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.
I actually came here to recommend i3-wm.
If you've never used a tiling window manager or used one but it didn't really work out,I suggest you give it a try.
I just realized I called it "tiling WM", but I use tabbed windows more than tiling features.
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 have some workspaces that are tabbed (that's typically the case where I'm using a browser), some that are tiled, and some that use both -- usually involving a tab group in one tile and one or more other tiles on the same workspace.
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.
Sometimes I feel a bit strange using i3 on Ubuntu (which has put so much work into Unity). I believe i3 was written to solve the use cases of developers, and so maybe that's why I often feel the choices the creators made just seem to make so much sense.
Trying out a tiling window manager was the "last straw" that pulled me off OSX and back onto Linux. It started with Xmonad, but I've settled on i3 for the same reasons as you.
I love i3, been using it for over a year after using dwm for about 1.5 (and trying many others). Now for me, it's setup up borderless with a hidden bar, I'm not much for fancy extras. And the multimonitor support is great too.
i3: instant productivity. Failed as an Awesomewm user, but now rocking i3 with dual-monitors; a developers' dream. The only thing remaining from my Ubuntu Unity install is gnome-settings-daemon.
i3 is really quite good, have been using it for several months now.
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 ;-)
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 those who wish to try before they buy (into) a tiling window manager, the repository dwm/suckless-tools work fine on Ubuntu 12.04 so you can log into a DWM session, and log out again using Shift-Alt-q. If you like the experience, you will need to uninstall the stock repository dwm binary and compile a replacement from source as the configuration is in a c header file.
While it is relevant due to the similarities of shells available, BSD is not Linux. I can see how someone might see it as the same as saying, "I don't use Linux. I use Windows with the default shell.". That is not relevant.
Yes. For this particular case, we don't care about what's under the hood (BSD or any Linux distro), but about the hood itself, which doesn't depend on the OS as long as it is Linux or a BSD.
I use KDE because I like my desktop set up the way I like it, not the way some developers think I should. (also Yakuake's, KDE terminal emulator, "Open window when the mouse pointer touches the screen edge" has become such a second nature to me that I keep shoving the mouse to the top of the screen even if I'm on someone else's machine)
Also, KDE has kickass support for multi-monitor setups and works and looks the best on big resolutions. This, and the possibility to configure the DE the way I want are the two most important reasons why I love KDE.
...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
Xfce all the way. It gets out of your way, uses little in the way of resources, and doesn't have drastic design changes every now and then just because the developers felt like it, but it still has all the basic hardware support (Wifi, Bluetooth, sound, battery) you need.
I use my own window manager Wingo [1] without a DE. It doesn't quite fit into the voting scheme, since it's a true hybrid window manager: it can do stacking like Openbox and automatic tiling like Xmonad.
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
Yeah, I remember when `bluetile` came out---really a very cool project. From what I understand though, its floating is just like Xmonad's, which I could never coerce into doing what I wanted. (I found floating in Xmonad is useful when it's necessary for things like GIMP, but not so useful as an explicit way to manage stacking windows. Which, of course, is quite OK since it is a tiling WM!)
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.
>I found floating in Xmonad is useful when it's necessary for things like GIMP
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).
It has a sweet spot that doesn't really fit for some. For example it is less productive than Gnome 2 if you have large monitors, lots of windows, and have multiple windows from the same app. For single tasking a handful of maximized windows Gnome shell works great, especially if using lower resolution smaller screens, and possibly fingers.
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.
I'm a big fan of GNOME 3 too, and it can be a highly productive environment. I've tried KDE, Xfce, i3, Awesome and Xmonad; I give each a proper go, getting over the initial learning curves and adjustment periods, but in the end, I find myself back with GNOME Shell and I'm quite happy with it. I don't mean to demean those projects; I think they're all wonderful and I'm happy to see them a part of the Linux ecosystem.
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.
fvwm uses a virtual desktop. "The screen is a viewport onto a desktop which may be larger than the screen." You can move the screen around over this virtual desktop. Moving down has the same effect as moving all the windows one screen height up. If a window is larger than the screen, you can easily pan around to see other parts of it. This is very handy when your screen height is 600 pixels and $ENTERPRISE_APP draws dialog boxes 1200 pixels tall. It also means I can lay out windows with a total area several times the screen area without having any overlapping.
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 seem to remember my computer (Running Ubuntu 10.04 with NVidia drivers, and the standard DE) doing that at one point. Through changing my external monitor, the resolution used was larger than my monitors, and I could scroll the viewport by mousing over the edge.
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.
That's X11 panning, which has a similar effect. The X server has one big screen buffer, and the physical screens get mapped into regions of it. You can enable it by using xrandr with the --panning option, and it will work with any DE.
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.
Funny, I picked today to re-evaluate my use of XMonad. I'm currently trying Gnome 3, and I'm really impressed.
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.
After switching from any kind of desktop to xmonad (or any decent tiling window manager, I assume) I can honestly say, I've never been more productive.
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.
I also switched from WindowMaker to DWM only this year, after having used it for a very, very long time. My only complaint about WindowMaker is it doesn't handle Chromium very well. (Never looked into that, but it wouldn't surprise me if that's Chromium's fault.)
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.
After switching to dwm a few years back I wouldn't dream of switching away. The tags (which are not workspaces) really are a killer feature, and the simplicity makes it win over other tag based WMs.
Anyway, what's your problem with Chromium? I'm using dwm and Chromium daily, and have no issues.
Sorry for not making it clear enough, issue was with WindowMaker and Chromium. (I will edit to make it clearer.) WindowMaker draws its own decorations around the window which doesn't fit with what Chromium is trying to do. When I tell WMaker to not put decorations on Chromium, then some windows which need decorations don't get them.
No, rereading your post now it's very clear what you meant (unless you have edited:) My mistake, I must not have been reading properly - or more likely, was too tired and should have headed to bed instead of posting.
Apologies for the noise, and enjoy your dwm usage :)
I held back upgrading from Ubuntu 11.04 to 12.04 for a while because I didn't like where Unity and Gnome were heading but the lack of support for my aging distrib finally "forced" me to upgrade. It was an absolute disaster on the performance, stability and usability fronts so I installed Cinnamon which is delightful on this old PC.
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..
I've been migrating my computers over to XMonad, as its defaults are essentially how I used E17:
* 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.
E with scatterings of GNOME's software suite has always made a pretty good combination, every time I've run a free desktop in the last 8 years it's always come back to that.
I use xmonad with a custom tiling and dzen setup that arranges my workspaces on a 3x3 grid and shows a little indicator of where I am on the grid in the way that gnome-panel used to do it (before "the accident"). All workspace navigation and window manipulation is customized, and I can fly around my desktop with ease. It took a lot of work to get running, but I wouldn't change a thing about my setup. It makes a huge difference when programming.
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.
As a matter of fact I switched from gnome3 to KDE just yesterday (still voting only for KDE) because of all the bad decisions gnome3 developers have made recently. Gnome Shell is not all bad, it is innovative in some way but they should add features instead of taking them away. I am hardcore vim user and tend to remap Caps-Lock to ESC for easier manipulation. When I found out they removed the option from Gnome Shell I was, well, pissed off. The removal of terminal transparency added a little bit of oil to the fire, even though I don't use that feature.
Unity here I just wish they would add some functionality to the Launcher and top panel like Gnome 2 has. Like, adding an icon to the Launcher that points to a shell script that starts a program is almost black magic to get it to work. In Gnome 2 it was clear and straightforward. Also in Unity the top panel is not a panel at all. It's useless. I have to remove the packages that stick menus at the top in a global way, to get Gnome 2 functionality back. But with all that said it's not a bad desktop overall. Yet, I'm still on the fence about it.
Switched to Linux a few years ago. For some strange, almost unexplainable reason I've never felt comfortable with any of the desktop environments. None of them felt right to me. It was only when I switched to a window manager that I started to feel at home with Linux. Took about a year of experimenting before settling on DWM.
Saying that Qt is sane sounds kind of flame bait. If you need own custom preprocessor which is bolted on "some" compiler to be able to build your GUI.. well I prefer something else. Like GTK.
Hey! At least QT based desktops can run over a not accelerated or buggier graphics driver and I t will work without slugines or graphical artefacts. The last time that I try Gnome 3(on Debian 7), it keeps eating 90% of the characters in the screen !
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).
Xmonad + GNOME (with GNOME Do as launcher). I like the GNOME utils (wifi UI, panels, panel applets, desktop switcher, notification area, etc), but prefer xmonad's tiling behaviour, keyboard-centricity and configurability.
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.
I was about to switch to crunchbang today and realized it required too much customization to get it the way I need it. Sticking with unity for at least a little bit longer...
I too was hesitant because it was so vanilla, it took me about an hour to get it 'just right'.
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.
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.
I just use Unity on my computers, but I tried out Pantheon today (in elementary OS) and it's seriously cool. The window management is fairly similar to Unity but more streamlined, and the workspaces are vastly superior. The panel and dock are like what Gnome 3 should have been.
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.
I use herbstluftwm, a manual tilling manager similar to i3 and wmii. I don't have a reason to use this over other tilling managers, because I haven't used them enough to compare.
I prefer manual tiling managers because it is easier to create usable layouts.
What's the goal of polls such as these? If someone is wants a DE recommendation then popularity probably isn't the best metric. If not, you might as well be asking what our favorite colors are (the answer is of course orange on white).
I think it's useful also for the DE developers... even if these results are from a small population, it's surely less biased than doing a poll from a blog post appearing on planet.{ubuntu|debian|gentoo|etc}.org or similar places
I used WindowMaker with some GNUstep stuff years ago, but I ended up moving from there to Sawfish, then to AHWM, and eventually to i3. WindowMaker is nice for what it is; the (other) GNUstep stuff was kind of ho-hum at the time.
Played with gnome, KDE, awesome, fluxbox, blackbox.. but I've been using stumpwm for the last couple years. I can't go back to anything else without feeling a lack of control. Similar feeling I have when I use a Windows machine.
I use different environments on my 3 main PCs: Unity, XFCE and windowmaker. Doesn't actually make so much of a difference for what I'm doing: mostly terminals and firefox.
I'm using the Gnome 3.6 fallback mode. My main workstation has 4,000 sq cm of display across two monitors. I have found a taskbar is the least worst way of dealing with lots of windows, especially if there are multiple ones from the same app. It is important that the taskbar allow reordering and hover to raise (eg for drag and drop). Being horizontal also means that mouse travel distance isn't too far even from the furthest points - a problem for desktops that focus on the top left corner.
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).
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.
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/