I tried i3 and now just wondering, which WM I can pick and why, because of their great diversity. Any advices?
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https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Window_manager#Tiling_window_managers
Wayland: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#Tiling
Hyprland user here.
My recommendation is to just try bunch of them and see which one fits your needs or you like using the most.
Try both manual tiling and auto tiling for both X11 and Wayland, one will eventually stick.
I started with AwesomeWM, then tried bunch of other ones , and to my surprise, I found myself using DWM (flexipatch) the most. I’m planning to transition to Hyprland soon.
Just use what you like and don’t pay much attention about the reviews.
I went back to xmonad from Sway a while back when I realized color management wasn’t coming to Wayland any time soon.
just pick one don’t overwhelm yourself with choices. testing out different software is part of the experience just be prepared for possible migration. currently I’m using hyprland and I’m happy with it but for Xorg/X11 i3 is a fine choice.
I personally like DWM and use it as my main window manager. Caveat emptor though, the suckless devs are a bit weird. Bit of a bad smell around their politics even though they claim to be apolitical.
I also am a fan of dwm.
The wonderful thing about open source projects is just use the code and move on.
One can modify it as they please if needed, but if the code has no crappy political baggage then so be it.
I personally use and recommend Sway.
If you are the kind of person who cares about the culture around the software that you use, avoid hyprland. It’s creator is antilgbt and their discord server is pretty toxic. I also happen to think their documentation sucks.
You can join the discord and check it for yourself. Been on it since December 2023 but never once saw one toxic comment. Also don’t know since when but the discord has no off topic conversation. The discord screenshots in drews blog were 2-3 years ago.
Hyprland already has explicit sync enabled unlike sway. Sway is good too but at that pount I’d just be using i3 which is more stable.
Try Niri (a linear window manager), I have tried it already for a short time on a seperate computer. It is very good! I just not got around configuring it for my main machine, yet.
And I need to test how well Xwayland works, because I need it for Steam and some games.
I’ve been enjoying niri a lot as well, it’s one of few scrollable tiling managers. Check out their gif to get a sense of what that’s like.
I use bspwm and I really like the unicorne philosophy of the config files (bspwm controls your windows and such, sxhkd controls keybinds, two separate programs and config files. The bspwm config file is also just a bash file so you can add anything bash related to it easily.
This said, I love the dynamic workspaces on i3 and wish bspwm could replicate them. I don’t like i3 enough to switch to it purely because it’s also on x, but when Nvidia gets better Wayland support I’m definitely hopping ship to sway (i3 on sway basically)… Or when I’m able to swap my 3080 ti for an and gpu at a reasonable price
I switched from Pop OS tiling that I had retro bolted onto stock ubuntu to Sway, massive step up and more importantly I get to keep my Ubuntu/Wayland base.
As with most add on WMs I had a bit of a learning curve sorting out the extra bits and pieces that just come stock as part of Ubuntus Gnome implementation such as a launcher (I use dmenu), a menu bar (swaybar for me), and even a lock screen (swayidle). Even doing things like wallpaper needed more effort.
