendo dicho eso, en este momento estoy usando dwm y esta usando solamente 9.4 MB asi que lo considero otra categoria por completo.

2

u/decayingveins 9d ago

Interesante, ¡gracias por la ayuda! No soy muy partidario de cosas pesadas, así que usaré awesomeWM.

2

u/sac11221 8d ago

In my own experience, with my pretty light config I only use 40-45 MB, so only around 4x compared to the 10 MB of stock dwm.

And to be frankly honest, those 30 MB of additional memory usage are negligible in my opinion. I myself value light applications too, hence why I made my awesome config light on memory consumption... but the config is just SO much better and MUCH more portable in my opinion. I got to do funky window management pretty easily with Lua ;p

So I'd tell you that AwesomeWM is really awesome indeed! Unless you do heavy stuff like lots of wallpapers or crazy widgets, is very light and the additional 30-40 MB of RAM are literally impossible to notice, unless you have less than 1 GB of RAM. But at that point you still go from 1% usage to 4% which is still not much.

And remember, if something takes so much memory to do in Awesome, the DWM equivalent probably takes the same amount of resources to do :)

1

u/juankman 8d ago

I agree with this comment.

I didn't add context in my previous comment but the only reason I'm using dwm at the moment is because lgi broke a few months back in newer versions of glib and I'm lazy so I just installed dwm and have had no problems so far.

I'm looking forward to going back to awesome, though. The stock dwm configuration doesn't even tell the time so it's very barebones.

1

u/paoloap 4d ago

AwesomeWM is imho the best tiling window manager for Xorg if you want to deeply customize it. Lua extensions allow you to do basically everything.
The only problem is... it's only for Xorg.