Ask HN: What's your Linux window manager and/or desktop environment? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's your Linux window manager and/or desktop environment?

#51

Post by anotherevan » Tue, Dec 07, 2021, 11:58 PM UTC

Awesomewm for the last couple of years. KDE for donkey's ages before that. (Still use Konsole and Dolphin.)

Took a lot of fiddling and trial and error to get it the way I wanted with a mix of tiling and floating windows depending on the app and such. Very happy with it though, and it has fulfilled my tiling window manager itch that I carried for a long time.

I'm setting up PC for my dad soon. Previously used the latest LTS of Kubuntu for non-power users, but considering trying Mint with XFCE instead and see how it behaves. (Use Arch for personal PC and Ubuntu for servers, so Mint and XFCE are new to me but think it will be a good fit for my familial tech support requirements.)

Re: Ask HN: What's your Linux window manager and/or desktop environment?

#52

Post by clay-dreidels » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 4:09 AM UTC

I use a custom minimalist setup I created:

https://lamda-chops.bearblog.dev/alpine-linux/

Re: Ask HN: What's your Linux window manager and/or desktop environment?

#53

Post by bronzecarnage » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 7:38 AM UTC

anotherevan wrote: post #50

bronzecarnage wrote: post #29

Arch, i3wm. Love having a personalized keyboard-first setup that I can say I've built over time. A tip for those who may just be starting out: switch your LEFT-ALT and WIN keys. Also make caps lock act like ESC on tap and CTRL on long press. See xmodmap, setxkbmap and xcape for this.

Ohh, those are interesting tips. Would also be handy for Awesomewm which is what I use. Gonna have to dig into how to do that.

If you want the lazy way (the way I have it):

    setxkbmap -option altwin:swap_lalt_lwin,caps:ctrl_modifier
    xcape -e 'Caps_Lock=Escape;Alt_R=Control_L|space'

I know that there are better ways to do this. But I never get around to trying them out.

Re: Ask HN: What's your Linux window manager and/or desktop environment?

#54

Post by atsaloli » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

I use dwm because it's lightweight and performs well on my old laptop; plus I like the minimalistic approach and I've been able to configure it to run as I want (I like to full-screen my apps and use large font).

Re: Ask HN: What's your Linux window manager and/or desktop environment?

#55

Post by Froedlich » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

KDE.

Re: Ask HN: What's your Linux window manager and/or desktop environment?

#56

Post by da-x » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 7:23 PM UTC

XFCE under Rocky Linux 8.

Multi-display setup.

I patched the source code so my side monitor retain its windows when I switch workspaces.

Re: Ask HN: What's your Linux window manager and/or desktop environment?

#57

Post by giuliomagnifico » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 6:06 AM UTC

Years ago (early '2000) I was using FVWM on my Gentoo setup (screenshot https://www.deviantart.com/sonic969/art/Station-32316919) now I'm using macOS and I have no idea of the state of FVWM, it was great at the time!

Re: Ask HN: What's your Linux window manager and/or desktop environment?

#58

Post by 97-109-107 » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 11:58 AM UTC

NSCDE (https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE) which is an adaptation of FVWM to resemble CDE. I can't comment how precise an adaptation it is, as I never used CDE.

I have originally switched to Linux ~8 years ago because I was fed up with how Windows doesn't help in managing windows. I then spent most of the time with i3 and xmonad.

Re: Ask HN: What's your Linux window manager and/or desktop environment?

#59

Post by slipwalker » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

after many, many years with xfce, i tried kde plasma and being happily using it since earlier this year.

Re: Ask HN: What's your Linux window manager and/or desktop environment?

#60

Post by freeezy » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

I use XFCE because of it's stabilty. For tiling: I came across the tool xpytile (search on github for it). It almost perfectly fits my needs. Since it's written in Python I could pretty easily tweak it or even add new features. Very helpful is the concurrent auto-resizing of windows which are placed side by side.