I want the easiest to configure/theme wm and one that comes with sane defaults. Also I currently use cinnamon, and I’m not sure how to escape from that(everything in it is just so nice) but I want the speed of a wm

  • Lucia [she/her]@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Fluxbox or IceWM as a more standard, familiar floating WMs (both are pretty customizable too).

    WindowMaker is my goto for standalone window managers, it’s look based on NeXTSTeP OS from 90s, so it doesn’t look like yet another ripoff from windows or macos (both are ugly IMHO), so it’s pretty unique.

    If you want minimal and keyboard-oriented, cwm is THE wm for you. The main problem is that default keyboard shortcuts are really bad (openbsd fanatics will say otherways, but when shortcuts are spread around ctrl+, alt+, and ctrl+alt+, it’s really far from good), so I recommend tweak them or to find someone’s config.

    If you want a desktop-agnostic file manager for these wms, I’d recommend xfe - it’s somewhat obscure for some reason, but it’s really, really good. Can’t recommend more.

    As to install, all of these should be in your distro’s repo. Fluxbox may come as two packages (fluxbox2 and fluxbox3), the first one is the last official version and the second is the “community edition” - a fork, basically.

    At least on Void Window Maker package is called WindowMaker, with capitalisation. Since Void sticks to official naming, other distros may have the same name.

    edit: Also, it’s worth to mention most of recommendation on this thread are tiling window managers (awesomewm, i3, hyprland, etc.)