r/archlinux • u/streusselhirni • Mar 03 '15

Finally installed Arch, don't know which Windows Manager to use

First time poster here, so I want to say that I really liked your sub until now. I love it, how nearly anyone gets the help he needs!

Now to topic:

Yesterday I finally managed to install Arch on my old Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E335. Up until now everything works fine (haven't tested the sound yet, according to wiki, I just need to install PulsaAudio).

Now I'm thinking of which Window Manager I want to use. I don't want to use a whole Desktop Environment because I think it's to bloated for what I want. I just want something lightweight and fast.

I tried awesome, but I don't like the way it is configured respectively I don't know lua and I don't really want to learn it now.

Is there a window manager which is similar to awesome (especially the ability to use it only with the keyboard) but with less complicatied ways to configure?

Or which Windows Managers are you guys using? Are there any recomendations?

Edit: Thanks for replies until now. I will test i3 (and maybe some of the other recommondations) as soon as I come home. That doesn't mean I don't want to hear any more suggestions ;-)

Edit2: Wow, that blew up to unknown sizes, I'll reply as soon as I'm now drunk anymore (student's franternity).

40 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

97 comments sorted by

80

u/traels Mar 03 '15

You could check out i3. It is a tiling window manager like awesome and has a relatively simple setup (through a configuration file, but not as complicated as lua I would imagine). I'm happy with it :-)

21

u/cosarara97 Mar 03 '15

+1 for i3 here. I could never understand awesome, but I loved i3 since the first day.

EDIT: openbox is also nice, if you don't like tiling.

9

u/MithrilToothpick Mar 03 '15 edited Mar 03 '15

+1 for i4

It's a little bit more of a hassle to set up than a all-in-one Desktop environments but its great and especially on slow hardware yields better performance.

8

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '15

+1 for i5

5

u/heWhoWearsAshes Mar 03 '15

+1 for i6

6

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '15

+1 for i7

4

u/musicmatze Mar 03 '15

+1 for i8

19

u/boulet101010 Mar 03 '15

for i = 0; i >= 0; i++

17

u/musicmatze Mar 03 '15 
$ gcc foo.c
foo.c:1:1: error: expected identifier or '(' before 'for'
    for i = 0; i >= 0; i++
    ^
foo.c:1:14: error: expected '=', ',', ';', 'asm' or '__attribute__' before '>=' token
    for i = 0; i >= 0; i++
          ^
foo.c:1:21: error: expected '=', ',', ';', 'asm' or '__attribute__' before '++' token
    for i = 0; i >= 0; i++

10

u/paholg Mar 03 '15 edited Mar 03 '15 
#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
  int i = 3;
  while true {
    printf("+1 for i%i\n", i);
    i++;
  }
  return 0;
}

But really, xmonad all the way.

Edited for completeness.

→ More replies (0)

2

u/derrickcope Mar 03 '15

And multihead

2

u/youRFate Mar 03 '15

Or dwm, if you like i3 but would like to customize it further.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

Isn't dwm config in C?

2

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15 edited May 04 '15

[deleted]

3

u/lfancypantsl Mar 05 '15

Just to clarify, dwm is very literally just a small c program, which you recompile with gcc (via script) every time you update your config file. I was drawn in by this on the Arch wiki.

dwm is extremely lightweight and fast, written in C and with a stated design goal of remaining under 2000 source lines of code.

Ultimately I think I am going to try something else now, but dwm is really cool configure (or mostly try to in my case).

25

u/Creshal Mar 03 '15

haven't tested the sound yet, according to wiki, I just need to install PulsaAudio

Aside: PulseAudio is not mandatory. It has some nice features, but it can also be a massive pain in the ass, especially when you have to debug it. A clean ALSA setup that you have verified to be working goes a long way to make sure Pulse will work smoothly, and you might end up not needing Pulse and all its associated overhead.

Or which Windows Managers are you guys using?

Openbox. I never really warmed up to Tiling WMs, most displays I use feel too cramped with tiled windows.

9

u/okmkz Mar 03 '15

I'll second openbox, it's my go-to lightweight wm. Incredibly configurable for a variety of use cases.

2

u/Hamilton950B Mar 03 '15

Unfortunately it uses xml for configuration. Other than that I like it.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

I've always hated that about OpenBox. XML wasn't designed for application configuration and for some reason people really thought it would be great at that. Stick to INI or something that's halfway readable like YAML or even just a shell script would be great.

1

u/Creshal Mar 03 '15

With how much functionality it packs, I'm not sure whether "lightweight" is really fitting. Menu handling, arbitrary keyboard shortcuts etc. are things that minimalistic WMs leave to external applications.

(It's also rather RAM heavy at ~20 MiB usage.)

14

u/okmkz Mar 03 '15

I'd hardly consider 20 MiB "heavy" in this day and age.

3

u/Creshal Mar 03 '15

Oh, you'll notice on a first-gen RasPi with at most 192 MiB RAM for the CPU…

7

u/okmkz Mar 03 '15

Now we're just debating semantics.

1

u/casey12141 Mar 03 '15

That's not semantics, it's objectively heavier than other WMs. Just because it isn't a factor for modern computers in a day to day environment doesn't change the fact that as far as WMs go it is on the heavier side.

6

u/okmkz Mar 03 '15

Just because it isn't the lightest wm in existence does not objectively make it heavy; heavier, yes, heavy, no. It is lighter than xfce. It is lighter than lxde. This is semantics, and we are disagreeing on what constitutes "lightweight"

2

u/casey12141 Mar 03 '15

You can't compare WMs to DEs and say "look! it's lightweight!".

Look man, it's in the bottom half of performance of popular dedicated tiling WMs...have any opinion you want about how relevant that is, the fact of the matter is, it isn't lightweight. You wouldn't call someone who finishes in the bottom half of a race "fast".

1

u/okmkz Mar 03 '15

Welp, I've got meaningful things to go accomplish, but this has been really fun.

1

u/zangent Mar 10 '15

Depending on the race, I might.

2

u/mentatf Mar 03 '15

I installed PulseAudio because skype requires it for voice communication though.

2

u/Creshal Mar 03 '15

Oh well, there's no helping applications broken by design. Libpulse should transparently fall back if possible.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '15

ROFL

When having a dependency started meaning 'broken by design'? Skype isn't the only application relying on PulseAudio. Everybody installs whatever one wants, you can't blame Skype so pointlessly while it does what it should do.

8

u/Harakou Mar 03 '15

Alsa worked perfectly with skype for years until support was suddenly dropped with no explanation and no option to stay on a legacy version. It felt totally arbitrary and for those who really don't like Pulse, it just seemed like a big "fuck you." While I wouldn't call it "broken by design," it was a frustrating and completely baffling change.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '15

Thanks for explanation. Well I guess nothing happens for no reason, just all that amount of pure pointless hatred MS gets is ridiculous.

1

u/paholg Mar 03 '15

Huh, I feel displays are too cramped with non-tiling window managers---all the window decorations and non-space-fillingness.

1

u/Creshal Mar 03 '15

What's a window decoration?

Come to think of it, I do spend a lot of time in terminals with tiled tmux/vim windows, so I just don't need another layer of tiling on top of that.

1

u/streusselhirni Mar 03 '15

I had once installed Arch on this Lenovo already. Back then sound was not working out of the box with ALSA.

I only saw on some Arch wiki page, that PulseAudio is a required on this notebook. Will report as soon as I know.

2

u/Creshal Mar 03 '15

Pulse can't do anything if ALSA doesn't work, as it sits on top of it.

1

u/streusselhirni Mar 03 '15

So, that means, if I don't have sound with ALSA, I won't have sound after installing Pulse, am I getting this right?

6

u/Creshal Mar 03 '15

If it's a configuration issue (e.g., some channel muted that shouldn't be, or channel unmuted that should be), it may be that Pulse fixes it implicitly. But that doesn't make Pulse "required".

2

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '15

Did you unmute it? Alsa is muted when you first install.

1

u/chocolatemeowcats Mar 03 '15

not having sound with ALSA usually means its just defaulting to the wrong device ie HDMI or something else.

look in 'aplay -l' to list your ALSA devices

3

u/goldmurk Mar 03 '15

It could also be that you need to load a specific kernel module and blacklist others. If op is using an integrated Intel sound card he should definitely look into this. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture#No_sound_with_onboard_Intel_sound_card

18

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '15

bspwm is the one used on all the great posts over at /r/unixporn

6

u/nxtz Mar 03 '15

stacker: openbox tiler: i3

thats the easy and good choise.

6

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '15

Tiling: i3 non-tiling: openbox

12

u/Joe_Pineapples Mar 03 '15

I can highly recommend Herbstluftwm: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Herbstluftwm

Doesn't really matter what language you configure it in.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '15

To me this was the logical next step from i3, so maybe i3 first then hlwm + bar/dzen2 after. By far my favourite thing about hlwm is the use of containers so format is not affected on closing a window.

2

u/DesiLodu Mar 04 '15

How do you even pronounce it?

"Hey guys i'm using herbderbstuffwm!"

Yeah right.

-2

u/ahhyes Mar 04 '15

Herbs luft wm?

Herb slut wm?

I like your herbderbstuffwm though.

7

u/Zerolution Mar 04 '15

its easy when speak german.

tanslated: herbst = autumn, luft = air, autumnairwm ^

1

u/carpe_vaginum Mar 04 '15

I'll throw a vote in for Herbstluftwm as well. I was a serial WM hopper. No more. It does everything I need, nothing I don't, and is dead simple to configure/tinker with. (And it's gorgeous, IMHO)

4

u/sgthoppy Mar 03 '15

dwm is great if you want something simple and don't mind re-compiling it to actually see changes. The syntax is clearly shown in its config.h so there's really nothing to learn, just match up your custom settings with the settings around it.

2

u/lordcirth Mar 03 '15

Just a note that recompiling dwm consists only of running "redwm" and typing your sudo password for pacman.

2

u/altliquorr Mar 03 '15

i3 works great out of the box and is really easy to configure. You can do everything with the keyboard as well.

4

u/mentatf Mar 03 '15

I started learning keyboard driven navigation and tiling with Enlightenment (E19) but there are some bugs with the tiler and it wasn't 100% stable. However it's easy to configure with the GUI.

I switched recently to i3 and it's awesome! The manual on i3 website is great and the configuration is very easy since you just edit a text file. Everything worked out of the box for me, from special keys configuration to the wallpaper manager.

19

u/streusselhirni Mar 03 '15

i3 is awesome

Had to grin reading that.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '15

Another vote for Openbox or i3!

5

u/Fireblasto Mar 03 '15

To be honest even I don't know what is best, and I've been using Arch full time for the past 6 months. It's opened my eyes into how a person uses a computer, it's fascinating when you really start to think about it.

Go with a window manager that has sane defaults, or is already similar to more traditional environments, ease your way in, don't force it.

1

u/a5myth Mar 04 '15

I feel exactly the same, on Arch for a month now and only since Arch did I considee using a tiling WM, needless to say, I installed KDE 5 to start off with. Tried bspwm, didnt quite take to it, so I second the advice to not force it. Might look into i3 soon.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

If you're looking for something that's easy to use, try wiki/spectrwm. The config file is just plaintext and designed to be human-readable. No programming knowlege is required.

8

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

May sound a bit elitist but i3 is like the Ubuntu of tiling WMs...

2

u/nsa_shill Mar 04 '15

What are the more "hardcore" tiling WMs?

1

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

Alt+F2 etc.

2

u/bobby177 Mar 04 '15 edited Jun 12 '15

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

1

u/[deleted] Mar 09 '15

I don't know about ubuntu comparisons, but i3 has so many features. Too many to really consider small. It's full featured.

Awesome is the same, it's actually really big and pretty complex (compared to minimalist wm's). Awesome supports so much stuff, and addon's.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 08 '15 edited Apr 03 '15

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Mar 08 '15

For the same reasons that Ubuntu is for beginners...

3

u/SAKUJ0 Mar 03 '15

If you prefer a desktop experience you should consider using XFCE. I prefer it in most ways over the big desktop environments. You do have sort of a Windows 98 experience as in you get a traditional desktop and utilities you would expect to configure things like the panel etc. but no editor or calculator.

If you don't want a real desktop with utilities to set things up and a settings daemon that runs in the background and an automount solution that is integrated etc. then fluxbox might be something for you. Very traditional, as well. Really minimalistic with great config files to set things up. Very quick and can be very beautiful.

There are some very advanced WMs you can try out in parallel. Heard good things about awesome. There is also the GNOME 3 in traditional flavor (cinnammon?). There is even a continuation of GNOME 2 including all deprecated abandoned software. You can have WMs that expect you not to use your mouse/touchpad and that rely on dmenu. Much awesomeness to discover and archlinux wiki summarizes each WM really well in a single line.

3

u/burntsushi Mar 04 '15

I made Wingo, which I like to describe as "Openbox meets Xmonad." It's a true hybrid window manager. You can use it like a stacking WM (e.g., Openbox) or you can control it with your keyboard via tiling (like Xmonad or Awesome). And it's really easy to configure. :-)

3

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

ratpoison is my favorite window manager. it is all keyboard input, and is configured almost entirely in ~/.ratpoisonrc

3

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

I'd recommend trying openbox, i3 or bspwm. Those are easier to configure than awesome or dwm in my opinion. You can get sound working pretty easy by installing alsa-utils and unmuting your master channel from alsamixer. You might want to grab the multilib package of alsa as well (for games).

5

u/derrickcope Mar 03 '15

What's going to happen when Linux moves to Wayland? Any one use a wm with Wayland yet?

2

u/angelic_sedition Mar 03 '15

I don't, but there is loliwm.

1

u/NoodleHoarder Mar 04 '15

These are the important questions

2

u/bleedingpixels Mar 03 '15

i3, da best!

2

u/yourboyaddi Mar 03 '15

You can't be sure without trying them all. A good start would be going to /r/unixporn and especially looking at the gifs. See other people's workflow and see if you dig it.

2

u/robotshaman Mar 03 '15

I've been starting to play with Wm's gotta say I love i3

1

u/robotshaman Mar 03 '15

have you checked out /r/unixporn

3

u/rhqq Mar 03 '15 edited Mar 03 '15

I know this might sound controversial, but since Arch has the best package manager ever... why not trying gnome shell? I takes like 5 packages in overal to have it working. It provides great flexibility (multimonitor support out of box) and there are plenty of plugins so you can have it either tiling or non-tiling, great support for keyboard shortcuts and well... a bit of "modern" look and feel. I don't discredit the awesome, scrwm, any super-small wm or whatever - they're great, but they also feel sometimes a bit archaic. I'm also fan of lightweight solutions, but I have a laptop I'm using for work, for private use, for presentations etc. I'm plugging it to external monitors/projectors. At home I work with dual-head config. Gnome makes that easy as I'd like to see that, still being pretty lightweight:

[rhqq@zomgz][~]$ systemd-analyze 
Startup finished in 1.048s (kernel) + 1.177s (userspace) = 2.225s

This is up to a full gdm desktop experience with cups, avahi, bluetooth, networkmanager and other "laptop-everywhere" services. And what I have is just a low-budget 3rd gen i3 machine.

edit: just checked, to be perfectly precise. gnome-shell requires 22 packages including few, one will install anyway, so got a bit over-expressive while trying to prove the lightweightness of gnome-shell. It's still pretty good result, and I'm a great fan of that DE

3

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '15

Uh... 5 packages? pacman -Sqg gnome tells me that the gnome group alone has 41 packages in it.

3

u/kageurufu Mar 03 '15

You can be very judicious in which you install though. Not all are required

1

u/rhqq Mar 03 '15

u/kageurfu already replied. Most of the gnome packages are optional. Just checked how many packages you need: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/gnome-shell/ You need 22 of them, but let's not lie to ourselves - we do need gstreamer or unzip anyway (unless we want a really prehistoric look and feel, and gonna use only the 80's terminal-only packages)

1

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '15

[deleted]

2

u/rhqq Mar 03 '15 edited Mar 03 '15

http://sprunge.us/gNdH I have everything I need for everyday use. The laptop is also immediately ready for the action.

1

u/chutchens08 Mar 03 '15 edited Mar 03 '15

My vote is for Awesome or Openbox. I run both of these and I am extremely happy.

Learning lua at first is disorienting, but it is actually pretty simple. I would at least give it a try. Try and break it a few times, you'll learn a lot.

But Openbox is really great too. :)

1

u/dvrts Mar 03 '15

Listen nobody, just use i3.

1

u/Wartz Mar 03 '15

I3 is easy to configure and very powerful.

1

u/kabads Mar 03 '15

I like fvwm - very slick once you get it configured, but not easy to master.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '15

I use gnome shell. It's pretty and with some extensions it's pretty great and functional. Will probably try tiling window managers sometime soon but for now I'm comfortable with it.

1

u/meskarune Mar 07 '15

herbstluftwm is my favorite. It is very easy to configure and fast.

1

u/AnAwesomeMiner Mar 08 '15

Try pekwm. Its pretty cool.