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
If you like the relatively polished experience provided by a DE like cinnamon, you’re unlikely to enjoy a WM. It’s a much more DIY experience. Unless you have particularly unusual window layouts, you’re best off just learning the keyboard shortcuts already supported in your DE.
Disclaimer: I’ve used tiling window managers for all of 30 minutes in my life.
If you just want a faster cinnamon, you might consider merely switching to XFCE. Just change the menu to the whisker menu and you’ll be right at home.
WMs don’t typically come with “sane defaults” in the DE sense of the word; you have to make your own sanity. In order to find sane defaults, you’ll probably have to switch to a distro that has its own custom configs. (That being said, you can always copy the configs back to your original distro when you know what you want.) Maybe check out Mabox for some inspiration. I can’t speak to any other beginner WM distros.
Do you want a tiling or a stacking wm?
Uh What’s the difference?
If stacking is floating, I think I’d rather have that
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.)
If you’re looking for a floating wm then Fluxbox might be your best bet. Otherwise I’d try i3. It’s easy to configure and has a lot of documentation (it also features a floating mode I believe). If you’re looking for something in python then I would recommend either awesomewm or Qtile (my fav). Qtile is a bit more difficult than awesome to configure though, but it has a better status bar.
My problem with qtile is it seems… just bad… The install instruction doesn’t work, and it was just a pain to install
If you know a bit of Python then i can only recommend you try qtile. It’s a pretty nice WM to start with IMO.
Why? I’ve used qtile for a while, and if gou need help configuring it, let me know and I’ll be happy to help
I just spent so long installing it, you’d think I’ve never used Linux before
You honestly can’t go wrong with using i3. It’s super simple to use and has great documentation.
Isn’t i3 a tiling WM? If they use cinnamon that seems like a bit of a jump
Tried out sway which I hear is based on i3 and at least on NixOS it came with bare minimum config that didn’t allow me to use my laptop properly at all
Yes. Its tilling.Inn my opinion, if you wanna go the wm route, why not go the tiling route and get rid of using mouse alltogether (ツ)
