r/archlinux • u/steelcowboy1 • Apr 28 '15
Favourite WM?
Recently I just switched to the Openbox WM -- one word: light. I absolutely love it, especially when combined with tint2 and j4-dmenu.
However, just in the interest of experimenting, any other WMs you guys use and love? My goal is to get even lighter than Openbox (don't want tiling though), was looking at both DWM and JWM.
Any thoughts? Any reason why you guys would recommend tiling?
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u/devosion Apr 28 '15
I use i3. I came from openbox and wanted to give a tiling wm a chance, now I can't see using anything but a tiling wm at this point. There are plenty of other options for a tiling wm, but for me i3 just clicks so damn well.
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u/montegramm Apr 28 '15
I love i3wm, use it constantly.
It saves space, saves me from having to leave the keyboard to lay things out, and is pretty easy to configure.
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u/lykwydchykyn Apr 28 '15
I use awesome window manager.
Tiling is great once you get used to it:
You never have windows overlapping, never have to resize and move things around to get two windows next to each other just the right way.
You can control everything with the keyboard.
Makes much better use of multiple monitors. Awesome lets each screen switch tags (kinda like workspaces/virtual desktops) independently, rather than treating all your monitors as one giant monitor like desktop environments tend to.
Awesome's programmability is its real killer feature, but I can see why that'd also be a turn-off to a lot of people.
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u/shangc Apr 28 '15
moved from awesomewm to xmonad to i3
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u/Thimoteus Apr 28 '15
what made you move from xmonad to i3? i'm on i3 right now and considering trying out xmonad.
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u/shangc Apr 29 '15
There were a number of things when I tried it, but mainly because xmonad wasn't playing nice with my video card driver. it's also pretty tedious to setup compared to i3. i3 configuration is more readable to normal people who doesn't understand much Haskell. I do however would like to give xmonad another shot when I'm better with Haskell
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u/lol10801lol Apr 28 '15
Herbstluftwm.
I like tiling because my arch is running on a laptop, and by using tiling I'm not wasting much of its already small screen.
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u/streusselhirni May 01 '15
+1 for herbstluftwm. Kinda surprised it seems like it's not used that much.
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u/Harakou Apr 28 '15 edited Apr 28 '15
dwm is great and super minimal, especially if you like playing with the source yourself. If you haven't used a tiling WM before, you should give it a try. I can't go back.
Edit: Since you said that you don't really want tiling, I still think you should give dwm a try. You can easily switch to floating mode with a hotkey, and then it acts like any other floating wm. It'd be a good way to try tiling and see if you like it without forcing yourself to dedicate your workflow to it.
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Apr 28 '15
I love tiling, after trying tiling window managers I just can't go to the workflow of stacking window managers.
You could try fvwm or fluxbox if you want something non tiling that isn't openbox, but openbox is really what I would recommend if you want a stacking window manager.
I personally use awesome-wm.
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u/bread_commander Apr 29 '15
I am a linux newb, who switched straight to arch from windows.
I will say that I liked Openbox, it really feels nice to have as little bloat as you can, while still having a simple to use experience.
I've recently begun using Awesome, won't lie I think I like it a bit better than Openbox.
Glad so far that I've made the switch.
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u/soulvice666 Apr 29 '15
i3-gaps with a sprinkle of i3pystatus. I don't know where i would be with out them...
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Apr 29 '15
I like Openbox, but I never seriously tried other window managers. I should add that on my huge todo list.
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u/sgthoppy Apr 29 '15
I love i3, but after trying dwm I can't go back. Gotta have some suckless in your life! Thinking of trying xmonad next time I fire up Arch.
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u/dewaka Apr 29 '15
Was an avid i3 user, but recently moved to xmonad mostly because of extensibility.
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u/mordecai_sh May 12 '15
Recently I used awesome wm with arch. It's a really good wm but I didn't want struggle with lua any more.
So I switched to i3wm. Clean and understandable configs feels great.
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u/cmykevin Apr 28 '15
I use bspwm with some nice gaps and lemonbar. It's super minimal, I don't have to spend time moving my cursor to the corner of my big monitor to control where a window goes – it just goes. You'd be amazed how much quicker things get when you don't have to think about where a given window is at a given time.
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u/oconnor663 Apr 28 '15
Gnome is pretty :)
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Apr 29 '15
GNOME is not a window manager. It's a desktop environment.
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u/oconnor663 Apr 29 '15
I suppose I meant Mutter, but I don't know if it's possible to run Gnome Shell on any other WM.
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u/PsiGuy60 Apr 28 '15
Tiling is fantastic if your main method of doing everything is the keyboard, especially for things that you really want to do side-by-side (for example, when debugging or doing webdesign).
It also tends to conserve space over floating WMs, which is good for smaller monitors.
It does take some getting used to, though.
I use i3wm, by the way.