Has anyone used AwesomeWM?

Lounge
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Has anyone installed EndevourOS with no DE but only AwesomeWM?

If so how much RAM does the OS use all together?

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I just started playing with Awesome a couple of days ago. According to top I’m using 157M of ram. Of course that includes urxvt and top running, but it is similar to what I get with spectrwm which is what I normally use. Awesome feels a bit quicker to respond however.

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3

Wow that is quite little. Did you do htop after you modified it or did you do it in awesome's vanilla form?

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Other than a couple of keybinds it is vanilla. That is also with lightdm enabled. I usually use a bit less ram because I don’t use a DM with just spectrwm.

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Also, I’m using top for my info. Htop will show a bit higher. Something about how they each calculate things differently.

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Cause when I did htop I was getting around 400 MB of RAM. So what is exactly lightdm and what is a DM?

OH I see is top built into Endeavour?

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Yes. Top is installed with Endeavor.
LightDM is what allows you to log into your desktop when the system is first installed. There are other destkop managers (DM) available, but that is what comes with Endeavor. I typically use one window manager so don’t need to switch often, so I have made changes so that I can disable it.

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Display Manager.

Memory usage changes vastly between devices. A lot of factors affect how much memory a specific setup needs to run smoothly.

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Did you remove some packages or something to reduce your RAM usage as well?

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I see, that explains why on VM it uses less RAM compared to runing it on my actual PC.

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Yeah. As I went to bed last night I realized that sleepiness was affecting my communication skills. Started to wonder what else I might have said that was wrong :neutral_face:

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Sorry. I was very tired last night. Should have mentioned that AWM is mostly stock but I have shut down a few services that I don’t need, so Endeavor on my laptop is not entirely vanilla. I do this to improve boot time with the pleasing side effect that overall performance is improved as well. Xfce is gone also, but if I wasn’t logged into the DE it didn’t affect much anyway.

As was mentioned by @anotherusername, hardware will have a lot to do with what you can or can’t turn off and how the changes will affect the system as a whole.

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Can you share, please, which services did you turn off?

And how can one check what’s running by default?

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All good mate and as @Tasia91 asked if possible I would like to see what services you removed please?

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I run “systemd-analyze blame” after the system is fully booted. This shows what processes were started during boot up as well as how long they take. Then I decided what is needed and what isn’t. (DISCLAIMER: I have totally bricked my laptop on a few occasions doing this. Please do some googling at this point. I am not an expert :wink:)

For example, I don’t use Logical Volume Management, so LVM2 is unneeded.
“systemctl stop LVM2” will stop the process.
"systemctl disable LVM2 will usually make it not start at the next boot.
Sometimes disable doesn’t work because another service may trigger the one you don’t want.
“systemctl mask LVM2” makes the service invisible and it WILL NOT start.

I also disable systemd-time-wait-sync-daemon, accounts-sync(I think) and avahi along with some others that I don’t remember right now. The important thing is to remember that every system is different so what I don’t need may be very important to someone else. Research is key. Google/Duck Duck Go and the ArchWiki are my best friends (other than my wife).

There are other options to consider changing like how journal flushing is handled but my ability to explain this is quite weak.

I hope some of this is helpful :blush:

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Thank you for the detailed reply, that was very helpful. systemd-analyze looks like a very useful utility, there are many other great commands to run with it besides the ‘blame’, according to the man.
I think I need to brick (and hopefully fix afterwards) my laptop too, everything seems to be too stable on my side, probably because I tend to leave things as close to vanilla and simple as possible. That’s why I know so little I guess :slightly_frowning_face:

edit: I’m really sorry for all this off-topic, but I have one more question, if someone knows. Is there a config file or something similar I could back up, before disabling services? So that I remember what did I turn off and could easily restore it if needed ( I probably don’t really want to break things that much :sweat_smile: )

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I was thinking that if a moderator wants to move this to its own thread that would be good. Not sure if I can do it on my own.

Systemd-analyze has been very helpful to me for education if nothing else. ‘critical-chain’ is a good tool to put on the end as well as blame. I don’t know about a config that has startup service info, I just try to disable one at a time until I learn the effect. Problems have come from the “shotgun” approach, shutting down several things, reboot, and…OOPS! Have fun and learn. Reinstalling is always available :sunglasses:

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18

Well, the best I’ve come up so far is just list all the units and their current state and write it to a text file:
systemctl list-unit-files > backup_systemctl_state.txt
To have it as a reference how it was, when things were working :upside_down_face:

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The question is why? The current thread hasn’t totally gone out of the topic’s context.
If you can elaborate, like what’s the new topic you wanna move some posts to? Which posts are related to that specific topic? etc.

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We just seemed to have drifted from AwesomeWM to system performance. If it isn’t bothersome to anyone I’m good. Honestly, system performance and WMs go hand in hand in my experience. Setting up a WM based environment is an excellent way to learn about how an operating system works.

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