Which Tiling Window Managers do you like, and why?

3 years ago by Cyclohexane to c/linux

feel free to list other window managers you've used.

I have been happy with bspwm, but considering trying something else. I love its simplicity and immense customizability. I like that it is shell scriptable, but it is not a deal breaker feature for me.

I like how the binary split model makes any custom partition possible.

JetpackJackson 11 points 3 years ago

i3 and sway

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visnudeva 8 points 3 years ago
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cyclohexane 3 points 3 years ago

Need to figure out making it work with nvidia 😭

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snamellit 1 point 3 years ago

Works fine here. I migrated from Sway to Hyprland and it just worked. For Sway I had to work around some frustrating niggles but nothing so far for Hyprland. I use a MSI laptop with a 2070Maxq hybrid graphics setup. The performance of Wolfenstein New Order shows the nvidia is working ;-)

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visnudeva 1 point 3 years ago
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visnudeva 0 points 3 years ago
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hschen 6 points 3 years ago

Starting with i3 as my first, i tried a bunch of different ones. Xmonad and Qtile were the ones i liked the most but Qtile was buggy and Xmonad while working was super confusing to configure with haskell.

Also tried AwesomeWM, it felt a bit buggy to me in terms of window handling and DWM was just too complicated to patch and even with patches it was too basic

Ended up going back to i3, and then moved over to Sway.

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kunday 6 points 3 years ago

XMonad. Been using it for almost a decade, and very powerful. I3 I hear is also good.

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vividspecter 3 points 3 years ago

I prefer the way XMonad handles multimonitor workspaces, but left for Sway due to wayland support.

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kunday 2 points 3 years ago

need to give it a try. I'm stuck in the past times lol

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whoopingsneeze 1 point 3 years ago

I haven't used XMonad in a long time, but it was my go-to for a few years. It was solid. The main issue is that you configure it in Haskell, and I don't know Haskell.

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Corngood 1 point 3 years ago

Same here, but I'm about ready to accept Wayland... Seems like sway is the best option?

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ME3D 6 points 3 years ago

i3 all the way

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xavier666 3 points 3 years ago

Sorry to be the boring i3 user but it's a rock solid TWM. Plus I am using the autotiling mod and now it's even better :D

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cristiangutie 1 point 3 years ago

i3 aswell, its great.

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state_electrician 1 point 3 years ago

This is the way.

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Borgzilla 5 points 3 years ago

Not sure if this counts as a tiling window manager, but I spend most of my time in emacs in full screen mode. I can create, delete, resize, and swap my windows.

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a_statistician 2 points 3 years ago

I'm not sure my solution counts either - I just use quicktile with default KDE, because it has the tiling bits that I need and the config file was simple enough that I didn't have to spend a whole day setting it up. I need working memory for other things besides keyboard shortcuts.

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mosthated 2 points 3 years ago

Are you aware that Emacs can be a full-featured window manager.

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lckdscl 5 points 3 years ago

i3 until the day I die

Edit: Why? Because I love how easy it is to get working, it's a nice balance between features and simplicity for me, and IPC features are great for some QoL plugins. Its configuration file format is simple enough, I like lua with wezterm and neovim but I don't really see the point with a WM, I just need to see my windows when I want, the way I want, and to switch to others.

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xavier666 1 point 3 years ago

Can you list some QoL mods for i3? I have been using autotiling for the last few months and it's great.

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lckdscl 2 points 3 years ago path: 0 80872 85957 92101, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
HotChickenFeet 0 points 3 years ago

I too would be interested to know what plugins you use.

I love i3 and have used it for years and find myself fruitlessly using the most common keybinds in windows at work.

But my gripes over i3 are:

  • If I don't know the name of the command, say a specific settings window, etc - then I'm hosed if I need it.
  • It doesn't come with a lock screen by default, you need a plugin for it
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lckdscl 2 points 3 years ago

Here's a list of plugins that may be useful:

  • kitti3: quake style dropdown terminal
  • tdrop: the same as kitti3, but I moved to wezterm due to kitty's design choice and tdrop fits the bill, it's also wm agnostic.
  • i3-volume: integrates with dunst for me to pop up volume status when I change volume via keybinds.
  • autotiling: A must have in my opinion. I seldom have more than 2 windows on a monitor, since I have two monitors and utilize other workspace, but there are times when I temporarily have multiple windows open and too lazy to group them into stacks or tabs.
  • i3expo: I heard people have success with this as an alt-tabber with visualization. I just use dmenu and have scripts for window switching.
  • wmfocus: quite useful if you have multiple monitors and multiple windows on each, instead of doing Super + h a few times to move to the left most window, I just use wmfocus and hop to it immediately.
  • i3-extras: I just found this, perhaps it's of use.

Regarding your gripe #1, I don't quite understand? Do you mean you don't know the command of a program to type into your terminal to launch?

And gripe #2, if you mean i3lock, I'm okay with that, I like that i3 follows UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, and because of that good i3lock forks exist! If it was baked into i3 then this might not be the case.

For i3-lock, I currently use i3lock-fancy-rapid, it's a weird name lol, but it is still dependent on the i3lock-color binary, which itself is a fork of i3lock.

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communist 4 points 3 years ago

Sway, but single window capture and the animations make hyprland very tempting...

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neoney 2 points 3 years ago

hyprland is worth it

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linkert 4 points 3 years ago

Sway with autotiling and a few nifty scripts (launch or focus and such) and Waybar. The combination of having scratchpads, sensible autotiling along with titlebars and the wonderful world of wayland is supreme.

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ScottE 4 points 3 years ago

i3 is what I've been using the past few years. I've tried others, but I always end back up with i3 as I've found nothing else to be as simple and efficient for my workflow, with 12 workspaces across 2 monitors.

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1ipod 4 points 3 years ago

DWM

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Onyros 2 points 3 years ago

I ran DWM 6.0.2 with (probably too many patches) for a long time, until I finally migrated to 6.4 and reduced the number of patches I was really using to about 6 or 7.

My first tiling WM was Awesome, but even though I'd heard about DWM before, it took Awesome to take the plunge.

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Nuuskis 1 point 3 years ago

You'll like Sway when you decide to make the Wayland transition.

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_s0me_guy_ 4 points 3 years ago

DWM due to it's suckless nature

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eyolf 4 points 3 years ago

This is perhaps cheating, but after diving deep into the hardcore tiling mangers (ratpoison, wmii, xmonad), I grew softer and stayed in awesome for a while, but eventually I realised that since all I want from tiling anyway is the ability to quickly place two windows beside each other, I might as well go with a DM that does all the other stuff I want automatically (mounting, monitors, etc.), and since KDE is now good again, and coming along on the tiling side, that's the tiling WM I'm using.

Yes, I said I was cheating ...!

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CaptainJack42 3 points 3 years ago

Currently using sway, but mostly for the lack of good Auto tilers on Wayland

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heimchen 1 point 3 years ago

Had the same problem, would like a middle ground between sway and Hyprland. Give me the option to be like Hyprland and some features and fancynes it has, but don't force me.

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Rehan 0 points 3 years ago

Swayfx?

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heimchen 2 points 3 years ago

Sonds cool, gona check it out

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roseh 3 points 3 years ago

Recently I have been using river. It's extremely easy to configure via a shell script, and it's very fast and stable. It's another dwm clone

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TheyCallMeHacked 4 points 3 years ago

It's not exactly a dwm clone, it's way better than that. It takes all the best parts from dwm and bspwm, and I've been loving it so far

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cyclohexane 1 point 3 years ago

The binary split tree is bspwm's best and most important feature imo. I'm sad river doesn't follow that model.

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tasmo 3 points 3 years ago
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Smorty 3 points 3 years ago

i3 just works in my opinion, and I can change stuff how I like it. It's simple and has loads of users, so guides are easy to come by.

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Senicar 1 point 3 years ago

I'm using sway because it feels a lot like i3 but for wayland, and I used i3 for years. Got that configuration just right.

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tatzelkatz 1 point 3 years ago

For manual tiling it's surely the best option.

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Fubarberry 3 points 3 years ago

I usually use tiling add-ons for Gnome or KDE. So pop-shell or bismuth.

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nutel 3 points 3 years ago

Hyprland. It's the first tiling manager that made me consider switching to and it was absolutely worth it.

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tatzelkatz 3 points 3 years ago

I've probed a few tiling wms: dwm: never ending tinkering, a lot of frustration and despair with incombatible patches. i3: manual tiling is not for me. spectrewm: nice, but too less features. xmonad: nice, but Haskell. Awesome: at first it was not my favourite, but it comes with most of the features I need. Missing features can be added in a short time (awesome is build from C and Lua, awesome's plugins are pretty simple lua scripts). Awesome is full operable via the mouse or the keyboard - awesome is able to act as a stacking window manager; a very handy feature, when coming from a stacking window manager (I've used icewm for twenty years). Summary: a very good tool to form a work environment that is adapted to your personal workflow.

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proycon 3 points 3 years ago

I'm on Hyprland (wayland compositer, wl-roots based). Prior to the wayland transition I was on dwm. Hyprland offers a dynamic tiling layout just like dwm, which was my main selling point. The dev is very active and hyprland is gaining maturity rapidly (more than alternatives like dwl or river did at the time I checked it out). I also tried i3 and sway, but they don't quite cut it for me as they don't do dynamic tiling out of the box.

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nobloat 2 points 3 years ago

I wish Hyprland gets into the Fedora repos. I don't wanna have to deal with building stuff.

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Junkdata 2 points 3 years ago

I started with for a bit awm, however i am giving qtile a try since im learning how to code python so good practice.

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NateSwift 2 points 3 years ago

I’ve been using i3. Nothing super advanced but the config is easy and being able to reload in place is nice

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fabhian_arkantos 2 points 3 years ago

Today I use Plasma, but if I need a tiling wm I use awesome. It's so great and customizable. If you're fine with Lua, is easy to config.

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donio 2 points 3 years ago

EXWM. I am a longtime Emacs user so merging the concepts of Emacs buffers and X windows is a huge benefit. Only one set of keybindings to worry about, all of my Emacs window management stuff works for X windows too. One less external dependency to worry about too. In a new environment (like when starting a new job etc) as long as I have my Emacs config I am good to go.

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isotope 2 points 3 years ago
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notroot 1 point 3 years ago

I'll have to give it a try again. I played with it a while back, but I was happy with GNOME at the time. What underlying version of emacs are you using? native comp?

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donio 1 point 3 years ago

EXWM is not particularly picky about Emacs versions or performance. I used to run with nativecomp but ended up turning it off since I value stability over performance. (nativecomp was pretty stable but I had some occasional issues)

The biggest caveat is that you must be very comfortable with whatever Emacs buffer/window management setup you use since you will be relying on that even more.

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pyska 2 points 3 years ago

i3 gang rise up!

I've only tried i3 and it just works, so I stuck with it. After learning the hotkeys it never seems to get in the way (at least for my usage). Riced it a bit. Then some polybar sparkled in there. A wallpaper. What more can a guy want?

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xchgeaxeax 2 points 3 years ago

I tried i3 back in 2019 and I've been using it ever since on my desktop.

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nullthegrey 2 points 3 years ago

@cyclohexane for me it was and always will be bspwm. Once I had it configured it was the coziest of cozies.

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notroot 2 points 3 years ago

Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS... I love how it combines tiling and stacking. Sure I could use workspaces instead of stacks, but with stacks... I can use both!

I've also used EXWM and am going to give it another whirl after I upgrade to emacs 28 with native comp

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Syudagye 2 points 3 years ago

LeftWM, because it's a really nice community to get involved with, and i like rust so i contributed a bit to the project

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PMunch 2 points 3 years ago

I use i3, but to say that I like it is a bit overstated. It's fine, does what I expect the very basic of a tiling window manager to do. I used Nimdow for a while and it's pretty good, the default bar is way better than i3 (supports ANSI colour coding, mouse presses, etc.), but I could never quite get to grips with the tiling algorithm.

I'm working on my own WM though, it's not tiling per-se, I choose to call in non-overlapping and I'm trying to solve my gripes with i3. Basically windows should not be forcefully expanded if they don't want to. Try open galculator under i3 and watch the horror. And when expanded the size should be split based on their initial sizes. So if I have Firefox open and want to do something in a quick terminal window the terminal won't get 1/2 of the screen. Firefox wanted more space than the terminal initially, so the terminal gets to take up a smaller share of the space.

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rwxrwxrwx 2 points 3 years ago

I used StumpWM for many years. It was great for most of my workflow and, being written in Common Lisp, you can recompile parts of it while it's running (I didn't do this often but it was a cool feature).

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jcb2016 2 points 3 years ago

Bspwm and i3 , I like i3 more cause i can manually do everything and the documentation is amazing

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soeren 2 points 3 years ago

AwesomeWM because nice defaults and you can configure it with Lua like neovim but I want to try hyprland in the future

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ab1k0 1 point 3 years ago

switched to hyperland from i3. Both work well in the end.

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kuresov 1 point 3 years ago

I like i3, at some point when I finally move to Wayland I'll move to Sway. Going to try Hyprland as well though, 'cause why not

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Chipstuttar 1 point 3 years ago

I use Qtile. Mainly because it's written in python.
It's easy to customize, and gets the job done :-) Came from I3 before..

The only thing is that I haven't really found a way yet to have both floating and tiling modes. I only really like tiling mode when I do work and need to stay focused

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ForynGilnith 1 point 3 years ago

My heart still belongs to enlightenment/e17 but I've been using i3 for the past few years, and then hyprland for the last 4 months or so. It's working out well.

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i_am_hiding 2 points 3 years ago

Man e16 was the shit. If it played nice with hot-plugging monitors, I'd still use it today. It had some awesome themes, too.

What's e17 like? I've truthfully never used it, though I daily Terminology as a terminal emulator.

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ForynGilnith 1 point 3 years ago

Ahhh, e17 - I've got memories of building it from either cvs or svn at the time as soon as it was announced by rasterman on Slashdot.

e17 was my daily driver for a long time. It looked very pretty, before compositing was even a thing on the desktop, all without sacrificing performance. The biggest downside was that it wrote its configs as binary blobs which frequently broke as new development releases came out.

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ForynGilnith 1 point 3 years ago path: 0 78272 78409 78450 79205, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
tomterl 1 point 3 years ago

herbstluftwm - because it just works and does not try to think for me;

The configuration is a shell script using herbstclient to talk to the wm process, that's a plus for me, too.

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Nuuskis 1 point 3 years ago

I used suckless ecosystem for 5+ years, but I wanted to use Wayland so now I'm transitioning into Sway and holymoly how fast and easy it is. So simple to configure and written in C.

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cristo 1 point 3 years ago

I've been pleasantly surprised by sway coming from dwm. It feels as responsive and most things I patched into dwm are built in.

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Oozy 1 point 3 years ago

Qtile has been great for me for a long time, but since recently I've tried Hyprland. Wayland works pretty decently nowadays, and Hyprland is a great example of that.

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falx 1 point 3 years ago

Sway, but used everything from ratpoison back in the day, awesomewm, i3, hyprland, openbox with manual tiling to Plasma. Just keep coming back to sway, seems like the best for for me.

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curtismchale 1 point 3 years ago

I've tried AwesomeWM but couldn't get anything going with it really.

I then moved on to Material Shell (yes that's a Gnome Extension) and it brought enough to really make me want to dig in more.

Now I'm slowly working on a Sway configuration on my Fedora 38 machine. Can't work in it yet, but unlike my attempt at AwesomeWM...I'm actually making progress on getting things setup. My 4 monitors were configured fairly easily, but now I need to figure out why dmenu isn't working to launch applications. Could be on my end since I'm using a Moonlander keyboard with a custom DVORAK profile.

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kemtue 1 point 3 years ago

I used DWM for a year or so (still do use it on my librebooted 2008 T400 gentoo thinkpad just to stay below 100MiB of memory after boot for the lols) and recently switched to sway.

My primary reason for sway was it being relatively simple and to try out wayland (which works with minor bugs in xwayland). Initial configuration took me about 1h and i wrote a small program in rust to populate the title-bar. Works like a charm and i like my stuff to be simple so i don't think i will look into different TWMs.

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FuryFaceofDoom 1 point 3 years ago

When I was using it, I LOVED Hyprland. It was my most flawless experience with Wayland on an Nvidia GPU. I switched off of it however, because I primarily game on my PC and a lot of games just didn't work and I did not want to have to figure out how to get them working all the time.

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Ecosphere5019 1 point 3 years ago

I'm using sway on top of fedora. I heard positive things with i3, but I wanted to try something that was native wayland.

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Prologue7642 1 point 3 years ago

Currently, I am using DWL and it is pretty nice. After moving to Wayland, I tried to use Sway for a while, but it does not really fit into my workflow well. But to be honest, even DWL is missing some things I want, and I am not really a fan of that it is written and configured in C. I am planning on trying to write my own tiling window manager in Rust when I have some time.

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MotokEkb 1 point 3 years ago

I've been very happy with hyprland since it's the only Wayland TWM that allows a great experience with nvidia.

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PapaTorque 1 point 3 years ago

I really like dwm. It doesn't seem too popular so maybe the other ones are better but it was the first one I tried so the others feel weird to me. I like the idea behind suckless in general though.

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Vuraniute 1 point 3 years ago

SwayFX. I have an AMD graphics card, so Wayland is the optimal choice for me. SwayFX Instead of Sway because of eye-candy.

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enix 1 point 3 years ago

i3 is the one I keep coming back to

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cyclohexane 1 point 3 years ago

What else have you tried, but didn't like?

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HerrBratani 1 point 3 years ago

PaperVM. Works under gnome and has everything i need

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nivenkos 1 point 3 years ago

i3 because it works well with few config changes.

Been using the same config since 2015 more or less.

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polskilumalo 0 points 3 years ago

I don't

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friedmag -1 points 3 years ago

I use sway because when I came back after a long break, it seemed to be the one to go with. I kind of miss awesome, though.

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