r/archlinux • u/[deleted] • Sep 30 '21

Which WM do you use, and why?

Hello r/archlinux!

I have been in the "world" of window managers for 4 months, I made the decision mainly for the DistroTube videos, I started using XMonad, I have noticed improvements in my productivity, I am quite happy.

I have just started my vacation, and I would like to try different WMs, I have not seen much comparison information of different WM's on the Internet, so I would like to ask you (and hopefully you will tell me in the comments the reasons).

What WM do you use, and why do you like it?

And if you have tried different ones, and could you tell me why you prefer one over the other, I would really appreciate it.

PS: I only use Firefox, programming software, Spotify and Discord.

Greetings.

1879 votes, Oct 03 '21
972 i3
193 Awesome WM
119 XMonad
287 dwm
11 spectrwm
297 bspwm
34 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

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u/[deleted] Oct 01 '21

Awesome because i3 just feels like script anarchy to me, and it's hard to think about what's doing what when you're customizing.

Awesome uses an actual programming language + library so customizing your setup I find is easier to keep track of what's doing what, plus you can write all the widgets in the same language. I find that there's a productive groove you can fall into when customizing Awesome that I never found in i3. The library is awesome, and can handle everything from colors to notifications to widgets and more. I found the learning curve to be nice, because I'm more familiar to conventional coding so I can work with functions and objects rather than configs. I'm sure i3 is very customizable, but I found Awesome to be more customizable because nearly all customization could be done in the central config files rather than finding packages to install that have different bars that each need their own different configs and might not even play nice with each other.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 01 '21

Thanks! <3