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!

  • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.works
    12·
    9 months ago

    The best one was enlightenment DR16, but it has been discontinued.

    It gave the option to remember the position of the first window per application and per a criteria you could set. Like “remember I want the Window titled Calendar from class calendar on the right of the screen”.

    Each theme would bring a set of different border styles and you could change them from the title bar menu and have it remember that. It was very easy to customize themes. The borders could have transparent sections, eg. your theme could have the window title in a bubble floating a few pixels away from the window.

    Windows could be stickied, so when you switch virtual desktops, the calendar would follow.

    It had pagers to show what’s going on on other virtual desktops, so you could see when your downloads finished even if the program didn’t use notifications.

    • Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      7·
      9 months ago

      I’m pretty sure KDE’s window manager, kwin, can do all of those things through kwin scripts and window rules, except the pager doesn’t show the details of windows on other desktops, just the outline.

    • poinck@lemm.ee
      1·
      9 months ago

      This was a fun one! Now, I use Gnome, after I discontinued my own fork of catwm called ocelot (but this was a tiling wm based on dwm, anyway).

  • Oka@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    This stick I use so that my window doesn’t slam closed

  • Gryzor@lemmyfly.orgEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    Try pop_os. It’s gnome tiling can be enabled and disabled from the top bar and it’s defaults are sane and easy to change.

  • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
    3·
    9 months ago

    For X, I’d probably go for Openbox. For Wayland, I have tried Hikari, but it reminded me why I don’t like floating window managers, so I don’t use it, but it seems really cool! Also, there is labwc which is supposed to be an Openbox replacement for Wayland, but I can’t tell you anything about it cuz I haven’t tried it.

  • z3bra@lemmy.sdf.org
    3·
    9 months ago

    I use glazier, a WM I wrote myself. But given your description, it won’t fit you at all ^^ It’s very bare bones, and requires that you script everything not mouse driven using wmutils.

  • wvstolzing@lemmy.ml
    3·
    9 months 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.

    • Gilgamesh@lemmy.ml
      1·
      9 months ago

      What about dwm makes it a more appealing choice compared to XMonad? (Excluding the C vs Haskell argument)

      • sederx@programming.dev
        1·
        9 months ago

        i dont have much experience with xmonad but i tried every wm at some point. usually the things that keep me with dwm is that i found a build with very sane defaults and a number of patches i appreciate like swallowing, fake fullscreen(so you can fullscreen a program inside the assigned window) or xresources/pywal integration . i also love the scratchpad implementation and the tag system with a tag 0. i also like dwmblocks for the status bar . now im sure some of this features are available on other wm but i never found all of them in one like on DWM.

        i also use ST as terminal and it works great with dwm while it gives me issues with other WM(usually resizing issues)

    • Administrator@monyet.cc
      1·
      9 months ago

      dwm’s so good. It has pretty much everything one would need and once you’ve set it up, no need to change anything.

  • Drito@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    9 months ago

    The Xfce one. I don’t see the point of simple WM for floating windows. I use a WM because it is the only solution for a proper tiling window manager.