brian wrote:

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 4:31 AM, Miernik wrote:

...

This is perfectly true. Someone here said that "124 MB is not a lot, are you sure its a problem?". Well, it bloody is, its just killing the idea of using a light window manager. If I wanted to scuk 124 MB just to manage my windows, I would install Gnome or KDE. I am in the market for lightweight tiling window managers, because I like to keep my software light.

XMonad is light in terms of lines of source and errors per line. If you're in some kind of disk space crisis that nobody else in the world knows anything about, you can definitely get some WM that takes fewer bytes on disk. But maybe just think for a minute about whether that would make any sense.

Liking to keep software light is similar to liking to compile from source. You can try to make a technical argument for it, but it doesn't come out very convincing. It's mostly a psychological and aesthetic thing, not technical. Which certainly makes it no less real! Whether or not you understand the viewpoint, the fact remains that the weight of xmonad's dependencies hurts its spread. Braden Shepherdson shepheb

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 06:49:54AM -0500, brian wrote:

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 4:31 AM, Miernik wrote:

...

This is perfectly true. Someone here said that "124 MB is not a lot, are you sure its a problem?". Well, it bloody is, its just killing the idea of using a light window manager. [...]

XMonad is light in terms of lines of source and errors per line. If you're in some kind of disk space crisis that nobody else in the world knows anything about, you can definitely get some WM that takes fewer bytes on disk. But maybe just think for a minute about whether that would make any sense.

You should be aware that there's more than only big fat i386 and amd64 (or x86_64 or what it's called on Linux) with hundreds of GB of disk space. For example, there's the Zaurus C3000, with impressive 4 GB disk space. Well, I'm a snob, I own a C3200 with 6 GB, and once GHC is ported to arm, which may happen within the next 6 to 12 months, I'll of course install it on my Zaurus, but other users may just want to run XMonad, without having to depend on a full GHC installation. And there are some similarly limited toys in the wild that are much less exotic than a Zaurus running OpenBSD (think of the Eee PC). For now, people who want to use XMonad on such gear have to either stick to the default configuration or to install GHC. Ciao, Kili

Dmitrij D. Czarkoff wrote:

If You trade the disc consumption for the configurability and flexibility, go install dwm.

Right now I installed awesome, which is a much better dwm. miernik@przehyba ~ $ ps -o %mem,args -p 25681 %MEM COMMAND 0.5 awesome miernik@przehyba ~ $ I don't need to install a whole programming language just to configure it, it has a powerfull but still intuitive ~/.awesomerc plain text file, no need to recompile anything to change config. What I plan to do is to build a linux image which is packed whole into an iniramfs image and boots from an USB flashdisk, all into RAM, and then after boot I remove the flashdisk, haveing the system all in RAMdisk, and then do XiP (execute in place) there. That's why I care about size - because RAM is about 25$ per GB now, so keeping the whole GHC in RAM costs 3$ wasted RAM space, and also power consumption (electricity cost) of the RAM chips. 3$ is not a lot, but it's also not nothing, 3$ here, 3$ there and I waste a lot of money. And money is time, so I want to waste less time, waiting for my applications to load from disk, by keeping it all in RAM all the time, and having no disk besides of RAMdisk on the machine. While I used xmonad for a few days, now I have awesome as my window manager since a few hours. Can you give me any reason in what xmonad is better then awesome, any reason to switch back? For those who don't know awesome: http://urukrama.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/first-steps-with-awesome-window-man... -- Miernik http://miernik.name/

On Tuesday 22 July 2008 19:07:22 Miernik wrote:

miernik@przehyba ~ $ ps -o %mem,args -p 25681 %MEM COMMAND 0.5 awesome

That's why I care about size - because RAM is about 25$ per GB now, so keeping the whole GHC in RAM costs 3$ wasted RAM space, and also power consumption (electricity cost) of the RAM chips.

You don't need GHC to *run* xmonad, only to *rebuild*. Just pack it and go.

While I used xmonad for a few days, now I have awesome as my window manager since a few hours. Can you give me any reason in what xmonad is better then awesome, any reason to switch back?

I don't know Your case. May be You should switch further to twm or something more minimalistic. And it would even save You one more penny! -- Dmitrij D. Czarkoff

One more thing -- (recalling my envangelizing experience with a friend who had an unfun install) -- much worse than having to go through several steps to install is not knowing what steps they are and/or having to backtrack. The most common example on #xmonad is finding out that X11.hs on debian didn't support Xinerama. Of course, he downloaded at a particarly difficult time -- IIRC, xmonad was dependent, at that point, on a newer version of Cabal than ghc-latest provided. So, download/install Cabal, ghc hide old Cabal...

* On Tuesday, July 22 2008, Miernik wrote:

That's why I care about size - because RAM is about 25$ per GB now, so keeping the whole GHC in RAM costs 3$ wasted RAM space, and also power consumption (electricity cost) of the RAM chips. 3$ is not a lot, but it's also not nothing, 3$ here, 3$ there and I waste a lot of money. And money is time, so I want to waste less time, waiting for my applications to load from disk, by keeping it all in RAM all the time, and having no disk besides of RAMdisk on the machine.

You can save more space, if your filesystem copied to ram is compressed using squashfs+aufs, like how livecds do it. Using gzip compression you halve the size of the filesystem, saving you $$! So, xmonad and friends will take about 85M, or $1.50. I have set up a system like that, and it is more useful in that I can spin down my hdd indefinitely, than the faster program startup time, since the programs I frequently use are started with xmonad.

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 11:33 AM, Brent Yorgey wrote:

2. At a more fundamental level--and I realize I am bordering on heresy here--*why* do we care about making it easy for people who don't want to install ghc to run xmonad? I'm not saying there aren't any good answers to this question, just that it should be considered seriously.

THANK YOU. All of this bullshit evangelizing (mostly from non-coders) in the free software community has been getting obnoxious. The last thing small community projects need is influxes of clueless users attracted to the *marketing* instead of the functionality. The ghc dependency is the foundation of what makes xmonad unique -- the fact that the 'config file' is actually the program itself. If it didn't have that fundamental design, the implementation language wouldn't matter at all from a user perspective. Without it and the functionality it enables, the only other feature that really differentiates it from other tiling window managers is the way it handles Xinerama (independent viewports onto a pool of desktops), and that's broken on Debian because of their usual packaging bullshit ;) -- Fred