Tiling window manager, very lightweight. It does its job, gets out of the way and doesn't try to push fancy stuff in my face, that's all I ask from a window manager (and more than what most of the others give me). Besides, I have my set of basic key bindings for it in muscle memory, so there's no point in changing.
[0] http://i3wm.org/
The tabbed windows looks very useful though.
I tend to have one main stack of tabbed windows on each workspace, out from which I "push" a window or two to create splits whenever I want to display multiple things at the same time.
I guess the ability to mix tabs with tiles (in whatever arrangements I want) is what keeps me using i3 instead of others. I'd love to get dwm's tags with i3's tabs and tile management.
A lot have the master window concept like XMonad which I do not like.
Not completely over the moon with i3 (some annoyances), but it's the best tiling WM I've come across to date; it's actively maintained, so should get better and better with time ;-)
I've run the gamut, from GNOME, to Xfce4, to LXDE, etc...
They all have too much extraneous software.
I'd much rather build a system up, rather than tear it down, in my quest to squeeze as much performance out of my netbook as I can.
Ditto. For me, however, the performance benefits of going fairly minimal are kinda secondary to the productivity benefits of choosing tools that stay the hell out of my way.
While there's a lot to like about dwm (I rather like its tag concept as a replacement for workspaces, for instance), I find it a bit limiting for my purposes. Spectrwm is another good one, and it gets too little attention. Xmonad is pretty good. For floating rather than tiling window managers, I think AHWM is pretty awesome, though it has been abandoned for years; it could stand to be picked up by a new maintainer.
I ended up with i3, though; it's tiling with decent functionality, including its native support for tabbing windows. It used to be better, actually, in that it was easier to mix and match different window arrangement styles within a single workspace, but even after making that marginally less usable it still does more in that regard than other WMs I've tried out.
For me it's not about resource consumption, but rather, the plain suck factor (of Gnome 3)
...until you try placing a vertical panel on an a desktop edge adiacent to another monitor ...an trying to find wtf is happening, you discover the developers will never fix it because they don;t consider it a bug, it's just the standard behavior of some component down the wm stack ...freakin awesome
For a full featured desktop it is great.
I use QuickTile to get the basics of a tiling window manager. Here's my blog post about that: http://knitatoms.net/2013/04/quicktile-simple-tiling-window-...
I use 'bluetile' which also allows you to set "floating" vs. "tiled" on a per-workspace basis. I'm probably going to migrate to pure-tiled in the future though because GNOME 2.x is dead and I abhor 3.x
But maybe Bluetile has gotten better in the years since I last looked at it. :-)
> I'm probably going to migrate to pure-tiled in the future though because GNOME 2.x is dead and I abhor 3.x
Good call. I freed myself from the DE years ago, and I don't think I could ever go back.
Interesting. The reason I first installed a tiling window manager (awesome) was for GIMP, so I could avoid having to deal with a bunch of floating windows. (Now that I use a tiling window manager, I actually like the fact that gimp has a bunch of windows, but I do not understand how that is a good design choice when most people use a non-tiling window manager).
The secondary problem is they keep removing functionality and configurability, and this isn't done in public. I'm the first to admit that I actually like less configurability - I'd rather the developers made good choices in the first place, rather than just throwing lots of options over the wall and making it the user's problem. But some really annoys people - for example Nautilus just lost the status bar so finding out the amount of free disk space went from moving your eyeballs to clicking in the background, making a menu selection, having a dialog appear, reading and dismissing the dialog. I insist on using focus follows mouse, so if that ever got removed I'd be up in arms too.
The theory from the developers has been that Gnome 3 has a powerful extensions mechanism so you make it do anything you want. While that satisfies some, it is annoying to the rest of us. We don't want to extensively program our desktops - we just want them to be productive, and prior ones like Gnome 2 were productive.
At the end of the day, however, the differences between desktop environments are largely a personal preference, and I'm quite happy using GNOME Shell. There's going to be people that don't like it, and that's fine. We can all co-exist.
I used to use ion until the author got wacky with the license. Too bad about that.
I wish someone would make a compositing window manager based on a big virtual desktop instead of on shrinking all the windows to illegibility and making me pick one to obscure all the others.
I never bothered to figure out exactly how enable/configure this feature intentionally, because I saw it as more annoying and simply reset the resolution.
I also remember being on a mac, wherer I could zoom in the entire screen, then scroll the viewport.
fvwm doesn't change the X11 screen size, it just moves all the windows to give the appearance of moving the screen in the other direction.
I love how they cribbed some great small details from OS X and iOS but the final product feels fresh. If I end up going back to XMonad my config will definitely change.
Hackable, easy to use, and the main thing for me is the fact that it's fast and straight to the point.
A while back, I stumbled across dwm.vim[0] which, although clunky at times, has proven itself to be really useful in my Vim workflow. It was inspired from the actual dwm[1] project which I looked into later.
The key bindings are quite different from Vim, but are easy to pick up on the whole.
Prior to dwm, I ran WindowMaker well beyond its prime (as in, I dropped it less than a year ago). I still have a sweet spot in my heart for that WM.
[0]: https://github.com/spolu/dwm.vim [1]: http://dwm.suckless.org/
It doesn't matter that WindowMaker is "past its prime", it achieved perfection in 1998. :-)
I always thought that people who run tiled WMs must be crazy, ever since trying out ion in the early 2000s. But now I'm one of them. It's honestly pretty good.
Anyway, what's your problem with Chromium? I'm using dwm and Chromium daily, and have no issues.
Apologies for the noise, and enjoy your dwm usage :)
So I guess Openbox
+1
Recently switched from Gnome Shell to E17 after many years again, happy so far..
Also, those comments show what is so great about Linux: Freedom of choice. There is everything present from the heavier Unity/KDE/Gnome users to the more minimalistic ones..
* All windows tiled/maximized. * Multiple desktops instead of minimizing/overlapping windows. * No window dressing anywhere. * Everything launched via terminal or a quicklauncher.
I've used E16 and E17 for well over a decade and it turns out that I've been slowly using it more and more as a tiling window manager.
I personally use GNOME 3, but the latest 3.8 has had some features taken off that pissed me off a bit. Nothing critically wrong yet.
On a related note, has anyone been suffering from slow startup times with xmonad lately? I'm not sure if it's xmonad, or some other part of my setup, or a misconfiguration.
Going from gnome to xmonad was almost as much of an improvement as going from just one to multiple desktops.
Bonus points for great support for dual monitor setups.
I also love the configurability of xmobar. I use it to show the top memory and cpu consuming processes at all times.
Why would I ruin my pretty, pretty servers with some ugly GUI?
I generally have two different Linux installs on each of my computers: A Gentoo + XMonad environment for development, and a Debian + KDE environment for anything else (other school work, movies, word processing, etc).
This used to work wonderfully in the Gnome 2.x days, but Gnome 3 is more monolithic - you basically have to use the whole Gnome Shell, window manager and all, or drop to Gnome Classic, which is an incomplete and buggy reimplementation of Gnome 2.x using the new (and backward incompatible) versions of the libraries. I'm using the latter at the moment, but not deliriously happy about it.
you should probably add options for awesome/xmonad, those are fairly popular in some circles.
I doubt I will ever switch to anything again. My system has never been faster. I feel like I am getting everything I used to get with Gentoo but without the gritty pain of compiling every damn thing.
In the beginning I used DE's like xfce and then lxde. My window manager evolution went something like:
openbox -> awesome -> dwm -> my fork of dwm
My evolution of terminal use went: urxvt -> xterm -> st -> my fork of st (adding tabs/keyboard-selection)
I think I'm really becoming a suckless fan.This is my "Desktop Environment": http://grigio.org/cairo-de.png
- Cairo Dock Session
- Openbox
- Nautilus
Stop. I've eye effect gratifications :) and I save 120mb of ram compared to Unity/Gnome3 and on a 1gb netbook is important otherwise you see gray windows everywhere.
The notebook can't run Unity. The desktop can, but Unity is optimized to get the best use of small screens, and I have a large one.
it is a lightweight tiling window manager, easily customizable due to its configuration being a simple text file and it has a status bar where you can pipe all sorts of information into it with a bash script.
p.s. "Gnome 3.x Shell" option should be down vote only ;-)
I prefer manual tiling managers because it is easier to create usable layouts.
I've noticed a lot of Arch users here.
KDE isn't my style but it's stable enough. Currently running XFCE for simplicity.
.. + urxvt + vim
I've repeatedly tried Gnome 3 shell and even the 3.8 classic mode. They always fail due to not having a functional taskbar. Notifications are also completely messed up - I can't figure out why you would want them hidden! Most bizarre are things like the system monitor being in the hidden notification area - in what way does that make any sense?
I've tried other environments and just didn't like them - eg KDE (too busy), LXDE (too spartan), Cinnamon (I like other Gnome 3 advancements).
I use FreeBSD. Do I get to participate in this poll?
Also, some tiling WMs like dwm, awesome, and xmonad probably derserve to be listed separately, imho.
switched from gnome2. honestly, now that thunar has tabs xfce is just as nice as gnome imo. e17 looks interesting but the support for fedora is horrible.