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!

  • wvstolzing@lemmy.ml
    4·
    1 year ago

    OpenBox & Xfwm. I’m keeping an eye on labwc, which is a new openbox clone for wlroots. It’s already suitable for everyday use.

    • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      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?

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        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).

        • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.

      • vector_zero@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.