Software Alternatives & Reviews

picom VS KWin

Compare picom VS KWin and see what are their differences

picom logo picom

A lightweight compositor for X11 (previously a compton fork).

KWin logo KWin

KWin is a window manager for the X Window System, and is in the process of becoming a Wayland...
  • picom Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-26
  • KWin Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-01

picom videos

ArcoLinux : 1481 Making sure compton/picom is working on LXQt

More videos:

  • Review - ArcoLinux : 1479 Changing from compton to picom - transparency in terminals

KWin videos

Review Sih KWIN | KLX Gordon Yang Menggoyahkan Iman

More videos:

  • Review - KWIN App Review for iPhone, iPod, iPad

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to picom and KWin)
Window Manager
65 65%
35% 35
Linux
44 44%
56% 56
Note Taking
74 74%
26% 26
Mac
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, picom seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 38 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

picom mentions (38)

  • [photo] installing Debian :)
    Also I took a census and zero founding members of NWA are "straight outta Picom". That's right, you heard it here first: Not even MC Ren is running Picom. Source: 10 months ago
  • I have two Linux computers which I use for gaming.... somehow the one with slightly inferior hardware gets significantly better performance. I'm trying to figure out why... any ideas?
    If you have compositing you are likely using picom. You can check if it's running with ps -A | grep picom. I've never dealt with this issue as I don't really game on linux often, but I'm sure there's a solution somewhere in the github docs or issues. Worst case scenario you could always just kill the process with killall picom whenever you're about to game, and re-enable it with picom -b after. Do note though that... Source: 12 months ago
  • Picom crashes with 'I3_FLOATING_WINDOW' in a rule
    Somewhat recently in official picom, a field called corner-radius-rules was added. I would like all my floating windows to have rounded corners. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Linux Mint XFCE4. I felt like having simpler looking rice. More in reply
    • Compositor: Picom - https://github.com/yshui/picom - used it to just get shadow, under rofi. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Black corners in GTK apps
    I'm running Manjaro with i3 as my window manager. I'm also using picom as a compositor and this is what my config file looks like:. Source: over 1 year ago
View more

KWin mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of KWin yet. Tracking of KWin recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing picom and KWin, you can also consider the following products

Contexts - Switch between application windows effortlessly — with Fast Search, a better Command-Tab, a Sidebar or even a quick gesture. Free trial available.

Dexpot - If you don't have Dexpot yet, the new update makes it a must-have tool for Windows, adding a ton of features to your desktop that you never knew you wanted.

Xcompmgr - Xcompmgr is a simple composite manager capable of rendering drop shadows and primitive window transparency. Designed solely as a proof-of-concept, Xcompmgr is a lightweight alternative to Compiz and similar composite managers.

VirtuaWin - VirtuaWin is a virtual desktop manager for the Windows operating system (Win9x/ME/NT/Win2K/XP/Win2003/Vista/Win7/Win10). A virtual desktop manager lets you organize applications over several virtual desktops (also called 'workspaces').

VistaSwitcher - VistaSwitcher is an elegant and powerful task management utility for Windows OS.

IceWM - icewm home page . Bug Tracking. If you have a patch, a bug report or a feature request to submit, please do so at the icewm project page at SourceForge.