@@DistroTube Maybe you can figure out how to benchmark them and see how efficiently they use the GPU vs CPU... They are the type of software that should be able to take advantage of GPUs, after all. I could also imagine WM stress testing being possible - with some program opening hundreds of windows and rearranging them with some (automated) monkey testing. Otherwise, all there is to talk about is features - and many are close in that regard.
@gamera lord I found it a bit tricky to configure resizing keybinds in qtile, also it does not fully support standards like ewmh(extended window manager hints) iirc
I'm planning to use it as my main de I'm learning python and using it will increase my python skills also. Technically it's like killing two birds with one stone.
@@DistroTube LOL, I know I asked like a month ago, thank you for all the videos since I've was looking at how to display data (like covid cases to a smart mirror.
I've been using dwm lately. It's true it isn't the most noob friendly or doesn't come with a lot of features but it's like it grows with you. Slowly you get the window manager that you need with dwm
I like my KDE Plasma and would never want to switch, but I have to say all those tiling window manager setups you see on places like r/unixporn look really cool and sometimes make me jealous.
@@lorenzocabrini yes it can be ... i use a tiling script with my plasma setup. You can even use i3 as wm for plasma. However if u want a simple solution just use krohnkite instead.
You can use scripts like Bismuth to make KWin tile, or even integrate a tiling window manager into plasma there’s a lot of bspwm plasma setups out there that work very well, you’ll probably just have to tinker with keybinds so that the ones for plasma and the ones for whatever tiling window manger you use aren’t conflicting
# 1: bspwm # 2: dwm # 3: awesome # 4: i3 # 5: xmonad # 6: qtile Edit: on each system I’ve tried them on BSPWM is the lightest... even more so than DWM. Xmonad is great but requires a ton of packages to run, Haskell knowledge, and bloated configs. It does what it does well, but there are simpler options that are just as capable and far less bloated.
Currently i am also running bspwm, but i am not very happy with it. It is lightweight, but not as good configurable as others. BSPWM is very light, but not lighter than dwm. Maybe you forgot to look for resource usage of sxhkd also, because otherwise bspwm will not work. So you need to count them always together.
Excellent choice of window managers. First thing I see in your i3 is vim, and what a color scheme! Awesome colors in your Qtile and Xmonad setup as well. I really need to look into your color themes. As always, brilliant presentation. I actually guessed your #1 would be Xmonad. You stay true to yourself. Keep it up!
1) I'm definitely going to say herbstluftwm, just because I used it for so long and customized it so extensively. 2) dwm. I recently patched my own build of dwm that has very low system requirements, and goes well with my workflow. 3) I played around with DT's xmonad, which I found very nice and easy to use. 4) Bspwm. 5) JWM. I got this configured how I liked it, and it worked very well for me.
DT, I have an idea for a future video. You seem to know hell of a lot about what panel, what dock, what login manager, what DE, what WM and so on and so forth goes best with what. How do you know all that (more of a rhetoric question that needs no answer) But maybe just talk about all that choice one gets once choosing open source. Cause thanks to your videos I get to understand that linux means to have a choice, but it doesnt help much when you are a rookie and dont know what is there to choose from.
i would recommend icewm for pentium III, pentium II antique CPU, or RIVA TNT, VooDoo GPUs. very forgiving for CPU, RAM use. unfortunately after i successfully compiled custom build Pale Moon web browser on my Pentium III Katmai 500mhz, my original factory SDRAM for it was completely used up, it was written to probably billions of times from swapping between 8 GB swap and 384 MB SDRAM over the 11 days it took to compile, I was only able to run Pale Moon with incredible, unbelievably smooth optimized modern web browsing on Pentium III for a few minutes before my DIMMS failed and now cant boot need to find more SDRAM DIMMS in ebay
Honestly after trying out Ratpoison I find it hard to move to anything else It might be just how my idea of tiling windows is, but it seems to just do everything so correctly and intuitively out of the box. It is a manual tiler, so you’re dedicating frames where you want windows to be able to open, and by default if you open another window in one frame it will maximise it, replacing the window that was under it And you can either switch between them in one frame like alt+tab, or further split those two into two frames with one window each. People usually complain about the escape key function - by default you have to press Ctrl-t , then followed by any other key binding every time you want to send a command to the wm but to me that’s not an issue, and actually prevents you from accidentally calling a command that will close a window, and frees up a lot of the keyboard bindings for you to use with other programs like tmux. Also it’s incredibly light (I believe it only uses 1MB of RAM. I encourage people to at least try it, it’s different than the popular wms but I promise if it works for you you won’t be able to use anything else again.
I still love spectrwm. I am most grateful that you introduced me to it earlier this year. It does almost everything that I would like. I do not know a programming language, but I am now considering learning C to try to fork spectrwm or similar (dwm, FrankenWM, etc.) and make it 100% my own. You have sent me down many great paths, DT. Thank you. I have been watching your channel for the better part of 2020, and I can hardly explain how much I have learned from your work.
Just found your channel, you make good stuff man. So far I've been only using Debian-based distros (Ubuntu, Zorin, easy stuff for a noob), but after a couple of years using and learning Linux I think it's time to try something based on Arch: gonna try both EndeavourOS and Arco Linux on virtualbox (tried Majaro once, it didn't worked on my laptop, not even MATE, gonna see if its diferent with these ones) this month before going with one next year, and this video gave me good ideas of what I should try first on them, so thanks a lot.
Thanks to you I gave Qtile a chance last week. Started with the config in your repo, and changed it a bit. Qtile has pretty understandable docs. I was using i3 since forever, it was my first tiling wm, than tried xmonad, and now Qtile. Keep up with your great work!
My top 8 WMs: 8: DWM 7: Openbox 6: Kwin 5: BSPWM 4: Spectrwm 3: Awesome (is awesome) 2: Herbstluftwm 1: XMonad Your XMonad show-off video inspired me to switch, and I hate to say this but it's better than HLWM, making it the best on the list
Recently I've gotten into plugin-based window managers and desktop environments, and in the process discovered that the code for Compiz 0.9 is actually really cool. From what I've read of the source you can even turn off compositing.
my favourite is bspwm because its config file is just a bash script and its modular design makes it very simple to use. the only thing I miss is master and stack layout.. anyone knows how to get that working in bspwm??
dwm all the way for me. The "warp" patch is fantastic for mouse-heavy applications like web browsers, etc.: whenever you change focus from one window to another, the cursor goes to the middle of that window. Key over, and the mouse goes with you. Very, very convenient.
You may want to look into leftwm, it is not configured in the programming language that it is written, but it has some nice concepts around theming (and it is just a WM, it does not have a panel nor any other thing, very Unix-y).
1) Xmonad which I'm currently using, has it limitations, specialy managing floating windows, very flexible thou. 2) Awesome, the most flexible of them all, pretty nice floating window management, more a hybrid than a tiler. 3) Spectrwm, is the easy and is better dwm if you want a basic dynamic wm with sane defaults imho. 4) Dwm, very versatile if you know C and fork some patches to you taste but you have to spend lots of time if you want something more than a basic wm. 5) ICEwm, very nice and fully feature for a lightweight floating wm.
@@gabrielt8844 You can't. The reason why is different logic of relations between windows. Dynamic window managers use stacks, manual window managers use trees.
After a year in Arch I just switched to ArcoLinux B i3 edition. What surprised me that i3 actually behaves like dynamic tiler. All thanks to autotiling, a small python library. It's not exactly dynamic, but after spawning second container it switches direction of next spawn. I think I'm gonna stick with this distro a while longer...
I'm not sure I'd call enlightement maximalistic. It depends on how you configure it. It can actually be pretty MINImalistic if you want. I used it quite a bit back in the days when it was the default window manager for GNOME.
I started with wmii, moved over to i3 and now since a couple of weeks qtile is my home, it's a really neat wm, and it's starting to really feel like home now, got my arch up and running, and a nice zsh, just feeling so good being back home in Linux :D
@@sotolf I could never figure that out... I LOVE python, so naturally I wanted to like qtile. I found it’s defaults insanely unusable. DT’s qtile config should be the default. Also, simple things (like changing floating window border colors) seemed impossible in qtile and easy in just about everything else. Anyways, I’m glad you’re liking it. It’s cool to see people branching out and using other things besides i3. I love trying out new window managers and configs as it gives me ideas for how to set up my own environment.
@@engageintellect I like herbstluftwm because it is pretty minimal, I can update it without restarting, and the fact that I can use any language I want to customize it. A lot of window managers have some of those functions built in but I like the combination of them all.
No! If GNOME feels slow and clunky it is because your brain is too fast. You are at fault and must slow your brain down to GNOME level. You have to make yourself stupid because GNOME was developed for stupid people. Only GNOME developers should think. Users should never think. That can confuse them and GNOME developers will be forced to remove even more features. And always remember that GNU's Not Unix Network Object Model Environment is absolutely not an acronym. Spatial file management was superior until one day it wasn't. But don't worry, soon GNOME will be rewritten in the only thing that is almost (but not quite) as good as GNOME: Rust and then all your problems will go away because Rust is a great programming language that makes Perl code look readable, so it must be really good.
"haskell's a tough one to get into as a first programing language"... And me starts to daydream of a world where everyone learns Haskell as a first language 😌😌
As a long time Distrotube subscriber, as soon as I saw this video, I guessed he would rate Xmonad as his top pick. Lol There are quiet a few videos about Xmonad in his channel. Love your work dude, keep it up !! Many of my distro hops this year were influenced by your videos and your genuine opinions on the distros.
Of course it’s very easy to figure out both qtile and xmonad if you have watched him for a little bit as he always shown his love for them and his bias towards xmonad especially.
@@zhanghanduo I don’t understand what you mean on that but I am not trying to make it seem like I hate his list. It’s all his personal opinions on his favorite. Someone else’s list will be different.
Interesting. I'm getting too old to keep hopping from one wm to another, but I am a bit curious about Qtile. As an ex-i3 user, how do you find the experience?
@@lorenzocabrini I was looking for a dynamic tiler, I really like the master/stack layout (monadtall in qtile). The config is n Python, so I'm comfortable editing it. If there is a error in the config, it reverts back to the default config. t doesn't tell you what the error is like i3 so change one thing and reload config. The website is well documented but web searches does not return much. I got it configured the way I like and I'll be sticking with for a while.
@@crwmike0 Cool! Just like you, I'm comfortable with python and that is why qtile is interesting to me. I'll see if I can't find some time and play around with it a bit. Thanks for the info!
1. DWM 2. Hersbluftwm 3. Bspwm 4. Openbox 5. Kwin 6. Xmonad 7. Awesome 8.SwayWM Waiting for the day dwl or a dwm like windows manager that uses wayland and the same workflow / master stack layout will become like stable and the whole xorg-server-xwayland thing goes out to the trash.
I've only used dwm before and now I'm using bspwm and I love it. First of all it's manual, which is my preference, second it's easy to switch between tiled and floating, third it has much more powerful keybind support because of bspc and sxhkd, fourth it doesn't come with a bar by default so I can use whatever I want
Honestly use Herbstluftwm while I learn Haskell (not even just for Xmonad, but as a language I write stuff in), but once I’m a bit more proficient I’ll probably move to Xmonad.
No need to wait. I don't know Haskell, I used to program on C, C++. But I set up Xmonad and Xmonad without big issues, just looked into the configs of others and logs.
I see you keep StumpWM to yourself :P Small criticism, what you call dynamic vs manual is usually known as list vs tree based tiling. A manual tiling is something like herbstluftwm or stumpwm. Still enjoyed the video (as usual).
Hey DT! Which tiling window manager would you recommend to noobs with multiple monitors? Willing to learn LUA but I've heard some complications with getting windows to working multiple monitors
I haven't used icewm in a long time, but it used to be very light. You could easily run it on older hardware. It was never really my favorite as such, but it was always handy to have it installed, when friends who used Windows 95 came around, because it felt quite familiar to them.
@@lorenzocabrini Sounds good. Its actually for a single core Athlon netbook, so this should work well. Now I just need to figure out how the whole X window services work, being fairly new to Linux. This is the first time I'm trying a minimal build starting w/ command-line Debian and there are a lot of things to learn. My initial attempt before properly reading the documentation was... less than successful.
I've personally only just gotten into the window manager only experience and I've only used 2, Openbox and Fluxbox and I never got to configure Fluxbox because it was virtual and nothing ever stuck past leaving the website. So that makes my number 1 choice pretty obvious, Openbox. I have it configured to around my liking so idk where to go from there. I will say though tiling is starting to look like an option to look into however I might just distro hop first, I'll see how I feel.
Hi, I've just discovered your "obscure window managers" series! You're just great explaining the pros and cons of these things. Well, due to a sucktastic laptop I have, a really piece of... In the beginning I've started with the traditional and light mate DE and xfce4 DE but even with those I've experienced issues. I had to turn my head over some very light managers and no more DE. I realized it was time to play around with icewm, openbox, i3, fluxbox. Right now I'm using i3, it's really easy and performs great, I can tell I've improved productivity as expected with a tiling manager! But I think sooner or later I'll go to fluxbox, which performed so well on an even older toshiba laptop I had years ago. My problem with many of these wm is the way to popup the menu, you know, to let the system show what's installed. I had always issues on first steps of having those installed, in the menu there was always some apps missing and a had a lot of work to make them appear :-( But exploring your videos you are for sure a great teacher explaining all these stuff for the rest of us. Thank you very much ;-)
Should do more of these top xx vids, DT. You converted me from urxvt to alacritty, so I am grateful for that. I toggle between vifm and ranger. You did a vid on ranger ages ago, so I am trying it out and thanks. Been using i3 exclusively for about a decade now. I don’t use too many third party packages with it besides dmenu/rofi. Almost use it as is out of the box without too many tweaks and it just works, nothing more to do. Love the manual control of how you want to layout the windows. Questioning on weather or not I try bspwm just to see what it’s like. Think it’ll take a bit to convince me unless I can use it how I do i3, is less bloaty and consumes less ram.
For me no window manager can replace qtile. Since me first trying it after learning about it from Derek I have a hard time using anything besides qtile. Something about it I love but I have never figured out what I love about it. Subconsciously something about it I love but can’t place a finger on it.
I like stacking for desktop. I have been trying to play out a setup for a micro-computer. And thinking about the options. Been trying to find if there is a tab-based window manager that doesn't have a crazy number of dependencies. Where it only shows 1-2 apps at a time but let's me keep more open and switch to them when needed. I don't really care about them directly stacking at all or anything. (Since then it's easy to just lose windows.) Been debating about whether to just stick with xfce or maybe to try putting together a window manager and file manager/browser.
Now that it is under active development and the docs have all been updated, I am trying out IceWM as my daily driver. I copied the configs from /usr/share/icewm to '.icewm' and used 'maker' to update the menu file. It doesn't tile like enlightenment, but I want to give it a chance. Something new in IceWM is a config that handles specific apps. You can config where and how an app opens. Interesting.
rank of all the window managers ive tried 1. herbstluft 2. dwm 3. i3 4. xmonad 5. bspwm herbstluft is the best wm in terms of function imo & it also helps that its very easy to configure and edit, i enjoy how unique dwm is even if i dont prefer master/stack, i3 is good but things about it bug me more than herbstluft, xmonad is interesting but its a pain to configure from my experience, bspwm is just plain awkward (fibonacci layout, the config file being split in half due to sxhkd, etc) i largely prefer the manual ones. I usually end up manually adjusting my windows anyway so dynamic layouts are kind of redundant to me
qtile and i3 are the only tiling window managers on this list that provide tiling/stacking (plus tabs) out of the box. i3/qtile stacking is a must have. If your tiling WM doesn't handle qtile/i3 style stacked layouts along with standard tiling, you might as well go back to using Windows.
What WM is best suited for Ultrawide (21:9) monitor? I would like to display the first program dead in the middle and have other programs being opened on the sides of it.
Great video, personally I use Awesome (but not the default theme, which is baaad). It is #3 on this list but I think has the benefit of "just working" with anything that I throw at it. I use a theme that makes it look very much like i3.
I'm really comfortable with i3 and at this stage in my life I'm no longer playing around with window managers as I used to. However, if something is good and makes sense, then why not? What benefits does bspwm have over i3? I'm really boring when it comes to looks, no titlebars just 1px borders, no panel, no gaps. What I care about is efficient workflow.
@@lorenzocabrini bspwm has better layout than i3, and bspwm hasnt panel, but you choose another panel. Example I use polybar, that is more functionality then i3bar. Titlebar in tiling wm? Why? Just takes up space unnecessarily...
@@OG900Aero I don't use a panel anyways, since it wastes space without really adding anything useful. I find that i3 (or sway which I use these days) has good enough layout management for me. But then again, 90% of what I use is Emacs, so perhaps my use case is too limited to see benefits of bspwm?
I was previously using popOs then I switched to manjaro i3. Since then using i3, it's simple and the config is super easy. I though i3 was cool 😂, but now I know there are so many wm out there definitely goign to try some of these. Thanks dr for sharing wisdom.
Sway is the best window manager in my opinion. It provides the best Wayland experience possible, and has some improved and extra features over i3wm. Of course most electron apps aren't quite ready for native Wayland yet, but XWayland works perfectly fine (with AMD hardware, that is)
I used to use IceWM a lot at one time. The only thing I've noticed about it more recently is that it doesn't seem to work correctly with the Compton compositor. I tend to use Compton to reduce/eliminate tearing when I'm using a window manager or desktop that doesn't have built in compositing. In fact, counterintuitively, using Compton seems to improve performance on low powered hardware by shifting some of the processing load from the CPU to the GPU. I've never really tried to develop a workflow for using a tiling window manager. I figure it would be an adjustment period, and I haven't worked up the ambition to give it a serious try. Also, it would probably make my computer desktop seem even more alien and inscrutable to casual observers / Windows users, and I'm not sure how much more or less interested it would make them in trying out Linux. I think it's worth mentioning that if you want to switch between tiling and floating, Awesome will let you do that. So my list of window managers at this point would probably include, in no particular order: Openbox Fluxbox PekWM Edit: I thought perhaps I should add the window managers I am most interested in trying out either at all or more thoroughly: Tiling: Awesome Qtile Floating: JWM Of course I use the desktop environment Xfce a lot, especially on more powerful hardware (though Debian/Xfce works pretty well even on not so powerful hardware).
#HeyDT! What's the point on spending time between different WM's when they all try to accomplish the same? What are the points that a WM starter person should check?
He told the differences in video. Surely they are allmost same at the end but they try very different aproaches to do that. I'm going to use Awesome because it is very customizable and use lua as scripting language
I made a couple of *iso's of a Xfwm4 standalone. One Debian Sid and one Ubuntu 20.04 based. Nice that the compositor is built in and it has an autostart file like openbox. It has a gui for keybindings and lets you know if there is duplicates. Plus it has the nice right click menu and it has some built in minimal Pseudo Tiling.
I never used standalone wm, but you inspired me to try tiling in my workflow. KDE + kwin tiling script + some tweaks such as disable toolbars, add bright frame for Windows gave best of TWM and full DE.
i use i3, i need the tabbed layout and the stacked one, i’ve 7-8 windows open in each workspace. I don’t think i’ve any alternatives, can anyone recommend ?
I have been using the i3 for several years and I am surprised that you are using both tabbed layout and stacked layout . For me normal tiling and tabbed is sufficient. Maybe try herbstluftwm? HLWM is a unique manual tiling window manager. You can divide the screen into several empty frames which you then fill with windows. Each frame has its own layout. You can have more than one frame on the screen. Although there are no tabbed and stacking modes, there is another mode that can replace them both. I don't remember the exact name, but I would call it monocle mode. Works like fullscreen, but within a specific frame. When you are in this mode, you still have access to other windows in this frame, you can change them to the next or previous one. The only thing missing is a way to know the number of windows in this frame without leaving this mode, but you can script it yourself because you configure HLWM using client commands. This gives you the ability to write scripts in any language you know or wish to learn.
Of the ones I've tried so far 1. BSPWM 2. OpenBox 3. DWM 4. i3 not counting any of the default ones in any of the DEs I've tried. I don't really like the Master Stack Layout of DWM, but at least it's predictable. It's a gamble of what will happen when you try to move a window in i3. That's why I like BSPWM. Assuming the number of windows in a workspace is the same, the layout won't change until you tell it to, and you can move windows around within that layout however you want. It's got a lot more keybinds necessary, but it's worth it to learn them all, I'd say. I'm open to using a different one if it keeps the Binary tree framework of BSP, and also lets you tab windows together without monocle mode. (Like having a quarter of the screen be taken by three tabbed windows for example.) That's the only thing keeping me from trying to use Surf or a more minimal terminal. (I'm on Vivaldi and Terminator right now.)
0:23 - #8 i3
2:55 - #7 IceWM
4:15 - #6 spectrwm
6:09 - #5 Openbox
8:21 - #4 dwm
9:50 - #3 awesome
11:36 - #2 Qtile
13:32 - #1 xmonad
Thank you. :)
How he moves window and resize with key binding?
@@tezaswiraj4244 a keyboard...
Thanks a lot
The only reason I can watch distrotube is people like you putting the timestamp of each video for us to skip unnecessary BS
DT is getting more and more really really noob friendly and i love it
Noobs need love too!
@@DistroTube Indeed we do!
@@DistroTube We sure do. Just keep it coming, enough of the complex stuff that makes my brain boil, more material for FOSS virgins like myself :)
@@trampolinhusetuser7098 I know that feeling. But fear not; your knowledge will grow as your journey continues. Keep it up!
@@DistroTube Maybe you can figure out how to benchmark them and see how efficiently they use the GPU vs CPU... They are the type of software that should be able to take advantage of GPUs, after all. I could also imagine WM stress testing being possible - with some program opening hundreds of windows and rearranging them with some (automated) monkey testing. Otherwise, all there is to talk about is features - and many are close in that regard.
Maybe I should give awesome a try so I can waste even more time riceing without doing anything productive
hehe ricing is fun...I may not be so creative...but its fun to bunk classes to rice the WM and watch DT :P ;)
@gamera lord how about others like xmonad?since I am better with python I find haskell a bit more easier than lua
@gamera lord I found it a bit tricky to configure resizing keybinds in qtile, also it does not fully support standards like ewmh(extended window manager hints) iirc
:(((((((((
_"so I can waste even more time"_
time = your life
Don't waste your life.
I knew about Qtile in this channel and since then it became my favorite window manager!
I'm planning to use it as my main de I'm learning python and using it will increase my python skills also. Technically it's like killing two birds with one stone.
@@cun_0092 Very good idea. Python is very powerful language and you are going to enjoy extending Qtile features with it!
I been waiting for this video. Finally
Yea, someone (maybe you) asked for this...so here ya go! :D
@@DistroTube LOL, I know I asked like a month ago, thank you for all the videos since I've was looking at how to display data (like covid cases to a smart mirror.
You got me into Qtile with some of your early videos and it has been my go to since.
Greetings from Germany. Your Videos are great. Linux user for 20 years now and I can always use some content from here
I've been using dwm lately.
It's true it isn't the most noob friendly or doesn't come with a lot of features but it's like it grows with you. Slowly you get the window manager that you need with dwm
I love bspwm, and I am sad it didn't make the top 8 :(
Same here
Same here, bspwm just work :))
bspwm > i3, spectrwm, acewm, at least.
Same here. Bspwm better than i3 and spectrewm.
me too. although i know it's not as efficient as others wm's, I am heavily biased to it.
I like my KDE Plasma and would never want to switch, but I have to say all those tiling window manager setups you see on places like r/unixporn look really cool and sometimes make me jealous.
My son uses plasma. He does like my i3 setup however. Can kwin (or whatever the KDE window manager is called these days) be configured for tiling?
@@lorenzocabrini I know that on gnome, system76 developed a tiling extension
@@lorenzocabrini yes it can be ... i use a tiling script with my plasma setup. You can even use i3 as wm for plasma. However if u want a simple solution just use krohnkite instead.
I go back and forth between KDE and Awesome lol. Just depends on what I'm doing, though I've been using Awesome more and more.
You can use scripts like Bismuth to make KWin tile, or even integrate a tiling window manager into plasma there’s a lot of bspwm plasma setups out there that work very well, you’ll probably just have to tinker with keybinds so that the ones for plasma and the ones for whatever tiling window manger you use aren’t conflicting
# 1: bspwm
# 2: dwm
# 3: awesome
# 4: i3
# 5: xmonad
# 6: qtile
Edit: on each system I’ve tried them on BSPWM is the lightest... even more so than DWM. Xmonad is great but requires a ton of packages to run, Haskell knowledge, and bloated configs. It does what it does well, but there are simpler options that are just as capable and far less bloated.
+1
@sidhanth rathod I agree, the tabs are cool! I think Brodie did a video on how to do tabs in BSPWM.. I know that it’s possible.
Currently i am also running bspwm, but i am not very happy with it. It is lightweight, but not as good configurable as others. BSPWM is very light, but not lighter than dwm. Maybe you forgot to look for resource usage of sxhkd also, because otherwise bspwm will not work. So you need to count them always together.
+1
yup I love bspwm
Wow I found a gem on youtube. I'm coming back to linux and needed this.
Thanks DT!
Awesome BTC ticker 😎 Top notch content as always!
I really appreciate this video! Excellent coverage of a niche that can be daunting to get into.
Excellent choice of window managers. First thing I see in your i3 is vim, and what a color scheme! Awesome colors in your Qtile and Xmonad setup as well. I really need to look into your color themes.
As always, brilliant presentation. I actually guessed your #1 would be Xmonad. You stay true to yourself. Keep it up!
Hey DT, I love the video!
My first Distro ever was Manjaro i3,that's all i know and im staying there.Tried few WM's and for what do i3 is enough. Great video DT! Thanks!
1) I'm definitely going to say herbstluftwm, just because I used it for so long and customized it so extensively.
2) dwm. I recently patched my own build of dwm that has very low system requirements, and goes well with my workflow.
3) I played around with DT's xmonad, which I found very nice and easy to use.
4) Bspwm.
5) JWM. I got this configured how I liked it, and it worked very well for me.
DT, I have an idea for a future video. You seem to know hell of a lot about what panel, what dock, what login manager, what DE, what WM and so on and so forth goes best with what. How do you know all that (more of a rhetoric question that needs no answer) But maybe just talk about all that choice one gets once choosing open source. Cause thanks to your videos I get to understand that linux means to have a choice, but it doesnt help much when you are a rookie and dont know what is there to choose from.
8. i3
7. icewm
6. spectrwm
5. openbox
4. dwm
3. awesome
2. qtile
1. xmonad
You forgot windows 8.1
Why?
OPENBOX very good most high performance lightweight fully stacking WM ONLY IceWM and fvwm MAYBE less RAM i love it
i would recommend icewm for pentium III, pentium II antique CPU, or RIVA TNT, VooDoo GPUs. very forgiving for CPU, RAM use. unfortunately after i successfully compiled custom build Pale Moon web browser on my Pentium III Katmai 500mhz, my original factory SDRAM for it was completely used up, it was written to probably billions of times from swapping between 8 GB swap and 384 MB SDRAM over the 11 days it took to compile, I was only able to run Pale Moon with incredible, unbelievably smooth optimized modern web browsing on Pentium III for a few minutes before my DIMMS failed and now cant boot need to find more SDRAM DIMMS in ebay
wheres bspwm?
Honestly after trying out Ratpoison I find it hard to move to anything else
It might be just how my idea of tiling windows is, but it seems to just do everything so correctly and intuitively out of the box. It is a manual tiler, so you’re dedicating frames where you want windows to be able to open, and by default if you open another window in one frame it will maximise it, replacing the window that was under it
And you can either switch between them in one frame like alt+tab, or further split those two into two frames with one window each.
People usually complain about the escape key function - by default you have to press Ctrl-t , then followed by any other key binding every time you want to send a command to the wm but to me that’s not an issue, and actually prevents you from accidentally calling a command that will close a window, and frees up a lot of the keyboard bindings for you to use with other programs like tmux.
Also it’s incredibly light (I believe it only uses 1MB of RAM.
I encourage people to at least try it, it’s different than the popular wms but I promise if it works for you you won’t be able to use anything else again.
I still love spectrwm. I am most grateful that you introduced me to it earlier this year. It does almost everything that I would like.
I do not know a programming language, but I am now considering learning C to try to fork spectrwm or similar (dwm, FrankenWM, etc.) and make it 100% my own.
You have sent me down many great paths, DT. Thank you. I have been watching your channel for the better part of 2020, and I can hardly explain how much I have learned from your work.
Whoa, herbstluftwm is not in top 8.
That's really disappointing it's a pretty neat Tiling WM.
My favorite
herbstluftwm is manual
my bad it's manual tiling but it ain't suck, people just haven't spent some time on it and saying it suck.
@kot Well, Fucking Enjoy patching DWM.
HLWM has crazy configuration potential. The best WM for huge screens.
Honestly I recommend IceWM even for overpowered machines because there's nothing quite like practically zero latency window management
Found this channel just a few days ago and I love it
Get used to the term "proprietary garbage" :D
Just found your channel, you make good stuff man. So far I've been only using Debian-based distros (Ubuntu, Zorin, easy stuff for a noob), but after a couple of years using and learning Linux I think it's time to try something based on Arch: gonna try both EndeavourOS and Arco Linux on virtualbox (tried Majaro once, it didn't worked on my laptop, not even MATE, gonna see if its diferent with these ones) this month before going with one next year, and this video gave me good ideas of what I should try first on them, so thanks a lot.
Thanks to you I gave Qtile a chance last week.
Started with the config in your repo, and changed it a bit. Qtile has pretty understandable docs.
I was using i3 since forever, it was my first tiling wm, than tried xmonad, and now Qtile.
Keep up with your great work!
I'm quite surprised bspwm didn't make it to the list.
I'm wondering why herbstluftwm and bspwm didn't make the list.
Awesome is awesome. Super fun to learn, very well documented.
they break the api during the update
My top 8 WMs:
8: DWM
7: Openbox
6: Kwin
5: BSPWM
4: Spectrwm
3: Awesome (is awesome)
2: Herbstluftwm
1: XMonad
Your XMonad show-off video inspired me to switch, and I hate to say this but it's better than HLWM, making it the best on the list
How can i use kwin without a DE??? There is no video that mention that.
Recently I've gotten into plugin-based window managers and desktop environments, and in the process discovered that the code for Compiz 0.9 is actually really cool. From what I've read of the source you can even turn off compositing.
my favourite is bspwm because its config file is just a bash script and its modular design makes it very simple to use.
the only thing I miss is master and stack layout..
anyone knows how to get that working in bspwm??
dwm all the way for me. The "warp" patch is fantastic for mouse-heavy applications like web browsers, etc.: whenever you change focus from one window to another, the cursor goes to the middle of that window. Key over, and the mouse goes with you. Very, very convenient.
You may want to look into leftwm, it is not configured in the programming language that it is written, but it has some nice concepts around theming (and it is just a WM, it does not have a panel nor any other thing, very Unix-y).
1) Xmonad which I'm currently using, has it limitations, specialy managing floating windows, very flexible thou.
2) Awesome, the most flexible of them all, pretty nice floating window management, more a hybrid than a tiler.
3) Spectrwm, is the easy and is better dwm if you want a basic dynamic wm with sane defaults imho.
4) Dwm, very versatile if you know C and fork some patches to you taste but you have to spend lots of time if you want something more than a basic wm.
5) ICEwm, very nice and fully feature for a lightweight floating wm.
You missed the best BSPWM, it is both manual and dynamic
DT always says its "manual" for some reason. Really it depends on how you set it up. I can be either like you said.
I never knew this! How can I make it dynamic/use different layouts?
@@gabrielt8844 You can't. The reason why is different logic of relations between windows. Dynamic window managers use stacks, manual window managers use trees.
@@gabrielt8844 in the bspwmrc file type:
bspc config automatic_scheme alternate
that's just one example and its the one I like, similar to spiral.
@@Gornius also watch some of brodie's videos on bspwm. and Gornius must just not be aware of this.
AwsomeWM fan here. Thanks for the info.
Nice background with church :) I live close by, it's in little country Slovenia ❤️
After a year in Arch I just switched to ArcoLinux B i3 edition. What surprised me that i3 actually behaves like dynamic tiler. All thanks to autotiling, a small python library. It's not exactly dynamic, but after spawning second container it switches direction of next spawn. I think I'm gonna stick with this distro a while longer...
My favourites: 3. Enlightenment 2. Compiz 1. Kwin. Guess I've soft spot for maximalistic WMs
I'm not sure I'd call enlightement maximalistic. It depends on how you configure it. It can actually be pretty MINImalistic if you want. I used it quite a bit back in the days when it was the default window manager for GNOME.
I started with wmii, moved over to i3 and now since a couple of weeks qtile is my home, it's a really neat wm, and it's starting to really feel like home now, got my arch up and running, and a nice zsh, just feeling so good being back home in Linux :D
How do you change the color of floating window borders in qtile?
@@engageintellect sadly I don't know, I never really use the floating layouts.
@@sotolf I could never figure that out... I LOVE python, so naturally I wanted to like qtile. I found it’s defaults insanely unusable. DT’s qtile config should be the default.
Also, simple things (like changing floating window border colors) seemed impossible in qtile and easy in just about everything else.
Anyways, I’m glad you’re liking it. It’s cool to see people branching out and using other things besides i3. I love trying out new window managers and configs as it gives me ideas for how to set up my own environment.
My top 5 would probably be herbstluftwm, bspwm, qtile, xmonad, i3
no sowm?
What do you like about herbsluft?
@@engageintellect I like herbstluftwm because it is pretty minimal, I can update it without restarting, and the fact that I can use any language I want to customize it. A lot of window managers have some of those functions built in but I like the combination of them all.
@@innac_makes_things sounds exactly why the reasons I love bspwm so much. It’s just so damn easy! And fantastic for scripting.
Noob here. Do i have to change DE's in order to use a particular tile windows managaer?
Thanks to your videos, I've switched to xmonad on my main laptop. Still have some quirks to figure out - but going back to Gnome feel so clunky...
No! If GNOME feels slow and clunky it is because your brain is too fast. You are at fault and must slow your brain down to GNOME level. You have to make yourself stupid because GNOME was developed for stupid people. Only GNOME developers should think. Users should never think. That can confuse them and GNOME developers will be forced to remove even more features. And always remember that GNU's Not Unix Network Object Model Environment is absolutely not an acronym. Spatial file management was superior until one day it wasn't. But don't worry, soon GNOME will be rewritten in the only thing that is almost (but not quite) as good as GNOME: Rust and then all your problems will go away because Rust is a great programming language that makes Perl code look readable, so it must be really good.
"haskell's a tough one to get into as a first programing language"...
And me starts to daydream of a world where everyone learns Haskell as a first language 😌😌
As a long time Distrotube subscriber, as soon as I saw this video, I guessed he would rate Xmonad as his top pick. Lol
There are quiet a few videos about Xmonad in his channel.
Love your work dude, keep it up !! Many of my distro hops this year were influenced by your videos and your genuine opinions on the distros.
Great to see xmonad topping the list! It's brilliant
nice list, although maybe you should also check wayland WMs/compositors.
wayland isnt as mature so there isnt much hype around them.
Before I go watch:
Qtile, xmonad, dwm, i3, bspwm, herbstluft, Spectrwm aaaaaaand openbox
Edit: 6 out of 8.
How'd I forget about Awesome.
6/8 not a bad prediction ;)
Of course it’s very easy to figure out both qtile and xmonad if you have watched him for a little bit as he always shown his love for them and his bias towards xmonad especially.
@@warhawk_yt Multiple "top" "best" descriptions for xmonad, which was used on qtile two years ago
@@zhanghanduo I don’t understand what you mean on that but I am not trying to make it seem like I hate his list. It’s all his personal opinions on his favorite. Someone else’s list will be different.
After using i3 for a couple of years, about a year ago I switched to Qtile.
Interesting. I'm getting too old to keep hopping from one wm to another, but I am a bit curious about Qtile. As an ex-i3 user, how do you find the experience?
@@lorenzocabrini I was looking for a dynamic tiler, I really like the master/stack layout (monadtall in qtile). The config is n Python, so I'm comfortable editing it. If there is a error in the config, it reverts back to the default config. t doesn't tell you what the error is like i3 so change one thing and reload config.
The website is well documented but web searches does not return much. I got it configured the way I like and I'll be sticking with for a while.
@@crwmike0 Cool! Just like you, I'm comfortable with python and that is why qtile is interesting to me. I'll see if I can't find some time and play around with it a bit. Thanks for the info!
No BSPWM?
1. DWM
2. Hersbluftwm
3. Bspwm
4. Openbox
5. Kwin
6. Xmonad
7. Awesome
8.SwayWM
Waiting for the day dwl or a dwm like windows manager that uses wayland and the same workflow / master stack layout will become like stable and the whole xorg-server-xwayland thing goes out to the trash.
1. dwm - may be because i put lot of time in patching, coding statusbar, setting other staff;
2. fluxbox
Patching got annoying real fast for me. Having the freedom to easily attach or easily remove something is way better.
it's 2021 and I have started using i3wm. Had a brilliant learning curve but I am having fun configuring it.
I've only used dwm before and now I'm using bspwm and I love it. First of all it's manual, which is my preference, second it's easy to switch between tiled and floating, third it has much more powerful keybind support because of bspc and sxhkd, fourth it doesn't come with a bar by default so I can use whatever I want
Surprised that BSPWM didn’t make the list, my top DWMs are Awesome, i3, and BSPWM.
assuming "dwm" means dynamic wm, neither i3 or bspwm are dynamic
@@thetreeofclues Correct, I meant to write WMs.
perfect timing!
Honestly use Herbstluftwm while I learn Haskell (not even just for Xmonad, but as a language I write stuff in), but once I’m a bit more proficient I’ll probably move to Xmonad.
No need to wait. I don't know Haskell, I used to program on C, C++. But I set up Xmonad and Xmonad without big issues, just looked into the configs of others and logs.
I know, I’d just prefer to have a config which makes full use of Haskell.
my top 3 windows managers :
1) DWM for advance user
2) I3 bcs users frendly
3) XFCE for noobs
@@____-gy5mq i agree xfce is a DE but it can be use as WM for new linux users before switching to TWM
@@____-gy5mq a new linux users that come from mac os or windows need GUI interfaces like kde after that xfce and TWM
I see you keep StumpWM to yourself :P
Small criticism, what you call dynamic vs manual is usually known as list vs tree based tiling. A manual tiling is something like herbstluftwm or stumpwm.
Still enjoyed the video (as usual).
Great video thanks for the info
Hey DT! Which tiling window manager would you recommend to noobs with multiple monitors? Willing to learn LUA but I've heard some complications with getting windows to working multiple monitors
Every tiling window manager listed here is good with multiple monitors (I have three monitors myself).
@@DistroTube sorry but i3 for multiple monitors is quite bad.
Really helpful. Awesome and Icewm especially look interesting.
I haven't used icewm in a long time, but it used to be very light. You could easily run it on older hardware. It was never really my favorite as such, but it was always handy to have it installed, when friends who used Windows 95 came around, because it felt quite familiar to them.
@@lorenzocabrini Sounds good. Its actually for a single core Athlon netbook, so this should work well. Now I just need to figure out how the whole X window services work, being fairly new to Linux. This is the first time I'm trying a minimal build starting w/ command-line Debian and there are a lot of things to learn. My initial attempt before properly reading the documentation was... less than successful.
Wow BSPWM doesn’t even get a mention...
hi, how do you make that top-right thing in 1:41 ?
I've personally only just gotten into the window manager only experience and I've only used 2, Openbox and Fluxbox and I never got to configure Fluxbox because it was virtual and nothing ever stuck past leaving the website.
So that makes my number 1 choice pretty obvious, Openbox. I have it configured to around my liking so idk where to go from there. I will say though tiling is starting to look like an option to look into however I might just distro hop first, I'll see how I feel.
No real surprise about your top two :-)
Great video as usual DT. My list is a little different
5. i3
4. Icewm
3. openbox
2. dwm
1. spectrwm ( the easy xmonad )
Hi, I've just discovered your "obscure window managers" series! You're just great explaining the pros and cons of these things.
Well, due to a sucktastic laptop I have, a really piece of... In the beginning I've started with the traditional and light mate DE and xfce4 DE but even with those I've experienced issues.
I had to turn my head over some very light managers and no more DE.
I realized it was time to play around with icewm, openbox, i3, fluxbox. Right now I'm using i3, it's really easy and performs great, I can tell I've improved productivity as expected with a tiling manager! But I think sooner or later I'll go to fluxbox, which performed so well on an even older toshiba laptop I had years ago.
My problem with many of these wm is the way to popup the menu, you know, to let the system show what's installed. I had always issues on first steps of having those installed, in the menu there was always some apps missing and a had a lot of work to make them appear :-(
But exploring your videos you are for sure a great teacher explaining all these stuff for the rest of us.
Thank you very much ;-)
Should do more of these top xx vids, DT.
You converted me from urxvt to alacritty, so I am grateful for that. I toggle between vifm and ranger. You did a vid on ranger ages ago, so I am trying it out and thanks.
Been using i3 exclusively for about a decade now. I don’t use too many third party packages with it besides dmenu/rofi. Almost use it as is out of the box without too many tweaks and it just works, nothing more to do. Love the manual control of how you want to layout the windows. Questioning on weather or not I try bspwm just to see what it’s like. Think it’ll take a bit to convince me unless I can use it how I do i3, is less bloaty and consumes less ram.
For me no window manager can replace qtile. Since me first trying it after learning about it from Derek I have a hard time using anything besides qtile. Something about it I love but I have never figured out what I love about it. Subconsciously something about it I love but can’t place a finger on it.
This is a video that needed to be made.
StumpWM is the best window manager and I will die on that hill.
I'm with you stumpwm controls like emacs and thats the best
I recently started tinkering with awesome window manager. I don't think I'll ever go back to using a traditional desktop environment.
bro thanks so much, you actually made soft soft easy to understand
It'd be nice if you would share with us where you get those wallpapers.
Check my GitLab: gitlab.com/dwt1/wallpapers
@@DistroTube Thx!
@@DistroTube Thank you!
I like stacking for desktop.
I have been trying to play out a setup for a micro-computer. And thinking about the options.
Been trying to find if there is a tab-based window manager that doesn't have a crazy number of dependencies.
Where it only shows 1-2 apps at a time but let's me keep more open and switch to them when needed. I don't really care about them directly stacking at all or anything. (Since then it's easy to just lose windows.)
Been debating about whether to just stick with xfce or maybe to try putting together a window manager and file manager/browser.
Now that it is under active development and the docs have all been updated, I am trying out IceWM as my daily driver.
I copied the configs from /usr/share/icewm to '.icewm' and used 'maker' to update the menu file. It doesn't tile like enlightenment, but I want to give it a chance.
Something new in IceWM is a config that handles specific apps. You can config where and how an app opens. Interesting.
rank of all the window managers ive tried
1. herbstluft
2. dwm
3. i3
4. xmonad
5. bspwm
herbstluft is the best wm in terms of function imo & it also helps that its very easy to configure and edit, i enjoy how unique dwm is even if i dont prefer master/stack, i3 is good but things about it bug me more than herbstluft, xmonad is interesting but its a pain to configure from my experience, bspwm is just plain awkward (fibonacci layout, the config file being split in half due to sxhkd, etc)
i largely prefer the manual ones. I usually end up manually adjusting my windows anyway so dynamic layouts are kind of redundant to me
qtile and i3 are the only tiling window managers on this list that provide tiling/stacking (plus tabs) out of the box. i3/qtile stacking is a must have. If your tiling WM doesn't handle qtile/i3 style stacked layouts along with standard tiling, you might as well go back to using Windows.
I would use DWM, but it doesnt have the EWMH support i need for my workflow, even with the ewmh patch.
So im on Awesome, which is very awesome.
How difficult is to use it? I would like to install it in mint :p
What WM is best suited for Ultrawide (21:9) monitor? I would like to display the first program dead in the middle and have other programs being opened on the sides of it.
Can Qtile split my monitor in 3 columns and launch first app in the middle one by default?
I3
its not often that you see someone running the same background as yourself. but the openbox background is the same as mine!
Great video, personally I use Awesome (but not the default theme, which is baaad). It is #3 on this list but I think has the benefit of "just working" with anything that I throw at it. I use a theme that makes it look very much like i3.
Good list, but missing one tiling WM that better than i3, spectrewm. This is the bspwm.
I'm really comfortable with i3 and at this stage in my life I'm no longer playing around with window managers as I used to. However, if something is good and makes sense, then why not? What benefits does bspwm have over i3? I'm really boring when it comes to looks, no titlebars just 1px borders, no panel, no gaps. What I care about is efficient workflow.
@@lorenzocabrini bspwm has better layout than i3, and bspwm hasnt panel, but you choose another panel. Example I use polybar, that is more functionality then i3bar. Titlebar in tiling wm? Why? Just takes up space unnecessarily...
@@OG900Aero I don't use a panel anyways, since it wastes space without really adding anything useful.
I find that i3 (or sway which I use these days) has good enough layout management for me. But then again, 90% of what I use is Emacs, so perhaps my use case is too limited to see benefits of bspwm?
I was previously using popOs then I switched to manjaro i3. Since then using i3, it's simple and the config is super easy. I though i3 was cool 😂, but now I know there are so many wm out there definitely goign to try some of these. Thanks dr for sharing wisdom.
Sway is the best window manager in my opinion. It provides the best Wayland experience possible, and has some improved and extra features over i3wm. Of course most electron apps aren't quite ready for native Wayland yet, but XWayland works perfectly fine (with AMD hardware, that is)
you meant: AMD cpu or gpu??
I used to use IceWM a lot at one time. The only thing I've noticed about it more recently is that it doesn't seem to work correctly with the Compton compositor. I tend to use Compton to reduce/eliminate tearing when I'm using a window manager or desktop that doesn't have built in compositing. In fact, counterintuitively, using Compton seems to improve performance on low powered hardware by shifting some of the processing load from the CPU to the GPU.
I've never really tried to develop a workflow for using a tiling window manager. I figure it would be an adjustment period, and I haven't worked up the ambition to give it a serious try. Also, it would probably make my computer desktop seem even more alien and inscrutable to casual observers / Windows users, and I'm not sure how much more or less interested it would make them in trying out Linux.
I think it's worth mentioning that if you want to switch between tiling and floating, Awesome will let you do that.
So my list of window managers at this point would probably include, in no particular order:
Openbox
Fluxbox
PekWM
Edit: I thought perhaps I should add the window managers I am most interested in trying out either at all or more thoroughly:
Tiling:
Awesome
Qtile
Floating:
JWM
Of course I use the desktop environment Xfce a lot, especially on more powerful hardware (though Debian/Xfce works pretty well even on not so powerful hardware).
Hey DT ,can you cover the arcolinux tweak tool once?
#HeyDT! What's the point on spending time between different WM's when they all try to accomplish the same? What are the points that a WM starter person should check?
He told the differences in video. Surely they are allmost same at the end but they try very different aproaches to do that.
I'm going to use Awesome because it is very customizable and use lua as scripting language
Pop Shell is my current favorite. It's a good balance of desktop and tiling window manager.
How to compile it on Mac OS X 🖥 ?
I made a couple of *iso's of a Xfwm4 standalone. One Debian Sid and one Ubuntu 20.04 based. Nice that the compositor is built in and it has an autostart file like openbox. It has a gui for keybindings and lets you know if there is duplicates. Plus it has the nice right click menu and it has some built in minimal Pseudo Tiling.
I never used standalone wm, but you inspired me to try tiling in my workflow. KDE + kwin tiling script + some tweaks such as disable toolbars, add bright frame for Windows gave best of TWM and full DE.
Justice is served I was expecting top window manager of 2020
Thank you DT🙃
Which distro is your favorite and which distro you use
How can I change between keyboard layout on i3wm
My fav one and only DWM
i use i3, i need the tabbed layout and the stacked one, i’ve 7-8 windows open in each workspace. I don’t think i’ve any alternatives, can anyone recommend ?
I have been using the i3 for several years and I am surprised that you are using both tabbed layout and stacked layout . For me normal tiling and tabbed is sufficient.
Maybe try herbstluftwm?
HLWM is a unique manual tiling window manager.
You can divide the screen into several empty frames which you then fill with windows. Each frame has its own layout. You can have more than one frame on the screen.
Although there are no tabbed and stacking modes, there is another mode that can replace them both. I don't remember the exact name, but I would call it monocle mode.
Works like fullscreen, but within a specific frame. When you are in this mode, you still have access to other windows in this frame, you can change them to the next or previous one.
The only thing missing is a way to know the number of windows in this frame without leaving this mode, but you can script it yourself because you configure HLWM using client commands. This gives you the ability to write scripts in any language you know or wish to learn.
Of the ones I've tried so far
1. BSPWM
2. OpenBox
3. DWM
4. i3
not counting any of the default ones in any of the DEs I've tried.
I don't really like the Master Stack Layout of DWM, but at least it's predictable. It's a gamble of what will happen when you try to move a window in i3. That's why I like BSPWM. Assuming the number of windows in a workspace is the same, the layout won't change until you tell it to, and you can move windows around within that layout however you want. It's got a lot more keybinds necessary, but it's worth it to learn them all, I'd say.
I'm open to using a different one if it keeps the Binary tree framework of BSP, and also lets you tab windows together without monocle mode. (Like having a quarter of the screen be taken by three tabbed windows for example.) That's the only thing keeping me from trying to use Surf or a more minimal terminal. (I'm on Vivaldi and Terminator right now.)
Why is i3 the 8th one? Would like to know your thoughts