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Comparison of X Window Managers
- alxlaz 7y agoIf anyone wants a trip down the memory lane, http://www.xwinman.org/ http://www.xwinman.org/ is still up. A long, long time ago -- but still quite some time after it stopped being (too) regularly maintained -- I emailed Matt Chapman to ask him to include my WM in the list. He never answered, thank God, that was my first piece of non-trivial X11 code and it was absolutely gruesome, I don't know what the hell I was thinking.
- z5h 7y agoIt's a miracle we could ever choose just one and get to work. Back in my Linux days it was PWM for me. https://tuomov.iki.fi/software/ https://tuomov.iki.fi/software/
- benj111 7y agoI can't, which is why I don't install Arch. The temptation when you aren't given a default is too strong.
- alxlaz 7y agoWindowMaker, then FVWM were my drugs. I used tiling window managers for a while, when my typical workstation was a laptop, but now that I have a large-ish screen (27") on a desktop they're pretty bad -- everything is either too wide to be useful, or too narrow. Ratpoison was definitely my favourite (I also use Emacs, figures...), but I liked wmii, too. By the time I ran into pwm I was hooked into Ratpoison :). LXQT does its job for me these days. It's not the most polished but at least it doesn't go out of its way to make my desktop look and act like a tablet so I'm happy with it. I've been toying with writing a Wayland compositor that does wmii-like tiling, but can also do proper floating window management, but I have to wait for things to settle on the Wayland front before writing anything that's useful... Edit: whoever downvoted you clearly never had a few hours of fun on a Friday night tweaking FVWM only to find out it's 4 AM now and oh crap it's also Monday!
- fierarul 7y ago> Edit: whoever downvoted you clearly never had a few hours of fun on a Friday night tweaking FVWM only to find out it's 4 AM now and oh crap it's also Monday! I'm still sorry about my FVWM config. It was almost perfect. I should search for it in backups.
- signa11 7y agostill using fvwm2, haven’t found anything that comes close.
- itsmenow 7y agoso do I. Although I discovered it rather late - in 2004. It's remarkable how configurable it is. I adopted some version of what this guy did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdSgf-IykIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdSgf-IykIo to do "manual tiling". Also can't find anything modern that even remotely can compare.
- imglorp 7y ago+1 for ratpoison - no rodent dependence!
- matttproud 7y agoTuomo Valkonen's Ion was my saviour for easily a decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_(window_manager) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_(window_manager)
- cannam 7y agoFunny to think that writing a window manager once seemed like quite a good use of one's time. I wonder what today's equivalent is. I still in theory maintain one of mine (wmx), and this thread just prompted me to go and fix a few warnings that newer compilers come up with. Egads, there's some grubby code in there.
- jabl 7y agoOh gawd, I spent so much time looking at that site and searching for the "best" wm. As my main WM, I've used fvwm (which I think was the default on slackware back then), olvwm (since I was used to Sun Unix machines from a summer job...), afterstep/windowmaker (NeXT was cool), fluxbox, kde 1.x-3.x, xmonad. Nowadays I'm just using gnome with pretty much default configs.
- aidenn0 7y agoI stopped using sawfish like a year ago. I had so many customizations for it that I didn't want to switch.
- swiley 7y agoFVWM has a graphical configuration program. Also it has a window switching widget you can put in the tiny window with the pager and stuff. I use cwm now though because it just gets out of the way and does it’s job.
- phjesusthatguy3 7y agoI've been using Awesome on Debian Stable for years. I haven't configured it very much, and I mostly use it to keep everything full screen all the time. I'm sure at some point the X Window System will be completely abandoned and I'll have to move on to something else, but I haven't figured out what that something else is, just yet.
- na85 7y agoI did this as well and recently just started using kwin with a tiling extension
- earthscienceman 7y agoWhich tiling extension are you using?
- na85 7y agohttps://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin
- cycloptic 7y agoThere is a port to Wayland being worked on. Note that it's not usable yet. https://github.com/way-cooler/way-cooler https://github.com/way-cooler/way-cooler
- phjesusthatguy3 7y agoThank you, I'll be following that project.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoAt the current rate of progress, there's a fair chance you'll be dead before X is completely abandoned.
- chousuke 7y ago
- arethuza 7y agoI think I went: twm -> olwm -> mwm I then stopped faffing about with such things (after spending huge amounts of time getting configuration just so) and over the years started increasingly just to go with defaults for most things.
- papermachete 7y agoXFCE has reportedly fixed screen tearing as of v4.14. Manjaro XFCE idle RAM usage is now <800MB, no microstuttering or input lag.
- shantly 7y ago> <800MB What's getting it even close to that high? Even allowing for more features and some serious bloat I'd expect modern Linux with XFCE to fit inside 250MB, not counting file cache and such.
- papermachete 7y agoThat's counting whatever Manjaro decided to put in my ramdisk.
- coleifer 7y agoYou can also swap out the xfwm compositor for compton, which also resolves the screen-tearing issue.
- papermachete 7y agoThat never fixed it for me; one had to also configure compton which was a nightmare.
- derekp7 7y agoI really wish the full potential of compositing window managers could have been fulfilled, instead of the tech behind them being used for mostly eye candy. Here are two items that should be doable with compositing. First, when giving a presentation with an external monitor, I'd like to tag specific windows to be mirrored (and scaled, if appropriate) on the secondary monitor. That way I can still be messing with my instant messages or email in private (which you can't do if you are mirroring your whole screen), yet be able to easily work with content that the audience is also viewing (by no having to shift my head from my laptop screen up to the projector all the time). This would be similar to using online meeting software where you share specific windows. The second item, that you can sort of do now but not cleanly, is have multiple mice and keyboards, so that a mouse that selects a given window gives its associated keyboard input focus to that window. While the other mouse/keyboard combo is working with a different window. This would be great for pair programming, especially with a multi-windowed shared buffer editor (like what Emacs can do). You can do this now, with some editing in the X config file, but there is no indication on the screen which window currently is focused to which keyboard -- this can be accomplished with the WM changing the window border or title bar color as appropriate.
- Torwald 7y ago> instead of the tech behind them being used for mostly eye candy. Why "instead"? Best would be to have both. Eye candy is an important feature. No need to sacrifice one to get the other.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoMalleability of certain display characteristics is an important feature (largely for accessibility reasons), eye-candy is just marketing and signaling.
- qplex 7y agoWhile I understand not wanting any useless eye-candy for functional purposes, I think there is also pleasure derived by simply "looking at pretty things". It does not need to involve any external motivations.
- city41 7y agoi3 is one of my favorite pieces of software. I’m currently writing a clone of it for ChromeOS (as best as the Chrome API will allow anyway). I think it’s a shame you can’t get something like i3 on OSX or Windows. It’s a primary reason I stick to Linux.
- flurdy 7y ago> I think it’s a shame you can’t get something like i3 on OSX or Windows. I presume you mean more than just tiling? As Amethyst [1] gives you that on macOS. [1] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst
- city41 7y agoThere are tiling solutions for most OSes, but unless you can get access to an API as low level as X, they tend to not be as good. Amethyst is admirable in many ways, but it's a far cry from i3. Amethyst also has to wrangle with issues such as certain windows just flat out ignoring it, which i3 -- due to how X works -- doesn't have to worry about. i3 is a rock solid tiling solution that pretty much 100% works, and Amethyst is unfortunately a patch on top of another window manager and so can often be clunky.
- newhouseb 7y ago> I’m currently writing a clone of it for ChromeOS This is neat! Are you writing this as some sort of Chrome Extension or forking Ash?
- city41 7y agoCurrently it's just a Chrome extension. The Chrome windows API is pretty decent. I think this "window manager" will have plenty of limitations, but I also think it might just be good enough. In parallel I'm also poking at ash a little bit, but I doubt I'd be able to take on such a large project and actually succeed. This extension is a window manager that mimics Amethyst for OSX: https://github.com/brockgr/chrometile https://github.com/brockgr/chrometile It can give an idea of what's possible with the chrome.windows API.
- chimichangga 7y agoWindowmaker.
- cat199 7y agowmaker + xfce destkop / file manager (can hide the desktop itself to the dock :D )
- zeotroph 7y agoI was a long time Window Maker (not Windowmaker, the world's leading software for... something else) user for a long time as well, but finally jumped ship to boring old KDE. It finally acquired most of the essential window management features of WMaker, such as Meta-R/L-Mouse to move or resize the window by clicking anywhere into it or shading windows. However I still miss selecting multiple windows with a rubber band and then moving them to a different virtual desktop together, or the dock apps. I still can't find a proper widget which displays the network activity or something like wmforkplop to show the general system load.
- fullstop 7y agoI sort of wish that kwin supported dockapps.
- __s 7y agoI prefer https://github.com/serprex/nobox https://github.com/serprex/nobox (which isn't on wiki's list) Only using 3 pages of RAM is pretty good
- msla 7y agoI have a basic environment I take with me across distros and across time: Window Maker, xterm, zsh, and Emacs. I have configuration files for all of them, and the combination makes me fairly insensitive to distro as long as it has a reasonable package repository and dependency-tracking package management.
- mseidl 7y agoI was a long time KDE user, then went to light weight wm I switched around from fluxbox, openbox. Then I went to tiling window managers. Which is where I'm at today. I have a screen shot of my old xmonad setup.. http://i.imgur.com/c4HGAEs.png http://i.imgur.com/c4HGAEs.png But now I'm using i3, as managing haskell crap is kind of a pita.
- techntoke 7y agoMight I suggest Sway when you're ready to make the transition to Wayland.
- coleifer 7y agoImplying that switching is inevitable.
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoSomeone will have to answer for X’s crimes.
- tapoxi 7y agoHaven't the Xorg developers expressed interest in deprecating it? Sure, someone could take up the mantle to continue working on Xorg, but it sounds similar to staying on Python 2.
- djsumdog 7y agoThe Wayland developers are the Xorg developers. It's most of the same core people, so yes. they certainly want to move away from Xorg. I'm not quite shore what the BSD people are planning. Do they plan on keeping a fork of Xorg or eventually trying to port Wayland to FreeBSD/OpenBSD/et. al.?
- Crinus 7y agoUnlike Python 2 not everyone among the Xorg developers want to drop it (e.g. Keith Packard doesn't seem very interested in Wayland). Also Xorg isn't really one thing, it is a bunch of different subprojects with the server being the one that is mostly referred to. Even if everything else stays exactly the same, the X server will still need to be updated since it also works as XWayland. Finally unlike Python 2 vs 3 the difference between Xorg and Wayland is tremendous, so i can easily see people who will be willing to fork it to continue development.
- airencracken 7y agoI used gnome2 for a while, then eventually moved to awesomewm when gnome-shell was announced, but I've settled on dwm as my wm of choice. It does what I want and nothing else.
- ausjke 7y agolxde worked well for me and memory footprint is totally good. still the GUI for embedded linux device is lacking, Android unifies that but it's more for phones loaded with a huge chunk of bloat-ware for other non-phone use cases. I have been looking for embedded-linux-GUI for a long while, but I'm happy with gnome/lxde on Desktops.
- nycthbris 7y agoI love the variety of styles and customizability. It’s really impressive to see some of the designs people have over at reddit.com/r/unixporn . I want to jump in but then realize how much of a time sink it can be.
- manjana 7y agoI've used i3wm and quite liked it. Simple, efficient and easy to setup. I'd properly propose i3 for anyone wanting to taste what a tiling window manager is like. I don't think it's competitors are nearly as easily configurable but I only have experience with i3wm so I cannot say for sure.
- Izkata 7y agoI've tried i3 a few times, and find it way overcomplicated in daily use compared to wmii.
- joveian 7y agoTo pharaphase Tuomo Valkonen (creator of the tiling window manager ion), most of these should not be called window managers since they make you manage the windows. I use ratpoison and GNU screen. These wikipedia lists can be quite helpful, even if they are often out of date and incomplete.
- shmerl 7y agoWayland compositors is a more interesting topic. So far quite a lot of work remains to bring them up to date.
- Chmouel 7y agoSo no new windows manager after 2013?
- hackbinary 7y agoMy favourite X Window website has always been Kenton Lee's: http://www.rahul.net/kenton/index.shtml http://www.rahul.net/kenton/index.shtml (from the '90's anyway.)