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Comment by archer | Hacker News Reader

I switched back to Linux last month after 5 years of OS X usage and XMonad was one of the main reasons.

Now, whenever I try using OS X on my 13 inch MBP again, the WM makes it feel really unproductive. Once I have few apps opened moving around is slow. Exposé and Spaces don't help much. It feels like going back to whatever good IDE from Emacs or Vim, not very fun.

In contrast, with a tiling manager, even small screens are bearable. I really recommend giving it a shot. Of course not everyone likes it, but I'd say it's not particularly unfriendly. Bindings are very simple. Setup is mostly straightforward.

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I just have a really hard time grokking haskell. I've been using stumpwm and it's awesome, but it integrates less well with gnome.

In the same boat -- 6 years OSX, installed Lucid RC on 13 inch MBP recently -- so far no intention of going back.

dwm is good, too. Sure, C isn't the greatest thing for exploratory programming, but configuring it isn't hard. (One of these days I might really learn X programming and do a tiled WM configured with Lua, but I've got too many projects already.)

wmii is also good, and once you get used to using libixp, you can script it in anything. I found wmii's named tabs interfered with muscle memory, though.

I used XMonad for a bit, but GHC is a hell of a dependency, and for a while there were problems getting any version newer than 6.6 to build on FreeBSD and OpenBSD. That's a dealbreaker for me.

Having used OpenBSD as a desktop for a bit, I realized, after waiting 24 hours for Amarok to build, that it is not a desktop OS. It's for your router. Use Linux for your desktop, it's just easier.

First off: Use binary packages. The ports tree is for porters and people running snapshots or CVS head. (Also: Definitely use binary packages if you're installing something that depends on KDE, or you'll be building KDE from source as a dependency.)

My "desktop" is emacs, dwm, tmux, and firefox, so that hasn't really been an issue for me. The OpenBSD minimalism is very much my style. (I use mpd for music, by the way.) It makes a killer router too, though.

I've tried going back to Linux a couple times, just to see what new developments (and ports, etc.) I've been missing since I spend most of my time on BSD. (I used Debian for a couple years, then mainly OpenBSD for the last six or seven.) I've gotten really used to OpenBSD, though, and every Linux distro I've tried hasn't stuck around for more than a day or two.

My Linux setup is like this, but it's nice to have the "long tail" readily available. Stuff like SBCL and GHC are a pain to manually compile (or get from ports), and this leads to a cycle where since there's no GHC, there's no GHC. Compare to Debian where the latest version is almost always available, and so building $latest + 1 is trivial.

I know where you're coming from - trying to update a common lisp port years ago got me into porting stuff. I'm happiest with OpenBSD, and I've done a fair bit of porting. (Not everything made it into the tree, though.) These days I'm a bit wary of depending too much on anything I can't bootstrap.

(One of these days I might really learn X programming and do a tiled WM configured with Lua, but I've got too many projects already.)

This has already been done. It's called awesomeWM and it is exactly as good as its name indicates.

I don't like Awesome. I've been using Lua for a while, and something about the way the Lua stuff is set up doesn't sit right with me. I can't rattle off any examples off the top of my head (it's been a while since I checked it out), but, I tried it, not my thing. (Also, taking a BSD codebase and making it GPL'd and bloated tends to piss me off.)

You could also check out Ion. The development has stopped and the webpages pulled, but there seems to be two forks (notion and anion3) that are in progress.

Tried: 9wm, aewm, awesome, blackbox, dwm, ion, larswm, ratpoison, scrotwm, w9wm, wm2, wmii, xmonad, probably a half dozen others.

I liked aewm, blackbox, dwm, ratpoison, and XMonad the most, FWIW. While I really like the keyboard-centric UI in ion and ratpoison, I think the layout/tile interface style used by dwm, XMonad, etc. gracefully accommodates programs that have too many windows or just blatantly break ICCCM, while ion and ratpoison don't even try.

Sounds like you have it covered.

I use pwm (precursor to ion) since I configured it years ago and it has served me well since then. One benefit of using such an old wm is speed; it does so little that it is blazingly fast on a modern computer. If I were to switch, it would probably be to ion or xmonad.

what kind of macbook do you have? and what kind of distro do you run on it?

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