Hi there, I’m looking at floating window mangers as an in-between of DEs and escaping configuration hell (somewhat) of tiling Window Managers.

Specifically, I was looking at IceWM and OpenBox, but would love recommendations and discussion on what you like and why.

Cheers!

  • z3bra@lemmy.sdf.org
    6·
    1 year ago

    I use glazier, a WM I wrote myself. But given your description, it won’t fit you at all ^^ It’s very bare bones, and requires that you script everything not mouse driven using wmutils.

    • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      Ah, like bspwm then.

      If I was younger, I’d jump on the idea to be able to configure everything to my liking and making a “perfect” setup. However, I want to reach a compromise between a lean system and something which has sane defaults OOTB. Your setup seems fantastic but it’s going to take me a week or so, which is not what I want to do. Thank you for mentioning your project though.

  • Gryzor@lemmyfly.orgEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    Try pop_os. It’s gnome tiling can be enabled and disabled from the top bar and it’s defaults are sane and easy to change.

  • wvstolzing@lemmy.ml
    4·
    1 year ago

    OpenBox & Xfwm. I’m keeping an eye on labwc, which is a new openbox clone for wlroots. It’s already suitable for everyday use.

    • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for the suggestions. Do you think I can get away with running just xfwm4 instead of the entire XFCE DE? I’m trying to stay light, which is why I would like to avoid DEs for the most part.

      Isn’t labwc just a compositor?

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        You’ll also want a root window and other essential features. This is provided by xfdesktop4 (or you can use an equivalent from another DE). You can use just the window manager if you want but you won’t like it. Or you can use something like Openbox which includes everything needed (it’s a tiny complete DEs not just a window manager).

        • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          Thanks, I’m looking at OpenBox, IceWM and FWM for now. I believe there are some other niche floating window managers too, but after attempting to configure ratpoison a while back (after which I realised that it was no longer supported) I don’t want to configure as much for a WM to work.

  • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
    3·
    1 year ago

    For X, I’d probably go for Openbox. For Wayland, I have tried Hikari, but it reminded me why I don’t like floating window managers, so I don’t use it, but it seems really cool! Also, there is labwc which is supposed to be an Openbox replacement for Wayland, but I can’t tell you anything about it cuz I haven’t tried it.

  • Oka@lemmy.mlEnglish
    41·
    1 year ago

    This stick I use so that my window doesn’t slam closed

    • Administrator@monyet.cc
      1·
      1 year ago

      dwm’s so good. It has pretty much everything one would need and once you’ve set it up, no need to change anything.

    • Gilgamesh@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      What about dwm makes it a more appealing choice compared to XMonad? (Excluding the C vs Haskell argument)

      • sederx@programming.dev
        1·
        1 year ago

        i dont have much experience with xmonad but i tried every wm at some point. usually the things that keep me with dwm is that i found a build with very sane defaults and a number of patches i appreciate like swallowing, fake fullscreen(so you can fullscreen a program inside the assigned window) or xresources/pywal integration . i also love the scratchpad implementation and the tag system with a tag 0. i also like dwmblocks for the status bar . now im sure some of this features are available on other wm but i never found all of them in one like on DWM.

        i also use ST as terminal and it works great with dwm while it gives me issues with other WM(usually resizing issues)

  • Drito@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    1 year ago

    The Xfce one. I don’t see the point of simple WM for floating windows. I use a WM because it is the only solution for a proper tiling window manager.