What is the crowd's opinion of IceWM?

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I'm rediscovering it after not using it since 98 or so. It is really powerful and seems to still be really simple! "seems to be" because the new version in pkgsrc pulled in a lot of dependanceies the last time I built it.

I'm floored that it's still developed and even has a website: Ice-WM

One tip, you can specify an image and then set it as a background by editing one of the config files (~/.icewm/preferences maybe? I'm not sure) and then adding icewmbg to .xinitrc

>AntiX Full requires a mere 256Mb to run, though presumably significantly more for a heavy app. But I found AntiX Full difficult to use.

I've never tried it. Out of interest, what made it hard? Does it require lots of config and/or not come with sane defaults?

>Debian asks for 2Gb. I haven't put it through its paces, but I'd imagine that Debian + Gnome wouldn't be far off Ubuntu + Gnome, particularly once you've added in the various extensions and apps that you enjoy using.

There's no way my Debian would run on 2GB RAM! As I mentioned, I have 8GB RAM, plus I have 14GB swap and have zswap enabled. But I'm also one of those people that has fifty bagillion browser tabs open, plus I use Thunderbird with a large email archive. So right now, with browser, email and 4 terminal windows open, I'm using about 11GB!

But using a light weight window manager makes all the difference. I did a quick search and it seems AntiX Full uses IceWM - which I've never used but is apparently a pretty lightweight window manager (apparently can be configured to use as little as 4MB! WTAF?!?). FWIW it's in Debian too and after having a look, is probably a nicer/better option than my previous light weight suggestions (i.e. openbox/fluxbox). FWIW it's in the Debian repos (probably Ubuntu too!?), so you could install that instead of Gnome if you wanted something more familiar but still lightweight.

>Your ten-year-old laptop with 8Gb RAM and an SSD would probably do as well with Ubuntu as with Debian. It must have been a great laptop back in its youth!

I suspect you're right. And yes it was a beast in it's day and still continues to hold it's own against most modern low-mid range machines (at least for my purposes).

„IceWM is a window manager for the X Window System. The goal of IceWM is speed, simplicity, and not getting in the user’s way. It comes with a taskbar with pager, global and per-window keybindings and a dynamic menu system. Application windows can be managed by keyboard and mouse. Windows can be iconified to the taskbar, to the tray, to the desktop or be made hidden. They are controllable by a quick switch window (Alt+Tab) and in a window list. A handful of configurable focus models are menu-selectable. Setups with multiple monitors are supported by RandR and Xinerama. IceWM is very configurable, themeable and well documented. It includes an optional external background wallpaper manager with transparency support, a simple session manager and a system tray.” - https://ice-wm.org/

https://ice-wm.org/

„IceWM is a window manager for the X Window System. The goal of IceWM is speed, simplicity, and not getting in the user’s way. It comes with a taskbar with pager, global and per-window keybindings and a dynamic menu system. Application windows can be managed by keyboard and mouse. Windows can be iconified to the taskbar, to the tray, to the desktop or be made hidden. They are controllable by a quick switch window (Alt+Tab) and in a window list. A handful of configurable focus models are menu-selectable. Setups with multiple monitors are supported by RandR and Xinerama. IceWM is very configurable, themeable and well documented. It includes an optional external background wallpaper manager with transparency support, a simple session manager and a system tray. IceWM is available on popular Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, Slackware, CentOS and also compiles on most *BSDs.”

You could try the window manager icewm (official, wikipedia. There is a supplemental package with themes called icewm-themes. That package contains two themes called xp and xp_new, respectively. They mimic the xp look.

Also, icewm is very lightweight, so it should work great on older hardware.

That was just a temporarily solution when I switched from StumpWM to EXWM Window Manager. Now I am using IceWM window manager https://ice-wm.org, it has semi-automatic tilings vertically and horizontally. And I do not need to jump from my bed to use keyboard.

EXWM is nice, depending of my mood. I change between the IceWM: https://ice-wm.org/, EXWM and StumpWM. With 2 or 4 windows, IceWM gives me satisfactorily tiling, just the same what I am using within EXWM and StumpWM. Stability and speed is much better with IceWM.