[SOLVED] Is this the reason why my antiX doesn’t hang?

[Member kaye]

Hello Friends!

Just purely out of curiosity.

I have a dual boot old desktop computer. Really old hardware. The OS are antiX in which I use iceWM, and MX Linux XFCE.

I have noticed that in antiX, if my web browser has 10 to 15 tabs open and maybe simultaneously loading web pages, the computer doesn’t hang.

This is not the case with my MX Linux XFCE – it hangs and slows down the computer a great deal and I have to use the xkill command to terminate the browser, that is if I can wait for the terminal to open. (btw Debian was worse – I had to manually shutdown the computer by unplugging or pressing the restart button).

My question is, could it be because of the XFCE desktop environment? And my antiX does not have a desktop environment but rather a window manager (iceWM) ?

Thank you for your time.

• This topic was modified 4 months, 2 weeks ago by kaye.

[Member PPC]

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Dear Kaye – it’s very likely that you do not have get “hangs” using antiX because this OS simply uses less system resources than MX with XFCE – sometimes 200 or 300Mb of free RAM is the difference between an “hang” and a “smooth sailing” experience… Also antiX may use also a little less CPU (less things running, use less CPU power).

Edit: generally speaking systems that use only Window Managers (like IceWM, Fluxbox or JWM, all included in antiX, ICeWM being the default one) do use less resources than systems that use Desktop Environments (like XFCE or KDE- that MX provide, or Gnome, that I think Debian uses by default).
Also it may be the case that MX uses Firefox as default browser and antiX uses Firefox-ESR as default browser, that usually is a bit lighter on system resources.

PS: MX Linux does have a version with a window manager instead of a D.E.- MX Fluxbox is a bit lighter- it’s a middle ground between antiX and MX XFCE – it’s quite good. You can mod it a bit and bring it almost to an antiX level of RAM usage, if you want to and know how to do it- there are some posts about that in their Forum.

P.

• This reply was modified 4 months, 2 weeks ago by PPC.

[Moderator BobC]

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If you were to reboot the machine, and after it comes up, wait a minute or two, then go to a terminal and type free, it will also tell you how much memory is being used.

Do that for each operating system to get a reasonable comparison, and post the results. My guess is there is 100 or 200 mb difference between them. If you run out of free memory trying to run programs it will swap out to disk, and that takes it a lot of time swapping things in and out, and the result is it will slow down significantly.

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