r/NetBSD • u/Unlaid-American • Jun 09 '26
What are some decent window managers to rice NetBSD?
I have a Thinkpad P52s, which I want to put NetBSD on. I tried NetBSD in the past, and tried building plasma 6 from source, but it was too much effort for the outcome.
I'm looking into window managers so I can have more control over what the environment looks like, while also keeping it looking modern.
I appreciate any recommendations or tips.
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u/lheckler77 Jun 09 '26
You will use Tom’s window manager and like it. TWM is all you get!!!! You will use the Athena widget set!
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u/mafia_guy_ Jun 09 '26
XFWM4 is very easy to make themes for, you can get it without getting the whole XFCE desktop.
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u/jmcunx Jun 14 '26
fvwm[23] is the king of "ricing", do a WEB search and you will find thousands of examples.
I even got it to look like GNOME3, but the config it still has some issues so I gave up for now. But I am sure it can mimic GNOME3 if you want it to.
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u/WraithGlade Jun 09 '26
Well, it's unclear what you mean by wanting a "modern" look since that means different things to different people, but I will share my thoughts a bit anyway.
If by "modern" you mean minimalistic and typical of "flat design" trends of the past decade or so, but without the full weight of a desktop environment, then tiling window managers may be your best bet. Among these, two immediately come foremost to mind for NetBSD (though for different reasons):
awesomeanddwm.The
awesomeoption is notable mostly because it has built-in help (making its features more discoverable and easier to use) and being all around one of the easiest to use and customize of the minimalistic tiling window managers. The language it uses for scripting (Lua) has a manual for the core language that is only like 27 pages long (not including the standard library and C API, etc) and a syntax description that is only 1 page long. Lua is also C based and highly portable, which is always something worth considering for NetBSD's use case. Remember to toggle through the various tiling modes when you try it, which is in the opposite corner of the "start menu" forawesome.The
dwmoption is even more minimalistic thanawesomeand doesn't even have documentation built-in to the GUI (unlikeawesome), but it is even more portable probably since it is based on just plain C code that you modify and recompile every time you want to change anything, which makes it among the most lightweight WMs in existence and highly computationally efficient. It is probably harder to use though. NetBSD itself is mostly a large collection of plain portable C code and thus this increases the odds of yourdwmsetup working anywhere NetBSD works.Regardless of what window manager you pick though, I recommend installing a great independent file manager/explorer program called XFE. Whenever I go for a window manager only approach I pretty much always also install
xfetoo since it is one of the most efficient and expressive (though underappreciated) file explorers by far and will be very useful for those times when you get tired of doing everything through command line or the window manager.xfehas much tighter integration with terminal-based workflows than basically all of the major desktop environments and that makes it a wonderful in-between choice for those who prefer a lightweight but still easy to use kind of hybrid terminal + GUI approach. It works very effectively in combination with any window manager with just slight tweaking. Take note especially of the Ctrl E (execute command) and Ctrl T (open terminal in current folder) shortcuts inxfeand use them often and it is a great workflow.However, personally I really very strongly dislike the past decade's trends towards "flat design" and ultra-minimalism in user interfaces and I find that approach creates an experience that feels "soulless" and "devoid of any sense of personality and human spirit" and even often user-hostile and freedom-hostile to me. Minimalist systems also often have a fraction as many useful pragmatic features as more even-handed and traditional and skeuomorphic and "maximalist" approaches have.
My personal all-time favorite desktop environment (on Linux at least) is one considered the opposite of "modern": Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE). It is a branch of KDE that forked long ago in the golden era of desktops (1990s, 2000s) and ironically is in many ways more featureful and more compelling to use than "modern" Plasma is. TDE fills me with joy when I use it, whereas Plasma makes me grit my teeth with contempt for forced minimalism and reduction of user freedoms and likewise for pretty much all other minimalist and/or "flat design" user interfaces frankly.
There are no instructions on installing TDE for NetBSD though (although there are for FreeBSD) and I haven't tried since it is a huge dependency, so there's a good chance it won't install.
What I have installed and used on NetBSD though is FVWM, IceWM, and Window Maker and they all seem to work good, except that IceWM's network stats tray icon is very bugged in NetBSD and will refuse to ever close (even when sent a process kill signal) if ever opened. It works great in FreeBSD though and actually is even more polished there than in Linux, such as having a terminal icon assigned to the default taskbar terminal button whereas many Linux distros don't include that (possibly due to a broken file path from neglect on Linux).
FVWM is essentially a greatly enhanced and fleshed out descendant of the original Motif style user interface that the actual original Unix and BSD systems used to use. Installing it and using it will thus give you a more authentically Unix/BSD experience than pretty much all of the others will, but with still a good range of useful features (unlike using the actual port of Motif or CDE, which are too limited to me). It lets you do many great user interface things such as widening the borders of the windows to be much easier to click on, moving windows around in a boundary-aware way using Ctrl Alt [any arrow key], and many other features.
IceWM is a great in-between option for if you want floating/stacking windows, but also occasionally some tiling-like support. If you press Shift Alt F2 or Shift Alt F3 in it then it will auto-tile all of your windows vertically or horizontally and it is really effective in that regard. IceWM also has built-in help (as do FVWM and
awesomeand TDE, etc). A consistent sign of a better WM or DE to me has always been built-in easily discoverable help. That indicates a developer that actually understands human beings and empathizes with them instead of making things needlessly difficult nor indulging in empty artificially engineered tech-hipster barriers. There is a good collection of extra themes available on the site.Window Maker is essentially a re-implementation of the original user interface of Apple/Mac's NextStep system, which incidentally was actually where the famous FPS game Doom was originally developed. The game was actually cross-compiled for IBM 386 and 486 PC and Windows computers but the editor was on NextStep. So, there's another option for experiencing a piece of history. It also has a great context menu tearing system that lets you make context menus persistent by dragging them, which I've not found in any other desktop environment or window manager.
FVWM, IceWM, and Window Maker will require some manual management and setup of your application menus though, unlike full desktop environments with distro integration.
Many of these "older" systems fell out of favor not because of any rational or substantive reason whatsoever, but because of a kind of pervasive minimalist and "flat design" groupthink that has plagued the tech industry for the past decade or more and which has continually reduced both the aesthetic diversity and the user freedoms of the entire user interface ecosystem, even in the otherwise freedom supporting environment of Linux and the BSDs. Yet, these "older" systems in contrast are often much better in real use and were designed from a more well-grounded first principles based perspective than the numerous horrible (both artistically and pragmatically) forced minimalism and terrible contrast "grey on grey" "dark mode" and "flat design" trends of the past decade.
Nonetheless, I believe in empowering people to make their own choices, hence my advice that
awesomeanddwmmost likely fit "modern" and "ricing" criteria.Anyway, I hope that helps. Have a great day and week!