Performance

More eye candy means less performance. Is it worth it?

When you use the standard desktops, Gnome and KDE, you will likely notice that you are using a lot of memory. In some cases, the CPU also increases quickly.

As soon as you start several applications, the system will start swapping between them, which leads to slowdowns and sometimes hangs.

If you haven’t noticed yet, try running htop in a separate window while you try out your choices. You should see a substantial difference with Awesome, i3 and, if you are elite, dwm. The difference in memory footprint is staggering when you start measuring. Gnome starts with somewhere in the region of 3GB at boot. This can be trimmed down by serious tweaking, but not very much. In comparison, the Awesome window manager weighs in at around 600MB.

Getting the advantage comes at a cost, though: you need to learn a few new habits. In the case of the tiling window managers, you have to use keyboard shortcuts to move between windows. In Regolith, you also start all applications with dmenu, drun or rofi. You reach these with a key combination. You will be forgiven for feeling uncomfortable about this change – the habit of using the mouse often sits deep. But even if you end up not switching to a new environment, the effort of training this is valuable, since you also learn to look for keyboard shortcuts. Vi and Emacs use these extensively. So do yourself a favour and set up training sessions to learn this new way of doing things.

The best contender in this respect is Awesome – you can put a lot of eye candy and daemons before you weigh down your system as much as the others.