I spent some time experimenting with pekwm and evilwm on my Slackware system, mostly out of curiosity.
Both are lightweight X11 window managers with very different philosophies:
• evilwm: extreme minimalism, very small codebase, written in C
• pekwm: still lightweight, but feature-rich (menus, grouping/tabs, rules), written in C++
I did a very simple, informal check of memory usage (RSS via ps) in a clean startx session: no compositor, no panel, one terminal. On my setup, both ended up in roughly the same memory range (a few MB).
At that scale, shared X11 libraries dominate anyway, so small differences aren’t very meaningful.
What mattered more to me was the trade-off:
• evilwm requires much more customization to reach basic comfort
• pekwm provides significantly more usability with essentially the same resource footprint
Conclusion (for me): pekwm hits a better balance between minimalism and usability.
evilwm is interesting as a learning exercise, but not worth the extra friction for daily use.
This isn’t a benchmark, just personal experimentation and preference.
#Slackware #X11 #WindowManager #pekwm #evilwm
Both are lightweight X11 window managers with very different philosophies:
• evilwm: extreme minimalism, very small codebase, written in C
• pekwm: still lightweight, but feature-rich (menus, grouping/tabs, rules), written in C++
I did a very simple, informal check of memory usage (RSS via ps) in a clean startx session: no compositor, no panel, one terminal. On my setup, both ended up in roughly the same memory range (a few MB).
At that scale, shared X11 libraries dominate anyway, so small differences aren’t very meaningful.
What mattered more to me was the trade-off:
• evilwm requires much more customization to reach basic comfort
• pekwm provides significantly more usability with essentially the same resource footprint
Conclusion (for me): pekwm hits a better balance between minimalism and usability.
evilwm is interesting as a learning exercise, but not worth the extra friction for daily use.
This isn’t a benchmark, just personal experimentation and preference.
#Slackware #X11 #WindowManager #pekwm #evilwm
