this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Do you want a tiling or a stacking wm?
Uh What's the difference?
If stacking is floating, I think I'd rather have that
Fluxbox or IceWM as a more standard, familiar floating WMs (both are pretty customizable too).
WindowMaker is my goto for standalone window managers, it's look based on NeXTSTeP OS from 90s, so it doesn't look like yet another ripoff from windows or macos (both are ugly IMHO), so it's pretty unique.
If you want minimal and keyboard-oriented, cwm is THE wm for you. The main problem is that default keyboard shortcuts are really bad (openbsd fanatics will say otherways, but when shortcuts are spread around ctrl+, alt+, and ctrl+alt+, it's really far from good), so I recommend tweak them or to find someone's config.
If you want a desktop-agnostic file manager for these wms, I'd recommend xfe - it's somewhat obscure for some reason, but it's really, really good. Can't recommend more.
As to install, all of these should be in your distro's repo. Fluxbox may come as two packages (
fluxbox2andfluxbox3), the first one is the last official version and the second is the "community edition" - a fork, basically.At least on Void Window Maker package is called
WindowMaker, with capitalisation. Since Void sticks to official naming, other distros may have the same name.edit: Also, it's worth to mention most of recommendation on this thread are tiling window managers (awesomewm, i3, hyprland, etc.)
If you're looking for a floating wm then Fluxbox might be your best bet. Otherwise I'd try i3. It's easy to configure and has a lot of documentation (it also features a floating mode I believe). If you're looking for something in python then I would recommend either awesomewm or Qtile (my fav). Qtile is a bit more difficult than awesome to configure though, but it has a better status bar.
I'll certainly try fluxbox. What is i3 and fluxbox configured in?
i3 is configured in it's own configuration language thing which I personally find very easy to use and understand. Fluxbox on the other hand is, I believe, configured through a GUI though I've never used it so don't take my word on that. Btw awesomewm is written in Lua not Python. Didn't realize my mistake until just now.
My problem with qtile is it seems... just bad... The install instruction doesn't work, and it was just a pain to install
Welcome to 90% of WM's friend.
Lies
I hope
Install instructions? I just installed it with my package manager and it worked fine.
I used pip, and apparently I needed to download from the git?
Ah, so apparently it's been removed from the Ubuntu repos. I would try apt-get qtile if you haven't already and if that fails, I just wouldn't try qtile. I'm not sure why they removed it from the repos though.