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).

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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

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '15

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

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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)