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!
I’m pretty sure KDE’s window manager, kwin, can do all of those things through kwin scripts and window rules, except the pager doesn’t show the details of windows on other desktops, just the outline.
fvwm is super-old-school but incredibly flexible.
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.
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.
OpenBox & Xfwm. I’m keeping an eye on labwc, which is a new openbox clone for wlroots. It’s already suitable for everyday use.
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?
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).
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.
I’ve run plain ol’ openbox without a desktop environment on top of it, and it’s quite nice. IIRC I also had a standalone status bar application, but I can’t remember which one I used.
There are a couple utility programs (obconf and obkey?) that help to configure everything comfortably.
Ah, I thought that xfwm4 wouldn’t work without XFCE, but I’m wrong. This is a good idea, thanks a bunch! I’ll have to look at panels/status-bars and see what I like. I’m not really one to configure GUI so this might be a learning curve
