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Looking for Panel suggestions

Greetings everyone,

I have been running OpenBox (withtout DE, so no XFCE, LXDE or anything) on Xorg for years, using Tint2 as my panel, with a very simple configuration: taskbar (separated per workspace), systray, battery percentage and clock+date.

I have been considering changing Tint2 for something else for a while, considering its issues with stability (sometimes it just crashes, out of the blue with or without a segfault shown in dmesg) and the fact that it has been essentially left to its own devices.

Do you have any suggestions for a good panel that could work well and be lightweight at the same time?

I tried Polybar, but its taskbar implementation is suboptimal (it used a bash script to show the taskbar contents) and it ended up using a lot more CPU than I was comfortable with.

As a secondary question: I'm shying away from switching to Wayland (since Xorg works well) but now I'm seeing more and more software being developed with Wayland in mind. I personally think it would be too early to switch, but what is your opinion on the matter? (I'm asking this because I see a lot of wayland-exclusive bars/panels).

Thank you for your attention.

Re: Looking for Panel suggestions

Reply #1 –
IMHO, if you want lightweight then wayland isn't for you.

On X I prefer FVWM3 including its panel with 'stalonetray'. It takes some time to figure out how to set it up, but nearly anything is possible.
And it's stable (also has very few open issues on github), fast and light, and in active development.

artist

Re: Looking for Panel suggestions

Reply #2 –
There is lxpanel, I was using it when I was using openbox.

Re: Looking for Panel suggestions

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Artist – on
IMHO, if you want lightweight then wayland isn't for you.

I would love to know more about this, out of simple curiosity. I know the two protocols work in a very different way, but that's the extent of my knowledge.

Quote from: Artist – on
On X I prefer FVWM3 including its panel with 'stalonetray'. It takes some time to figure out how to set it up, but nearly anything is possible.
And it's stable (also has very few open issues on github), fast and light, and in active development.

Oh wow, that's very different concepts going into FVWM3 than a "simple" stacking window manager like openbox (if I understand correctly, each workspace has some "virtual desktops" and your "screen" is essentially a "camera" that pans across them).

I was mentally debating on whether to switch to IceWM, which seems nice and well-maintained, too and seems quite flexible.

I wonder what the degree of customization is, and if I could port (more like "recreate" my current openbox config) in either FVWM3 or IceWM.

Quote from: kiblaster – on
There is lxpanel, I was using it when I was using openbox.

Thanks for the suggestion, I have been looking into it in the past, but I've never delved into it too much, could be worth a try if I don't switch WM directly (like I mentioned earlier).
 

Re: Looking for Panel suggestions

Reply #4 –
IceWM has it's builtin panel/tray launch by default so you may like that. On the other hand customization is just themes and stuff you can turn off.

No wayland WM has low enough memory usage yet, around double to triple the usage of xorg+wm+comp. in my case.

Re: Looking for Panel suggestions

Reply #5 –
Quote from: Hitman – on
IceWM has it's builtin panel/tray launch by default so you may like that. On the other hand customization is just themes and stuff you can turn off.

From a WM I would want at least the customization that OpenBox + Tint2 gives me, but maybe IceWM would be enough for my needs, I have no idea.

Quote from: Hitman – on
No wayland WM has low enough memory usage yet, around double to triple the usage of xorg+wm+comp. in my case.

Currently I'm under Xorg+OpenBox+Picom which gives me 198M+40M+63M=301M of memory and I think that's already a lot. I don't think I'll switch to Wayland any soon if things are like this.