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.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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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.
The reason I like cinnamon is the sound effects and animations and such, and last I checked, xfce doesn't have those.
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
Welcome to 90% of WM's friend.
Lies
I hope
Install instructions? I just installed it with my package manager and it worked fine.
I used pip, and apparently I needed to download from the git?
Ah, so apparently it's been removed from the Ubuntu repos. I would try apt-get qtile if you haven't already and if that fails, I just wouldn't try qtile. I'm not sure why they removed it from the repos though.
I'll certainly try fluxbox. What is i3 and fluxbox configured in?
i3 is configured in it's own configuration language thing which I personally find very easy to use and understand. Fluxbox on the other hand is, I believe, configured through a GUI though I've never used it so don't take my word on that. Btw awesomewm is written in Lua not Python. Didn't realize my mistake until just now.
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.
Qtile just felt wrong to me with how meant things didn't work
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
Oh, what distro are you on? If you're installing via pip, it canbe painful. I felt the same way to be honest.
Mint
I like Hyprland
Ooo, what's this?
A wayland tiling window manager that has a lot of nice visual features out of the box, like animations, round corners, borders, etc.
It also has a basic text file config file, not a scriptable one.
Well, an easy to configure WM, like you asked. I can't do it justice with a description because I suck, just try it out.
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)
You can still use your mouse. I3 allows using the mouse for moving Windows if you want it. Personally I manage Windows using shortcuts, but for GUI and some TUI apps I use the mouse anyway
DWM
Yeah it's customised by editing a C header but you don't really need to know C to configure it, you can 100% just copy the patterns that are already there and change them up like you would with any other config format.
Maybe I'll try it
One thing I just remembered that you might struggle with is applying patches which is how you install "extensions" in most suckless software including DWM. Do you know how to use Git or some other version control system? If you don't know Git but have used Subversion or Perforce or something then it should be fairly easy to pick up but if you haven't used version control ever then resolving conflicts between patches might be a little tricky.
I've used git before
If you want sane defaults, try lxqt. It is still a huge improvement in performance after cinnamon, but you don't have to manually configure everything like in WMs.
How different is that from lxde?
Same design, different technologies. LXDE was dropped in favor of lxqt. In terms of performance both are almost the same, but in the future, when all of old code will be dropped from lxqt, it would be lighter. Also lxqt looks more modern compared to lxde.
@ExplodeyWolf
You can install Xfce and change the window manager. You will need to install a compositor, picom for example, but you will have the xfce panel and a working DE. This works flowlessly with i3 and bspwm for sure. It's a nice setup.
I don't really need a task list on my panel, only for if I have an... Interesting alt tab implementation
But how do I do this? What stuff from xfce would I keep?
@ExplodeyWolf
I found this guide on endeavouros forum. Of course you need just the part where you kill xfwm and xfdesktop. It is for i3 but the principle similar for any window manager. And you need a conpositor, usually picom, because xfwm, that you are replacing, has its own compositor.
https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/tutorial-easy-setup-endeavour-xfce-i3-tiling-window-manager/13171
I would recommend using one with wayland compatibility if you can. Might as well not have to switch later.
When I was using Wayland, zoom crashed when you joined a meeting. Does this still happen?
The app has been slow to update to Wayland. In general I've just gotten used to using the web version.
I need the app for my music lessons, so I can't use wayland
I would recommend the opposite. You are limited in customizing Wayland WMs due to less amount of tools.