Software Alternatives & Reviews

picom VS Polybar

Compare picom VS Polybar and see what are their differences

picom logo picom

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

Polybar logo Polybar

Status bar for Unix-like systems.
  • picom Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-26
  • Polybar Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-26

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

Polybar videos

[8e] | Polybar on i3

More videos:

  • Review - Polybar III: Using Polybar with Multiple Window Managers
  • Review - My Dotfiles - HLWM Polybar Arch

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to picom and Polybar)
Window Manager
100 100%
0% 0
Productivity
0 0%
100% 100
Note Taking
69 69%
31% 31
Mac
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using picom and Polybar. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, picom should be more popular than Polybar. 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: about 1 year 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

Polybar mentions (24)

  • Is there a way I can tell which exit node I am using from CLI in Linux?
    I'd like to just be able to write a short shell script to check if an exit node is in use, and then pipe that output into polybar which I use anyway. The problem is that I can't find an option in the tailscale Linux CLI client that will show me whether I'm using an exit node or not. Is there a way to do this? Source: 5 months ago
  • Are there any tools to analyse/modify colours directly from a bash script?
    I am on Arch Linux and I am using pywal to generate a colour palette from my wallpaper, which I then use throughout my system. In particular, I have a bash script which grabs these colours and uses them for polybar. The problem is that sometimes these colours do not have enough contrast, and the bar is hard to read. Is there any tool that would allow me to check the readability of my colours, and modify them... Source: 10 months ago
  • How do you deal with volume >100% and ramp-weights?
    Maybe check out the canonical page instead: https://github.com/polybar/polybar. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Top Bar
    A common one is polybar, but there are quite a few so they can't be hard to tell just from how it looks. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Top Bar
    That is a status bar, often used with tiling window managers. A popular one would be https://github.com/polybar/polybar. Source: over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing picom and Polybar, 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.

tint2 - git clone https://gitlab. com/o9000/tint2. git cd tint2 git checkout 16. 1 mkdir build cd build cmake ..

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.

Pywal - Generate and change color-schemes on the fly.

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

DockbarX - DockbarX is a standalone dock that groups and launches applications.