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I am setting up a computer as a an older tablet "PC".

It will run Debian and a single application, without any window manager. No Internet is needed, nor is remote access.

To ensure it runs as fast as is possible, I wonder if there is a lightweight version of X, with lots of features removed, available on Debian?

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  • Is an X system a requirement, or could you do with a GUI-less version? I ran a CLI-only Debian 10 and I believe it meets the running as fast as possible requirement with no GUI at all. Commented May 5, 2021 at 20:42
  • Is it possible to run a simple X application without X? Commented May 5, 2021 at 20:44
  • @Village Obviously not. An X application requires an X server by definition. Commented May 5, 2021 at 20:46
  • There is the FrameBuffer option also, not X at all if the app supports it (not many to be honest). I was amazed to find out that mpv video player and netsurf web browser work without X. Commented May 5, 2021 at 21:48

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There used to be a lighter-weight way of displaying a single graphical application without the added weight of support for multiple windows and multiple applications. But since there's very little demand, I don't think there are any maintained drivers for modern PC graphics cards any more, and there are extremely few still-maintained applications that support graphics without X (or Wayland, with some graphical interface libraries). SVGAlib has not been updated in a very long time. So you'd be constrained to a slow graphical mode, possibly with less than your screen resolution. And of course you'd be constrained to applications that support a different interface.

An X server is lightweight, by the standards of a PC manufactured in the 21st century.

(If your application runs in text mode in a terminal, then this still works on modern PC hardware. But I guess you wouldn't be asking in that case.)

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    @Krackout Ah, I see what you mean. I never claimed SVGAlib to be a “lightweight X”, but the wording of the question could make it seem so. I've edited my answer to remove this potential for confusion. Commented May 5, 2021 at 21:55
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X itself is quite lightweight (we were running it on 80286 PCs back in the late '80s / early '90s). What's not lightweight is the added "value" brought by desktop managers such as Gnome and KDE. I suspect you would be perfectly happy with a simple window manager instead. You will need a WM unless you have a monolithic application that uses absolutely no child windows (dialog boxes).

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