DE/WM discussion thread

Which desktop environment or window manager do you use? Tiling or stacking? And why? As for me, I have been using spectrwm for a couple of years now as my first tiling wm, I want to like it so badly because it is everything I want, was trivial to setup and configure, and is just as minimal as I want it to be. The problem is, spectrwm is buggy as hell. And having bugs in your wm is really annoying. Windows will just turn transparent without any way of accessing them anymore when switching out and back into a workspace, screen will just start flickering randomly and it happens occasionally that the whole wm crashes and I can't do anything anymore but restart. This is making me pretty sad, I wish I could help the project because it is exactly what I want, but I would just introduce more bugs with my programming skills so my best option is to abandon spectrwm with a broken heart. Now I don't know how to move on, dwm is a bit too memey and recompiling everything after a simple change doesn't sound like a good idea at all, also the patch system is not something I consider a good design choice. i3, awesome and similar wms are too big for my needs, I want something small and simple without many config options, it is supposed to just display windows reliably. Don't know anything about Xmonad except haskell dependencies, think I will look at herbstluftwm and bspwm over the next days to see if I should try them. Are there any other wms I could consider? Here's a list for others in my situation: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Comparison_of_tiling_window_managers I also tried going back to xfce because I remember it being very robust from my pre-spectrwm days, but there is no going back to a stacking wm once you've gone tiling. You can set xfce to use a wm that is not xfwm, but it doesn't work with spectrwm. That would have been nice, because I wouldn't need to learn new keybinds and all that soykaf I don't want to waste time on.

I use Openbox, with i3 keybindings, so it's a similar mix. I use kitty, and it has a built-in tab function, so if I ever need more than one terminal, it can be just in one window. I do like bspwm, it looks very clean. However, Openbox works well for my uses, I just don't need to have many windows open to justify a tiling wm. Linux Mint as my distro, because it has great defaults, and "just works". Much faster too with just xfce and replacing lightdm with ly (https://github.com/nullgemm/ly)

Thinking about switching over to wayland, are there any wms besides sway?

I use dwm. I patched it once a few years ago, and I haven't had any problems since. Some videogames suck with tiling window managers, so I just run those in windowed mode.

>>55419 https://github.com/labwc/labwc

>>55413 MATE. It's simple, it doesn't tear like XFCE (but compton!!!) and it's not buggy. I will continue to use GNOME 2 until the sun implodes.

>>55413 Awesome on my laptop, the low resolution demands it. It stacks, it floats, it tiles manually and dynamically, it slices, it dices, you name it. It has every tiling layout I can think of, comes with sane keybindings all nicely catalogued in a cheat sheet, a program launcher, a run prompt, a desktop menu. It's the only WM I would deem usable out of the box, the only changes I've made were setting my preferred terminal/editor and commenting out the layouts I don't need, as well as disabling title bars in the config file. As I understand it, it was forked from dwm and rewritten using XCB rather than the old Xlib. On my desktop, I use GNOME, which I liken to a minimal WM because of its simplicity and focus. Resolution and screen space aren't an issue and I have the hardware to back it up. It's buttery smooth, with a couple extensions for tray icons and additional eye candy. It's just the nicest desktop experience I've had on any operating system.

>>55413 (OP) Do we really need this thread? DE/WM is chosen by personal choice. If you don't like the taste of DE/WM what you are currently using, then move to another one. If it's same, then moving to another one again to find yours. There're such many things 'cuz it's not Windows or MacOS. Even if you choose one thing, but you can make your own environment through ricing. Btw, I'm using DWM right now. I'd used xfce, and moved to Openbox. xfce was great. But I don't need pre-installed softwares like thunar, ristretto etc 'cuz I use alternatives. Maybe remove them can be a solution, but I quit from xfce instead. Openbox is fine. It's such light, simple, and its documentation is great. But I don't want to edit xml config when I need to change. Also I don't know what's the benefit of stacking windows managers. Those are just lightweight version of DE? Oh sorry. DEs are such bloatheavier version of stacking WMs. Anyway, Stacking WM's workflow was worse then DE except I didn't fully ricing it such as adding bar, add large amount of keyboard shortcuts etc. DWM is my final goal. There's no configuration file except config.def.h in source. Somebody can think re-compiling is more tired then edit existed config file like OP. But I prefer DWM's way. Also you can patch it if you think DWM is lack of features, but default is usable for me. And most patches in suckless site are kinda outdated. I need to edit it for patching (not only dwm, but also st. I tried patced gaps for dwm and input method fix for st, and they are outdated. I'm not sure really `most` things are outdated. This can be fixed if you changed it yourself manually.) I mentioned only xfce, openbox, and dwm what I'd used. But I used i3, 9wm, rat poison and many others. Ofc I didn't mention about them 'cuz I'd been using them really short time. In the end, I said "Do we really need this thread?" as an negative meaning. But end of this fuarrk reply, I think this thread would be good for beginners or people who think moving to linux. Because I think DE/WM is one of the big attractive point of Linux distros (including BSD lol). --

>>55440 >do we need this thread? I appreciate your attitude to it. When I was new to linux and computers in general I think seeing a lot of these threads and conversations helped me find new things and new ways of doing things. It seems kinda silly now but hey its fun. If you're going to spend a lot of time computering, I think its worth figuring out how you like things, and getting them just right. My journey to where I am now went through a few places, gnome, xfce, and i3 mostly, before settling on ratpoison, though I've tried a lot of different ones. Ratpoison is pretty barebones, but it does what I want pretty easily. Workspaces, maximal use of screen real estate, and easy splitting and moving of windows. Used to use it multiscreen. The command system is a bit clunky but with something like sxhkd its a lot more versitile. re:dwm, if you're going to have gcc and all the ability to compile normal c stuff on your machine, recompiling isnt a great burden in my experience, the annoyance is that you can't live change configurations, though personally I think most people only relatively rarely update configs for this sort of thing at all. Of course, don't bother using dwm if its the only thing you're going to be compiling locally.

>>55413 KDE Plasma, I have this habit of immediately abandoning a peice of software after it slightly inconveniences me, and that led to me quickly burning through several different DEs and WMs when I first installed a Linux distro. As you can imagine that happened very quickly when I "tried" a TWM. While I'll certainly concede I didn't give the idea a fair shake, I don't have any motivation to look into them any further. As for my decision to go with KDE? GNOME's interface was immediately unappealing to me and xfce, LXQt, MATE etc. just didn't look good and had lackluster customization in place for me to make them look good. The main thing that irks me nowadays is the size of UI elements in relation to how often they're utilized. Personally, I almost never use titlebars for anything, so they're the first thing I disable. Just make your window grabbable from the empty space within it or via a hotkey, immediate +5% screen realestate.

>>55413 I used dwm and bspwm for couple of years and recently switched to whatever kde uses by default. Tiling feels more like a restraint for me and some applications tend to behave weirdly with it. Small pop up windows that have ok/cancel buttons are big pain with tiling. I think it makes more sense to have non-tiling wm and just get binds to have window fill a part of the screen.

>mom has old-ass Lenovo all-in-one (1.7GHz Bobcat CPU, dual-core, non-OCable) >reviving it for her by installing Ubuntuuuuu >go with the MATE desktop since no way this thing runs anything newer (and XFCE is starting to bug out since its maintainers can't keep up with systemd's continual infrastructure changes, nor am I going to make a 60yo learn a tiling WM) >desktop is still a bit sluggish, not sure why >oh soykaf it doesn't have hardware compositing OOTB since sw compositing is fine if your CPU is more than ~2.5GHz >think back to my Arch days, remember Compton is good >check, but it's been abandoned for like 4 years now >successor (picom) has a VERY SLIGHTLY different interface so I can't just do the ol' ln -s polyfill trick >make this wrapper, stick it in the system >enable it via MATE GUI >itwerks >the machine now runs pretty well #!/bin/bash #/usr/local/bin/compton for arg do shift [ "$arg" = "opengl-swc" ] && continue [ "$arg" = "--paint-on-overlay" ] && continue set -- "$@" "$arg" done exec -a compton picom "$@"

>>55413 I use jwm. One simple dotfile in a xml-like format for configs, it's stacking, it only uses around 4.5mb of ram, comes with a panel and virtual desktops. It just does what a stacking wm should do and nothing else. https://joewing.net/projects/jwm/ https://github.com/joewing/jwm (pic related aren't mine)

>>55413 I haven't tried tiling wm's yet. I've used plenty of the stack ones since the 90s. I tend to gravitate around the fluxbox clones, sometimes xfce. But I've noticed that they're not as lightweight as they used to, and I don't like the Windows XP kind of look that most things have nowadays. I'm looking for a tiling wm, and at this point I think it'll be FrankenWM. It's written in C, it's modified directly from source, and it uses the library XCB, instead of Xlib like dwm. I'm under the impresion that, in theory, XCB is much faster than Xlib. Do you guys know more details about how relevant the chosen X api might be for the performance of the wm in the real world?

>>55514 This might be useful to me, but where are you selecting compton? On mate-tweak?

soykafty thread but will reply anyway I am currently using GNOME, the whys are because I run 1440p display on 14" laptop. From the big gang of three (GNOME, Plasma, Cinnamon) GNOME as the only one was able to run all currently developed projects properly (it also has the longest battery standby on Xorg). The rest of lighter DEs looked blurish after scaling (MATE, Xfce) so not a go. I do also use this machine as my primary and only computah therefore I can't tickle with it to properly set HDMI adapter to work under WM.. If I had a regular <=1080p display I would stick to MATE. Compared to Xfce, I do pref MATE's design a lot more, it has lower power consumption, better integration with Qt applications and can handle playing video without screen tearing.

>>55588 Yes, precisely: since this computer will be used by someone who doesn't enjoy sysadminning-as-a-hobby, I wanted to try not to make any state changes that might need to be undone later on that couldn't be undone via an appropriately obvious GUI element

How about icewm? It's such light and easy. I'm consider to move it from DE.

>>55600 >it has lower power consumption Gonna need a citation on this one, last I checked MATE and Xfce have practically identical memory footprints.

>>55788 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/05/06/benchmarked-the-most-power-efficient-ubuntu-19-04-flavor-will-surprise-you/?sh=347a520ce341 Also and CPU/memory usage is not equivalent to power usage see: https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages/home?utm_source=thenewstack&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=platform

> Switched from GNOME to KDE because after using it for a long while I realized that I wanted to be able to swap applications without going into activities mode + didn't wanna make too many virtual desktops > Like to use GTK appsbut they look like soykaf on KDE > Also like GNOME because it looks pretty decent out of the box with dark mode > Tried Cinnamon after but it's weird to use because sometimes applications aren't able to add themselves to the app menu > Also want a filepicker with thumbnails. What the fuarrrk do I pick, guys? I wanna use a nice DE with floating menus and a taskbar that just werks and has a functioning file picker. Way I see it is to just go GNOME with dash to dock or use KDE and ignore the soykaf aesthetics on any GTK soykaf I might need to use.

>>55792 >?sh=347a520ce341 >?utm_source=thenewstack&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=platform Please don't do that anymore. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/

I use cwm because it just werks.

NextStep vs CDE? If you lived in the era of commercial unix workstations, which would be your preferred DE?

>>56629 I like more CDE, but NextStep looks more adequate for a professional environment. So, CDE at home, NextStep at work.

>>56629 can someone post that wallpaper, tried to reverse-search but sadly no result :'(

>>55413 >Which desktop environment or window manager do you use? shod https://github.com/phillbush/shod/ >Tiling or stacking? Both. At the same time. It tiles windows in a stacked/floating container. The container floats on the screen, while containing the actual windows tiled inside it. Pic related. It can also do tabbing btw. >And why? Because I wanted to experiment with window management and I wrote a wm myself.

- On X11 side, I use OpenBox because it just works and it's stable. I never needed tiling when there is Gnu Emacs and xterm+tmux. I also prefer to have multiple desktops (or just Alt+Tab) instead of tiling. - The only usable Desktop Environments are Xfce and KDE. KDE is the better one but also more heavy. - On Wayland, the only usable is Sway (aka i3 but Wayland) >>55798 Use KDE and follow this guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Uniform_look_for_Qt_and_GTK_applications

>>56642 > Because I wanted to experiment with window management and I wrote a wm myself. Stop bragging, be anonymous.

I use LXDE personally. I like that it gets out of my way as much as possible, which is what a DE needs to do. With a lot of the other ones I've noticed some annoying patterns such as the following: 1. They don't have sane defaults (come with weirdly arranged panels, bad compositors that cause screen tearing etc.) and as such require you to start configuring things when you first start using them. 2. They take unnecessary amounts of system resources to run. In my view, an operating system is a platform for installing and running programs. This is why it's ridiculous to me that something as basic as a GUI takes up system resources that said programs could be utilizing instead. 3. On a fundamental level they work in a way that require you to relearn how to use a desktop GUI which is frankly unacceptable. Given this I understand why people just go "screw it I'm gonna get a barebones WM and make my own interface out of it with configs." It's because most options out there are badly made and/or try to reinvent the wheel for no reason.

I have considered using a WM, but I have yet to see one that works well with a Wacom tablet. How would window management work with using only a graphics tablet?

>>56673 Floating or tiling? And do you mean tablet as the only form of input? I've used both one of those tablets with a screen (not sure of the proper term) and a traditional one using WMs like Openbox and JWM. Following this guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wacom_tablet#xrandr_setup Usually works, specifically the xinput commands. Even for the sketchiest of brands. As for tiling I would imagine it works similar. It's just glorified mouse input.

>>56679 Both floating and tiling, if possible, and the drawing tablet itself is the only input. It really is just a giant trackpad controlled by a pen (or multitouch controls), so keyboard shortcuts will be limited to a few through the hotkeys.

>>55656 Thanks, it worked fine. I could even create a ~/.config/marco-compton.conf file to customize it a bit.

>>55773 IceWM is good. It's really easy to edit config, and more user friendly experience than ((minimalistic)) WMs.

>>55773 >>57408 IceWM is great. If you don't like it, install OpenBox which is just as easy to use/configure.

>>56685 does it work in libre environment?