Tiling window manager, very lightweight. It does its job, gets out of the way and doesn't try to push fancy stuff in my face, that's all I ask from a window manager (and more than what most of the others give me). Besides, I have my set of basic key bindings for it in muscle memory, so there's no point in changing.
I actually came here to recommend i3-wm.
If you've never used a tiling window manager or used one but it didn't really work out,I suggest you give it a try.
Sometimes I feel a bit strange using i3 on Ubuntu (which has put so much work into Unity). I believe i3 was written to solve the use cases of developers, and so maybe that's why I often feel the choices the creators made just seem to make so much sense.
Trying out a tiling window manager was the "last straw" that pulled me off OSX and back onto Linux. It started with Xmonad, but I've settled on i3 for the same reasons as you.
I love i3, been using it for over a year after using dwm for about 1.5 (and trying many others). Now for me, it's setup up borderless with a hidden bar, I'm not much for fancy extras. And the multimonitor support is great too.
i3: instant productivity. Failed as an Awesomewm user, but now rocking i3 with dual-monitors; a developers' dream. The only thing remaining from my Ubuntu Unity install is gnome-settings-daemon.
Ditto. For me, however, the performance benefits of going fairly minimal are kinda secondary to the productivity benefits of choosing tools that stay the hell out of my way.
While there's a lot to like about dwm (I rather like its tag concept as a replacement for workspaces, for instance), I find it a bit limiting for my purposes. Spectrwm is another good one, and it gets too little attention. Xmonad is pretty good. For floating rather than tiling window managers, I think AHWM is pretty awesome, though it has been abandoned for years; it could stand to be picked up by a new maintainer.
I ended up with i3, though; it's tiling with decent functionality, including its native support for tabbing windows. It used to be better, actually, in that it was easier to mix and match different window arrangement styles within a single workspace, but even after making that marginally less usable it still does more in that regard than other WMs I've tried out.
For those who wish to try before they buy (into) a tiling window manager, the repository dwm/suckless-tools work fine on Ubuntu 12.04 so you can log into a DWM session, and log out again using Shift-Alt-q. If you like the experience, you will need to uninstall the stock repository dwm binary and compile a replacement from source as the configuration is in a c header file.
I use KDE because I like my desktop set up the way I like it, not the way some developers think I should. (also Yakuake's, KDE terminal emulator, "Open window when the mouse pointer touches the screen edge" has become such a second nature to me that I keep shoving the mouse to the top of the screen even if I'm on someone else's machine)
Also, KDE has kickass support for multi-monitor setups and works and looks the best on big resolutions. This, and the possibility to configure the DE the way I want are the two most important reasons why I love KDE.
Xfce all the way. It gets out of your way, uses little in the way of resources, and doesn't have drastic design changes every now and then just because the developers felt like it, but it still has all the basic hardware support (Wifi, Bluetooth, sound, battery) you need.
I use my own window manager Wingo [1] without a DE. It doesn't quite fit into the voting scheme, since it's a true hybrid window manager: it can do stacking like Openbox and automatic tiling like Xmonad.
I use 'bluetile' which also allows you to set "floating" vs. "tiled" on a per-workspace basis. I'm probably going to migrate to pure-tiled in the future though because GNOME 2.x is dead and I abhor 3.x
It has a sweet spot that doesn't really fit for some. For example it is less productive than Gnome 2 if you have large monitors, lots of windows, and have multiple windows from the same app. For single tasking a handful of maximized windows Gnome shell works great, especially if using lower resolution smaller screens, and possibly fingers.
The secondary problem is they keep removing functionality and configurability, and this isn't done in public. I'm the first to admit that I actually like less configurability - I'd rather the developers made good choices in the first place, rather than just throwing lots of options over the wall and making it the user's problem. But some really annoys people - for example Nautilus just lost the status bar so finding out the amount of free disk space went from moving your eyeballs to clicking in the background, making a menu selection, having a dialog appear, reading and dismissing the dialog. I insist on using focus follows mouse, so if that ever got removed I'd be up in arms too.
The theory from the developers has been that Gnome 3 has a powerful extensions mechanism so you make it do anything you want. While that satisfies some, it is annoying to the rest of us. We don't want to extensively program our desktops - we just want them to be productive, and prior ones like Gnome 2 were productive.
I'm a big fan of GNOME 3 too, and it can be a highly productive environment. I've tried KDE, Xfce, i3, Awesome and Xmonad; I give each a proper go, getting over the initial learning curves and adjustment periods, but in the end, I find myself back with GNOME Shell and I'm quite happy with it. I don't mean to demean those projects; I think they're all wonderful and I'm happy to see them a part of the Linux ecosystem.
At the end of the day, however, the differences between desktop environments are largely a personal preference, and I'm quite happy using GNOME Shell. There's going to be people that don't like it, and that's fine. We can all co-exist.
Funny, I picked today to re-evaluate my use of XMonad. I'm currently trying Gnome 3, and I'm really impressed.
I love how they cribbed some great small details from OS X and iOS but the final product feels fresh. If I end up going back to XMonad my config will definitely change.
After switching from any kind of desktop to xmonad (or any decent tiling window manager, I assume) I can honestly say, I've never been more productive.
Hackable, easy to use, and the main thing for me is the fact that it's fast and straight to the point.
A while back, I stumbled across dwm.vim[0] which, although clunky at times, has proven itself to be really useful in my Vim workflow. It was inspired from the actual dwm[1] project which I looked into later.
The key bindings are quite different from Vim, but are easy to pick up on the whole.
Prior to dwm, I ran WindowMaker well beyond its prime (as in, I dropped it less than a year ago). I still have a sweet spot in my heart for that WM.
I also switched from WindowMaker to DWM only this year, after having used it for a very, very long time. My only complaint about WindowMaker is it doesn't handle Chromium very well. (Never looked into that, but it wouldn't surprise me if that's Chromium's fault.)
It doesn't matter that WindowMaker is "past its prime", it achieved perfection in 1998. :-)
I always thought that people who run tiled WMs must be crazy, ever since trying out ion in the early 2000s. But now I'm one of them. It's honestly pretty good.
I held back upgrading from Ubuntu 11.04 to 12.04 for a while because I didn't like where Unity and Gnome were heading but the lack of support for my aging distrib finally "forced" me to upgrade. It was an absolute disaster on the performance, stability and usability fronts so I installed Cinnamon which is delightful on this old PC.
Recently switched from Gnome Shell to E17 after many years again, happy so far..
Also, those comments show what is so great about Linux: Freedom of choice. There is everything present from the heavier Unity/KDE/Gnome users to the more minimalistic ones..
I've been migrating my computers over to XMonad, as its defaults are essentially how I used E17:
* All windows tiled/maximized.
* Multiple desktops instead of minimizing/overlapping windows.
* No window dressing anywhere.
* Everything launched via terminal or a quicklauncher.
I've used E16 and E17 for well over a decade and it turns out that I've been slowly using it more and more as a tiling window manager.
E with scatterings of GNOME's software suite has always made a pretty good combination, every time I've run a free desktop in the last 8 years it's always come back to that.
I use xmonad with a custom tiling and dzen setup that arranges my workspaces on a 3x3 grid and shows a little indicator of where I am on the grid in the way that gnome-panel used to do it (before "the accident"). All workspace navigation and window manipulation is customized, and I can fly around my desktop with ease. It took a lot of work to get running, but I wouldn't change a thing about my setup. It makes a huge difference when programming.
On a related note, has anyone been suffering from slow startup times with xmonad lately? I'm not sure if it's xmonad, or some other part of my setup, or a misconfiguration.
As a matter of fact I switched from gnome3 to KDE just yesterday (still voting only for KDE) because of all the bad decisions gnome3 developers have made recently. Gnome Shell is not all bad, it is innovative in some way but they should add features instead of taking them away. I am hardcore vim user and tend to remap Caps-Lock to ESC for easier manipulation. When I found out they removed the option from Gnome Shell I was, well, pissed off. The removal of terminal transparency added a little bit of oil to the fire, even though I don't use that feature.
[+] [-] Wilya|13 years ago|reply
Tiling window manager, very lightweight. It does its job, gets out of the way and doesn't try to push fancy stuff in my face, that's all I ask from a window manager (and more than what most of the others give me). Besides, I have my set of basic key bindings for it in muscle memory, so there's no point in changing.
[0] http://i3wm.org/
[+] [-] vacipr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hmottestad|13 years ago|reply
The tabbed windows looks very useful though.
[+] [-] platz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomasmeeks|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aerique|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bgar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vivab0rg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fdr_cs|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] D9u|13 years ago|reply
I've run the gamut, from GNOME, to Xfce4, to LXDE, etc...
They all have too much extraneous software.
I'd much rather build a system up, rather than tear it down, in my quest to squeeze as much performance out of my netbook as I can.
[+] [-] apotheon|13 years ago|reply
Ditto. For me, however, the performance benefits of going fairly minimal are kinda secondary to the productivity benefits of choosing tools that stay the hell out of my way.
While there's a lot to like about dwm (I rather like its tag concept as a replacement for workspaces, for instance), I find it a bit limiting for my purposes. Spectrwm is another good one, and it gets too little attention. Xmonad is pretty good. For floating rather than tiling window managers, I think AHWM is pretty awesome, though it has been abandoned for years; it could stand to be picked up by a new maintainer.
I ended up with i3, though; it's tiling with decent functionality, including its native support for tabbing windows. It used to be better, actually, in that it was easier to mix and match different window arrangement styles within a single workspace, but even after making that marginally less usable it still does more in that regard than other WMs I've tried out.
[+] [-] virtualwhys|13 years ago|reply
For me it's not about resource consumption, but rather, the plain suck factor (of Gnome 3)
[+] [-] keithpeter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celerity|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] S4M|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klearvue|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moondowner|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IanChiles|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeguard|13 years ago|reply
For a full featured desktop it is great.
[+] [-] w1ntermute|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knitatoms|13 years ago|reply
I use QuickTile to get the basics of a tiling window manager. Here's my blog post about that: http://knitatoms.net/2013/04/quicktile-simple-tiling-window-...
[+] [-] burntsushi|13 years ago|reply
[1] - https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo
[+] [-] stevekemp|13 years ago|reply
I use 'bluetile' which also allows you to set "floating" vs. "tiled" on a per-workspace basis. I'm probably going to migrate to pure-tiled in the future though because GNOME 2.x is dead and I abhor 3.x
[+] [-] jMyles|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loser777|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggordan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rogerbinns|13 years ago|reply
The secondary problem is they keep removing functionality and configurability, and this isn't done in public. I'm the first to admit that I actually like less configurability - I'd rather the developers made good choices in the first place, rather than just throwing lots of options over the wall and making it the user's problem. But some really annoys people - for example Nautilus just lost the status bar so finding out the amount of free disk space went from moving your eyeballs to clicking in the background, making a menu selection, having a dialog appear, reading and dismissing the dialog. I insist on using focus follows mouse, so if that ever got removed I'd be up in arms too.
The theory from the developers has been that Gnome 3 has a powerful extensions mechanism so you make it do anything you want. While that satisfies some, it is annoying to the rest of us. We don't want to extensively program our desktops - we just want them to be productive, and prior ones like Gnome 2 were productive.
[+] [-] u2328|13 years ago|reply
At the end of the day, however, the differences between desktop environments are largely a personal preference, and I'm quite happy using GNOME Shell. There's going to be people that don't like it, and that's fine. We can all co-exist.
[+] [-] dwc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dwc|13 years ago|reply
I used to use ion until the author got wacky with the license. Too bad about that.
[+] [-] elwin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfox|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gizmo686|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tammer|13 years ago|reply
I love how they cribbed some great small details from OS X and iOS but the final product feels fresh. If I end up going back to XMonad my config will definitely change.
[+] [-] CrazedGeek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Draiken|13 years ago|reply
Hackable, easy to use, and the main thing for me is the fact that it's fast and straight to the point.
[+] [-] z3phyr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikegirouard|13 years ago|reply
A while back, I stumbled across dwm.vim[0] which, although clunky at times, has proven itself to be really useful in my Vim workflow. It was inspired from the actual dwm[1] project which I looked into later.
The key bindings are quite different from Vim, but are easy to pick up on the whole.
Prior to dwm, I ran WindowMaker well beyond its prime (as in, I dropped it less than a year ago). I still have a sweet spot in my heart for that WM.
[0]: https://github.com/spolu/dwm.vim [1]: http://dwm.suckless.org/
[+] [-] asveikau|13 years ago|reply
It doesn't matter that WindowMaker is "past its prime", it achieved perfection in 1998. :-)
I always thought that people who run tiled WMs must be crazy, ever since trying out ion in the early 2000s. But now I'm one of them. It's honestly pretty good.
[+] [-] prollyignored|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johncoltrane|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jensenbox|13 years ago|reply
So I guess Openbox
[+] [-] me_bx|13 years ago|reply
+1
[+] [-] buster|13 years ago|reply
Recently switched from Gnome Shell to E17 after many years again, happy so far..
Also, those comments show what is so great about Linux: Freedom of choice. There is everything present from the heavier Unity/KDE/Gnome users to the more minimalistic ones..
[+] [-] NegativeK|13 years ago|reply
* All windows tiled/maximized. * Multiple desktops instead of minimizing/overlapping windows. * No window dressing anywhere. * Everything launched via terminal or a quicklauncher.
I've used E16 and E17 for well over a decade and it turns out that I've been slowly using it more and more as a tiling window manager.
[+] [-] 0x09|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavanky|13 years ago|reply
I personally use GNOME 3, but the latest 3.8 has had some features taken off that pissed me off a bit. Nothing critically wrong yet.
[+] [-] gosu|13 years ago|reply
On a related note, has anyone been suffering from slow startup times with xmonad lately? I'm not sure if it's xmonad, or some other part of my setup, or a misconfiguration.
[+] [-] anrope|13 years ago|reply
Going from gnome to xmonad was almost as much of an improvement as going from just one to multiple desktops.
Bonus points for great support for dual monitor setups.
I also love the configurability of xmobar. I use it to show the top memory and cpu consuming processes at all times.
[+] [-] vl4kn0|13 years ago|reply