Swaying Between Environments
And ending where you started
Since I started using Linux I thought it would be a good idea to jump straight into window managers. You know, those “muh minimalism” graphical environments, usually with a tiling layout, that you have to configure yourself, otherwise, everything will look broken. I love these things.
I started on X11 with i3wm, cool, simple, my favorite feature is the ability to create “window groups” [ not an official term ], you can have multiple windows tabbed in one container and still split the screen space in half. So you end up with a container on the left with multiple windows inside and a tiled container on the right with just one window. Makes sense? No? Then try it yourself.
Then I experimented with bspwm and AwesomeWM. bspwm: minimal, easy to learn, no way to group windows tho. AwesomeWM: annoying to configure [ unless you already know LUA ], no way to group windows [ unless you already know LUA and want to code in that feature ].
After that I decided to let go of tiling for a moment and explore the stacking [ or floating ] window managers. I tried quite a few. Starting with icewm which was easy to learn and configure, comes with a panel and it’s pretty lightweight. I tried Openbox, this one is kinda the standard, nothing special boringly average. JWM, we getting into “muh minimalism now”. Simple, comes with a panel. I patched the panel to remove icons. Next evilwm. Now this is minimal. Pretty cool concept until programs break because of missing features. All of these are amazing projects but they are missing a way to group windows.
Two projects stand out from this era. Fluxbox and PekWM. Fluxbox for once has the ability to tab windows, however it is really annoying to theme, so far the other window managers either have simple window borders, that require you to define a couple of colors in a config file, or simple bitmap themeing. The problem with Fluxbox is that it overuses the bitmap themeing, pair that with hard to find themeing documentation. It’s messy. PekWM is the window manager I landed at the end of my X11 days. Super customizable and it comes with a sensible config by default. No window tabbing or grouping tho. However it was very comfortable and rather theme-able.
Around this time KDE Plasma 5.27 came out and it caught my eye. I’ve used Plasma before but never as a daily-driver. This switch also allow me to experiment with Wayland for the first time. Plasma was alright, it is in fact my favorite DE [ Desktop Environment ]. However using a DE, is Linux on easy mode so after some time I made the switch to my first Wayland compositor [ fancy name for Wayland window managers ].
I landed in Hyprland the compositor with animations and other eye candy, it also has window grouping [ although really clunky ]. Cool, as you may expect but it had some problems. Haven’t use it in a while, mainly because it doesn’t play well with REAPER [ my DAW ] which runs under Xwayland [ don’t worry ]. Since I started using Wayland I found myself constantly jumping between Hyprland [ the one with the looks ], Sway [ an i3 clone for Wayland ] and labwc [ a pseudo-Openbox clone for Wayland ]. When Hyprland would break I’d use one of the other two. I also used dwl for a while but it also had problems with REAPER. This became really annoying.
I really like window grouping, like, a lot. The only Wayland compositors [ I ain’t going back to X11 ] that offer it are Hyprland [ clunky! ] and Sway [ which is basically i3 ]. I also tend to get obsessed with how the animations look in Hyprland and start to notice that they’re kinda wonky, and get annoyed. Sway it is then.
All that testing and configuring for more than 2 years just to land on the same workflow and design philosophy. I’m just thankful that I’m not a distro-hopper. :)
For those who may be curious the panel or “bar” in the screenshot above is Quickshell with my own Win98 inspired config. I plan to make it public soon. # FIX ME ADD LINK #