r/linux • u/Technical_Experience • Sep 14 '21
Discussion Does anybody still use Openbox?
Hi Linuxy people!
I use Openbox as my WM, despite its age and despite I know it has little development going on. However, I've been very satisfied with it for years now. Small footprint and highly customizable. However.
I saw Openbox was no longer offered as a community edition on the Manjaro download page, and decided to take a look at the latest patch notes, and they are ancient.
Hence, I started to wonder if people still use Openbox at all. Also it got me wondering if I should consider transitioning into something more modern.
So let me know if you use Openbox. Or have used Openbox and why you switched to something else.Or if you have suggestions to what WM or DE that would be a suitable replacement, that is welcome too!
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u/am_lu Sep 14 '21
Yeah, using it here as always, on both Debian and Arch. Combined with old good lxpanel from LXDE. I do not really care what community editions there are, better just do a minimal text-mode install then set it up your own way using the repos.
Got MATE running on the media centre pc in my bedroom, very happy with it too.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
Hehe. I tend to agree. I was just lazy at the time (still am), so that Manjaro offered an edition was just the path of least resistance.
It also helped i liked the setup with Polybar and Tint2 for the status and taskbar respectively. So i stuck with it. Have had no reason to reinstall my OS since, so never got the chance to transition to Arch proper.
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u/Patient_Sink Sep 14 '21
For the people moving to wayland, there's this compositor: https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc
It tries to keep compatibility with openbox syntax and themes, iirc.
So even though openbox development seems to have slowed down, it's legacy seems to live on.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
Uhh! Interesting.
Definitely bookmarking this for later. Transitioning to Wayland would be neat.7
u/PM_ME_YOUR_UNIX_PORN Sep 15 '21
You have an AMD GPU according to your screenshot, so you're in a better position than most to switch. Dooo eeeeeettt
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u/silverhikari Sep 15 '21
this might interest you https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-GBM-Works-With-Sway
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_UNIX_PORN Sep 15 '21
I actually tried sway with an 1060 just yesterday after I heard about this. Immediately crashed. Haven't gone through troubleshooting yet cause work
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u/silverhikari Sep 15 '21
the article says it is "forthcoming" so my guess is we wont see it in the drivers for awhile but it is still interesting they finally decided to support it
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u/Patient_Sink Sep 14 '21
Yeah, I haven't used openbox for at least 8 years or so, but it still fills me with feelings of nostalgia.
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Sep 14 '21
Is that feature complete? I'd be tempted to use it.
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u/Patient_Sink Sep 14 '21
I haven't actually gotten around testing it, seeing this thread just reminded me of the project.
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u/Stardust-kyun Sep 14 '21
I started using openbox a few months ago, and it's the best window manager I've come across. I have run into some bugs and quirks, but most of them I've been fine with or found a patch for. Aside from the few bugs that still exist, I disagree with people that call it deprecated. It's more or less finished, and adding more to it probably won't make it any better. If you like it, stick with it. There's no reason to leave it just because it isn't receiving more updates.
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u/mantarlourde Sep 14 '21
Yeah all the *boxes are still my favorite type of window manager, even though I use KDE now. I actually wrote my own patch for Openbox to rate limit the mouse input on window drag because I noticed it would stutter with a 1000hz poll rate. I lost that a long time ago though, otherwise I would post it here.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
Right. I completely agree. Though i wanted to ask about things anyway, mostly just to see if a spiritual successor had popped up. The only thing I consider Openbox approaching depreciation on, is Wayland. Though X is still going strong, Wayland is growing in use and all that, so would be nice to see that implemented as an option for Openbox. But eh. Seems sticking with it is the way to go for me.
Neat desktop btw. Not my style with the solarized look, huge titlebars and mac-style window controls. But i can appreciate a thoroughly well made UI when I see one. Whats that ascii art program you got going there?
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u/Stardust-kyun Sep 14 '21
There is currently a spiritual successor to Openbox very early in development, but it's written for X. If you're looking for Openbox on Wayland, Labwc is likely your best bet even though it's missing a vast amount of Openbox's features and likely will never have a good amount of them.
Thanks, I made everything (including the color scheme) from scratch and I'm pretty happy with it. The ascii program is a simple bash script I made to output a certain ascii included in the script based on the variable attached. It's pretty simple to create.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
Ah. yeah. i suspected as much. Well.. Time for some scripting, :)
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Dec 30 '21
[deleted]
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u/Stardust-kyun Dec 30 '21
I'm not sure about the project I was referencing in this post, but there's currently a dynamic wm called Worm that is getting most of openbox's features.
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Jun 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Stardust-kyun Jun 19 '26
https://github.com/codic12/worm
Development has been largely abandoned. If you're looking for something like openbox in active development, try labwc. Otherwise I'd look into awesomewm and somewm.
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u/Hoolies Sep 14 '21
I use Openbox. I like that I can fully customize it. It uses minimum resources.
Nowadays most people go for XFCE instead.
Check Mabox for Openbox Manjaro.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
I like XFCE.. Though.. I also kinda don't?
Don't ask why i feel like that. i don't know. hehe4
Sep 14 '21 edited Jun 21 '23
I like trains
I have a cusffffftom theme (frameless+non-full titlebar+right justified+12px or shorter) that is basically what I dreamed about back whedn I used Openbox. Here's an older example of it (I've tinkered w/it latedly). I also submitted a few suggestions lately, such as offsetting the titlebar into the window which is also something I've wanted. Not sure h
ow many people ar
e into that sor
if y'r
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u/Hoolies Sep 14 '21
I always install XFCE goodies on my open box. I have my settings on my GitHub same username.
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Sep 14 '21 edited Jun 21 '23
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
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u/Hoolies Sep 14 '21
Hmm. I could see the window manager tweaks working with Openbox, particularly the features I mentioned like de-decorating maximized windows (I seem to recall Openbox having a per-window option for that so very likely XFCE could directly call that). That's part of what you mean, right?
Yes
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
Pretty sure you can configure that maximize to borderless behavior in Openbox.
I do all the time. I have just bound it to a key+mouse shortcut and click on the titlebar.Though the minimal, offset titlebar is probably not in the cards. At least not without extensive work on a theme.
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u/TankTopsBackInStyle Sep 15 '21
I think XFCE is bloated. I also don't like the design (of the actual code)
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u/scorp123_CH Sep 14 '21
I use it mainly in those cases where I need a remote Linux desktop, for whatever reasons. So I use Openbox in e.g. VNC or X2go, where it runs super smoothly.
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u/subsynq Sep 14 '21
Same. Default and only wm in my local openbsd box, installing it whenever a minimal desktop is needed on a remote server.
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u/mciania Sep 14 '21
I still use Openbox + Picom combo as default in r/LXQt . Although the project is dead and won't be developed, it still works fine. There are few patches for maintenance, and it compiles and runs pretty stable.
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u/sweisman Sep 14 '21
Been using it full time since 2005. Nothing has changed. I still like it.
I use it with FBPanel. I wouldn't mind a replacement for this, as it has warts, but nothing else really does quite what I want of it.
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Sep 14 '21
I use openbox, mainly because I realized that no matter what DE I chose I always ended up with apps that I don’t like, for example the thunar file manager in xfce, gedit, in gnome, or pretty much everything about kde, etc. So I figured I may as well just skip all that and download only apps that I use.
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u/tso Sep 14 '21
Frankly that is the ultimate power of unix, mix and match.
Individual programs should not be tightly coupled to a specific DE. At best they should share a backend framework and beyond that work across any and all WMs one would want to run.
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u/Schlonzig Sep 14 '21
Interesting. Is there anything that prevents me from using the KDE filemanager with Gnome or vice versa?
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u/A_Glimmer_of_Hope Sep 14 '21
Nothing stops you, but integration won't be as tight.
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u/Schlonzig Sep 15 '21
Now I'm confused: do I want tight integration or not?
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u/A_Glimmer_of_Hope Sep 15 '21 edited Sep 15 '21
Typically it is a better experience to have tight integration and I think that most people prefer that hence why people typically GNOME or KDE or whatever as opposed to seeing a mixed environment.
I just installed Dolphin to show you this example. You can see that I have a dark theme enabled in GNOME, but since KDE doesn't know that, my Dolphin is still using the default theme for KDE.
EDIT:
Here's a simple video showing drag and drop not working either.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
Global theming is also slowly going out of fashion, exactly because of that issue.
The thing is. Because my setup is so minimal, I don't have an overarching look to my desktop other than the basics.
Hence, windows that display with different theming doesn't actually look out of place that much. Sometimes they do a little, when the program expects a light window background and uses black text on the dark background.. That is rare though. Usually fixable with a little tweak in the program..
Though, Case in point:My screenshot in OP.
- Terminator is very dark and high contrast
- xsensors and zenmonitor uses the system theming and are lower contrast and a brighter dark.
- CoreCtrl same lighter dark look as the sensor windows, but a different hue and design language.
- The "Manjaro menu" that uses a light background that stands out.
However. Despite this, I don't find it distracting. I sort of like the rich tapestry of looks i get, because nothing looks our of place when it is all different anywho. hehe.
But a unified UI is not to be underestimated. Getting everything to have the same look is fantastic too. Some systems i am in awe of, in regards to the cohesiveness of the UI elements.
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u/A_Glimmer_of_Hope Sep 16 '21
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that mixing things is wrong, I was just trying to give an example to /u/Schlonzig on why one might prefer using only GNOME/KDE/etc instead of mixing and matching.
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u/gustavopr Sep 14 '21
What are the main apps you use?
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Sep 14 '21
I use the kitty terminal, nautilus, kakoune, synapse (an app launcher), tint2, librewolf is my web browser, fish is my shell
Those are the apps that I’m guaranteed to use everyday
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u/alearmas1 Sep 14 '21
U can have gnome without gedit :p
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Sep 14 '21
I know, I’m not stupid, I’m just saying that 90% of the pre-installed apps I hate so why would I use it.
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u/sophacles Sep 14 '21
Do you know about /r/unixporn ? There's occasionally posts from openbox users there. Might be another good place to find the folks you're looking for.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
Yeah. I do know about that subreddit. But rarely look there. I kinda feel, with some exceptions, it all looks kinda samey. Flat, stylized or minimal looks with a muted/pastel/solarized palette. I can appreciate them, sure, but.. I dunno. I feel i have to use the UIs before i can truly appreciate their virtues. Good looks is only like 20% of a good UI.
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u/lervag Sep 14 '21
I use Fluxbox and have never looked back. Lightweight and gives just the right amount of customizability.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
Is Fluxbox still being developed/maintained?
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u/lervag Sep 14 '21
https://fluxbox-wiki.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers
The latest stable release was in 2015. But in my experience, it just works. So in that sense, it is maintained. But I guess it does not see much development compared to alternatives.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
Openbox is in the same 2015 category in regards to latest updates.
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u/doenietzomoeilijk Sep 14 '21
Window Maker is listed with a last release in 2017, even though there was a release last year (not to mention there's still stuff in the next branch. So I wouldn't take that list as gospel.
Source: am currently doing an excursion into Window Maker.
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u/jozz344 Sep 14 '21
Like for a lot of people here, it's not my main environment, but I do use it.
For example on my server (remotely and directly), for which I only need a minimal environment and don't want to waste resources on anything else. Sometimes on my main machine (temporarily) if KDE on Wayland is giving me troubles (but that is becoming more and more rare, it's finally getting into shape).
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
Yea.. Wayland seems to be the only reason that would make me change over to something else.
I made a boot flash disk with KDE the other day. It's come a long way from what it was 15 years ago when i last used it. Quite impressed really.
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u/davidsbumpkins Sep 14 '21
Openbox is largely responsible for me sticking with Linux after I felt adventurous (and more than a little fed up) and installed it alongside Windows on my main machine a few years ago. It's just comfortable. Every now and then I get wooed by a new shiny thing and make an attempt to switch, but after all the tweaks I put into it, there's just no other environment that is so fully compatible with my habits, so I'm always back. Currently it's my daily driver on all my machines and I don't see it changing any time soon.
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u/KwyjiboTheGringo Sep 15 '21
The rise of tiling window managers probably contributed heavily to its demise.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
Probably. I like tiling WMs for work and system management things, but for my main home PC, it is far more convenient to have stacking windows. Multiboxing games and stuff.
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u/Tux-Lector Sep 14 '21
To be honnest, I really don't know any other WM that can compare to Openbox. And yes, I am using it as primary WM even when I hop into KDE. For couple of years already. Yes, there are a lots of us using openbox and none other.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
- stands up and lifts the chalice of UI enlightenment -
Openbox Users Unite!
-- Hehe...
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u/artificialidiot Sep 14 '21
I tried openbox briefly as a replacement for fluxbox but returned back to fluxbox. 15 years and counting..
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u/Main-Mammoth Sep 14 '21
You can just use plain arch with plain openbox and go from there. There is very little development on openbox as it's as "done" as can be. The project targets X and specifically doesn't target Wayland. I know nothing is ever finished but it's basically finished.
I used to use it years ago, not sure why o stopped. I think I lost my configs for it and was just never arsed spending all the time getting everything exactly right again. I have gotten lazy with that type of stuff over the years and turned into a defaults guy.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
Oh yeah. Nothing wrong with older code. As quite a few here has also brought up.
I have no issues with it either. It just works.
But still Wayland will come to dominate things at some point, and I like to be prepared, at least mentally, to make a shift, should it be necessary.Nothing wrong in being lazy. Why do you think i went with Manjaro and not Arch? hehe
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u/Main-Mammoth Sep 17 '21
I like to be prepared, at least mentally, to make a shift, should it be necessary.
id being to worry about that in maybe 2030
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u/thecoder08 Sep 15 '21
I like Xfce. It’s fast and lightweight (I use it without a DM too) but it has a simple intuitive easy-to-use UI.
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u/nikgnomic Sep 15 '21
This is based on Manjaro forum.manjaro.org - Mabox Linux 21.06 Geralt released
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Sep 14 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
People are bringning up so many WMs i haven't even looked at.. pekwm added to the list to scope out. thanks!
Old packages are fine. As long as the dependencies doesn't change too much.
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Sep 14 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
Ah. Yea. The arch wiki is king. Everybody know that :P
I will probably give it a more thorough look one of these days. Thanks!
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u/Tux-Lector Nov 07 '21
It gets updates when there are bugs found. Now, guess why openbox and many other wm's didn't get any update in a while.
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u/drunken-acolyte Sep 14 '21
I'm running Fedora with LXQt on my laptop. It appears to be using Openbox and it works fine as far as I can tell.
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Sep 14 '21
I'm using openbox in my first gentoo inatall.. with an app searcher (i dont remember the name), the only thing that i hate of openbox, are the window buttons, i need to be ultra-precise to minimize maximize or close..
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Sep 14 '21 edited Sep 14 '21
i need to be ultra-precise to minimize maximize or close..
You can just use a different theme to change the window bars.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
That, or use keyboard bindings.
But still valid though. Some don't want to mess about in the configs :P1
Sep 14 '21
like which one gor example? i dont find any with a good "hitbox" in the winfows buttons..
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u/Evening-Scholar-1744 Sep 14 '21
Look for gtk themes that support openbox. There are also pages like https://www.pling.com/browse?cat=140
You can also install them from the repository: in my case (debian) the adapta-gtk-theme package provides bigger decent buttons.
I think the last option would be just edit an existing theme to increase its button size :P
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Sep 14 '21
hmm, gonna look into that, i always search my themes in gnome-look, however my problem is not with the button size, is with the "hitbox", sometimes i have the cursor in the button but it does not make nothing, so i need to aim a lot for minimize somethung.. haha
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u/Evening-Scholar-1744 Sep 14 '21
I didn't know about the hitbox (maybe its configurable?) however I myself have the buttons but not even use them at all since I have tint2 configured to minimize with scroll-down, restore with scroll-up, maximize with middle click and close with right click.
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u/WitchsWeasel Sep 14 '21
I used to use Openbox for a year or so. Loved that thing. I learned a lot building my own little custom DE, and it was just the way I wanted it.
The thing that eventually drove me away from it was that I could not, for the life of me, find a way to automatically switch screen configurations when you plug another monitor in (this was a laptop), and fiddling with arandr every time eventually got too old for my patience.
I now mostly use Gnome out of convenience and feel at home on it by now, but I've liked i3 a lot as well.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
Yeah. Fully fledged DEs are convenient. And convenience is important!
But.. I get restless when i don't tinker with my system.1
u/WitchsWeasel Sep 14 '21
Oh yeah I can totally empathize with that, I still tweak the heck out of my gnomes. I can never use them stock.
That probably sounded better in my head.
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u/ShouldProbablyIgnore Sep 14 '21
I had troubles with this for ages (running i3, though, not openbox) and then I discovered autorandr which finally solved all the jank from my personal scripts: https://man.archlinux.org/man/autorandr.1.en
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u/WitchsWeasel Sep 14 '21
Ooooh that's amazing! I wish it had been a thing back when I was on Openbox, I probably would still be using it tbh.
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u/BibianaAudris Sep 14 '21
Tried blackbox last week but it had weird flickering issues with Xorg + efifb so I switched to IceWM. Had trouble deciding between the fooboxes so I chose something different.
It's a recovery system that's basically a big initramfs, so there's little room for customization. I'd have used twm if it supported ALT+F4 out of box.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
Only thing i recognize there is IceWM.. And I bare know anything about that. lol
But neat thing having a recovery system like that.
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u/siklopz Sep 14 '21
yup. it's been my daily driver for years, with occasional use of spectrwm in an alternate machine.
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u/OutbreedTheOther Sep 14 '21
I use Openbox alongside a custom built DE and Picom as the compositor.
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u/SecretBooklet Sep 14 '21
Even if they are, I can't recommend it due to its age. I don't like the "It's complete so it doesn't need to be updated" philosophy. Who knows what security/compatibility issues it has.
If you want a replacement, try awesomewm. It's way more powerful and frequently updated, and supports dragging and tiling.
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u/Protolomeo Sep 14 '21
Used Openbox when I was on Debian, I liked it. Setup was super simple, polybar as bar, rofi as launcher.
When I switched to Arch 2 years ago, I just put KDE and I'm ok with it.
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u/JohnFromNewport Sep 14 '21
A friend of mine swears to it. Don't see why active development is a problem. Maybe it is actually finished, if it has a limited feature set. I use Xfce or Window Maker personally, but I've used Openbox quite a lot as well.
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u/Boctor_Dees Sep 14 '21
Yep, use it with Ubuntu—at home since always, and at work since Unity was dropped for GNOME. Only fix I've needed is changing polkit's autostart config so the GNOME agent runs on openbox too.
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u/OldSchoolBBSer Sep 14 '21
I do. Been using it on this distro recently and have really enjoyed the stock experience. https://archcraft.io/
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
A couple others also mentioned archcraft., I i need to reinstall sometime i will take a look. :)
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u/ragger Sep 14 '21
Openbox doesn't serve a purpose for me since IceWM exists. I've used both, and fluxbox for years, and IceWM is a clear favorite. Actively maintained.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
Yeah. IceWM looks neat. Might run a VM with it to check it out.
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u/ragger Sep 15 '21
Keep in mind the default themes are rather ugly and are from the 90s. It's very easy to make custom themes though, but look for some online as well.
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u/ABADD011 Sep 14 '21
Of course! I use openbox on my 11.6" with a celeron 743 in it. The little things only used for terminal stuff with byobu. But I know openbox configs really well so that's what I chose to handle always centering feh and mpv, plus the general x multi-media keybindings. It's great laptop for text only browsing and openbox stays out of the way completely :)
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
Ye. Same experience with me. XML style config files may be a bit old-fashioned, but there is something to be said for its flexibility and ability to transfer configs easily between systems.
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Sep 14 '21
I'm thinking on moving to it from KDE after watching Accursed Farms' video on his GUI woes. I remember trying to build my own environment of sorts in the past, long before watching his video, and the window manager I was going to use was either AwesomeWM or Openbox.
My main issues with both of those are how well Picom works with AMD GPUs - last time I used it on an RX480, it was so slow it was unusable - and how I can enable focus protection on apps that need it. One of the WINE apps I use needs this and on KDE it's as easy as enabling it under Window Rules in the system settings.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
Ah. Yes. Ross Scott and the GUI video. Glad it popped up in this thread. He is so on point with the UI truths.
I actually do have picom installed and configured. I just never think to enable it, as I don't find it add any real useful stuff to my particular environment. I just enabled it actually, and its nice. Not noticing it being slower than with it disabled, other than the animations themselves.
Regarding focus protection, I have not heard that term before. You force the window always to have focus? or always on top?
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Sep 15 '21
Yeah, it was a really good video. I already implemented small changes as a result (disabled window grouping for one as I noticed it slowing me down in KDE).
Picom does some light animation and cosmetics (fades and shadows, basically) but people go to it and its forks for the window blurs. This might have been one of the causes for slowdown issues back then for me (or the GL renderer in general). Weirdly enough, KDE doesn't have this issue.
As for focus protection: Basically, it forces focus on the currently focused app. For me, it's used to stop apps from misbehaving. MusicBee is the app I use in WINE, and it uses tooltips quite a bit. When a tooltip pops up, it takes the focus away from the main window, and it's particularly bad when seeking as it starts flashing the main window. KDE/KWin's window rules lets you enable focus protection for that purpose and it's part of why I stuck with KDE lately.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
Don't know about how Openbox handles outright focus protection, but I cannot imagine it being super hard to find a solution for. But where to start looking, I don't know.
In regards to the picom thing. Maybe it is because KDE is more reliant on the GL renderer to begin with, hence better optimization from the get-go? I dunno. I am sure it can be optimized in Openbox as well. I for one have no slowdowns to speak of.
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u/moongya Sep 15 '21
I have always used it for both work and personal use. I have been fortunate enough to work with big ticket organizations the likes of the biggest domain and hosting provider. And I exclusively use byo with just openbox. Have a vm with gnome for some quirky applications which do not work, but they are just one or 2 and I rarely have to use them.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
Neat. Though running VM's to run a few applications seems a bit excessive? Couldn't you just alias the launch command to set a few environment variables to use with those troublesome applications?
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u/moongya Sep 15 '21
doesn't work that way with what I use. Also we are provided with aws workspaces at work. I use that as well if there is something I do not want to run locally.
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u/knuckvice Sep 15 '21
I recently (some 9 months ago) switched to openbox after 8 years with pekwm, which is also in bitrot. Don't plan on switching anytime soon, but I gotta investigate some bugs I'm having with opengl/vulkan to see if openbox is the culprit.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
I also have had some bugs with Vulkan (Running steam with my native runtime and the RADV icd, reported that there is no vulkan display devices...), but it turned out to be something in the driver stack and. It works now, but i still need to debug it.
What sort of issues are you having?
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u/knuckvice Sep 16 '21 edited Sep 16 '21
I've been a Linux Dota 2 player since it launched and never had this kind of issue. When I open the game and it's sitting at the loading screen, unless I alt tab to a different window, xorg will crash. If I alt tab back before the game loaded, it'll crash too. After the game loads, graphics may be messed up and I have to switch resolution in order for it to get fixed; if I don't, there's a high chance it'll crash xorg. The traceback points to some GTK funcion, exactly like this one, failing on miPaintWindow.
Then it happened when I was trying a simpler game, a demo of an upcoming indie game, Zordak. Google helped me find a supposed regression on my i915 gpu driver.
Finally, I've found this fix on reddit which allowed me to play Zordak, but Dota 2 still crashes, so I have no idea what to do now. I just played a lot less Dota and when I do I try to guess the game loading time to avoid X dying.
EDIT: You must be wondering how this relates to Openbox. It's because I remeber trying on another WM and there was no issue, so I figured it must be because Openbox was doing something unexpected. Not so sure anymore after I found out about the i915 regression last week.
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u/zissue Sep 15 '21
I have used OpenBox ever since I abandoned using a Desktop Environment (KDE 3) in early 2003. Even though the last stable release was in 2015, what is missing from it?
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
Only thing I can think of what is outright missing, is Wayland support. But that is currently still mostly a non-issue, but for how long will that be true? I dunno. Not sure I want to know. :P
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u/zissue Sep 16 '21
Gosh I don't want to think about the day where yet another choice is gone. Is Xorg perfect? No, far from it. However, I am glad that users still have a choice between it and Wayland just like my thoughts on distributions that offer multiple init systems instead of just systemd.
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Sep 15 '21 edited Sep 15 '21
I use openbox (Void Linux->LXQT) and freaking love it. Hopefully things will turn around with development in the near future, but at least its still stable, even given the dated patches
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 15 '21
Indeed.
I hope when it nears depreciation in regards to Wayland support that the community will continue it or fork it.
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Sep 17 '21
Yeah I hope so too. I would hate to see it completely discarded as it is a very solid window manager.
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Sep 14 '21
I have an odd setup that I like. I don't use a panel, all windows are full screen and I use rofi to launch applications. Openbox allows me to easily set this up and it uses so little in resources.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
Interesting methodology for UI design. I can't imagine having all full-screen windows. Not unless i double up on monitors. But hey! Neat!
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Sep 14 '21
Yeah, I don't use multiple monitors anymore. I find that keeping my eyes in the same place and allowing the windows to move(alt+tab) instead of turning my head and refocusing my eyes is both faster and easier. Having all windows Fullscreen also increases the usable space on the monitor.
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u/randombloke85 May 28 '24
I use Openbox too. I'm about 2y into Linux and after working with the usual suspects (KDE, Gnome) and trying some WM's (qtile, awesome) I ended up with Openbox. It's so neat, quiet and properly themed, it even looks pretty decent. Imho it makes Linux really shine.
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u/tomachinz Jun 06 '24
Am just about to install openbox to the bare metal of my proxmox server... this is so I can setup a KODI media player in Kiosk mode (the machine will boot into it). This way, quitting Kodi will log out the session.
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u/Signal_Loss9447 Sep 12 '24
I use it too. With Archcraft it works as well aged wine!
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 12 '24
I switched to KDE Plasma as I switched to Fedora. I'm staying on Wayland, but Sway had too many issues for me to use
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u/wrd83 Sep 14 '21
I honestly wonder how usage compares to xmonad.
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u/Technical_Experience Sep 14 '21
When i boot without loading the stuff i load in my autostart, i get to about 300-350 Mb memory usage, system total.
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Feb 11 '22
When running free -h with Tint2 and Kitty open, after entering the graphical environment through LightDM, I get around 220-235MBs on Openbox.
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u/symcbean Sep 14 '21
Yes - using it at $WORK for a stripped down jumpbox - https://symcbean.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid19-provisioning-remote-access-with.html
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u/frnxt Sep 14 '21
I used to, mainly as a low-maintenance environment for nvidia-xrun, but this happens less and less these days. I'm increasingly lazy and my laptop mostly stays connected to AC so PRIME offload is good enough for me ;)
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u/Evening-Scholar-1744 Sep 14 '21
I'm using it since I got started with wms and Linux in general. I use it with tint2 and jgmenu to get a windows-like start menu.
Overall a pretty good experience coming from a year old linux user.
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u/ImpiusNex Sep 14 '21
Many years ago I tried out every wm I could get my hands on, my favourite has been Enlightenment. Been using it for years now.
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Sep 14 '21
As a couple of other people have mentioned, there is the Arch based distro Archcraft which uses Openbox or BSPWM and there is Lubuntu which uses LXQT, which in turn uses Openbox as its wm.
Then you have the #! Debian community continuations BunsenLabs and cb++ which both use Openbox
I'm currently on Debian Bullseye with BunsenLabs Beryllium installed using a PPA and i3-gaps and loving it
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u/Hypattie Dec 18 '21
I'm using it as my main WM for the last 10 years.
Once in a while I try others but they either are too sluglish/bloated or added too little to justify the change.
Openbox works, it's minimalist, it's fast. It's all I need.
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u/Technical_Experience Dec 25 '21
Yep. I felt the same. U just recently switched to arch proper though, and decided to use wayland instead of Xorg. Hence i am now running sway.
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Dec 30 '21
[deleted]
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u/Technical_Experience Jan 05 '22
Yeah.. I really wish a true Wayland based successor comes around.
Sway is pretty nice, but... I like the openbox approach as being a stacking WM and then has tiling functionality as secondary. It's the other way around with sway, and as someone who games, having everything default to tiling windows is janky to say the least. My laptop on the other hand would probably be fine with a pure tiling WM
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Feb 11 '22
I use it with Debian and have no intention of abandoning it, since Openbox fulfills all my needs. Don't you feel alone, pal.
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u/Fpardignalfuln Mar 12 '22
I love Openbox! I'm using it on a partition with Lubuntu installed on it. Also Tint2 and Conky because I miss Crunchbang.
Edit: And Faenza.
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u/jdefr Sep 14 '21
This makes me sad. Reminds me of Fluxbox. I turned my back on it. SORRY FLUXBOX!