i3

Window Manager Shootout

I’ve been using Window Managers (WM) in Linux for around five years. I first wrote about them back in 2018, and mentioned them often subsequently. In my mind WMs can be categorised into two broad camps, and further subdivisions can be applied. The two broad camps are stacking window managers (where windows for newly-opened apps appear over previous apps), and dynamic tiling window managers where new windows open adjacent to current windows on some predetermined basis.

Linux distro and WM update

I most recently wrote about my Linux distro of choice and window managers a little over a year ago. At that time I was running the i3 window manager on an Arch distro. That is still my setup of choice, but in the interim I did use both dwm and Qtile for quite a while (probably 9 months in dwm and two months using Qtile). dwm did take some fiddling with patches to install a systray, but it eventually came together.

Arch with i3

For some reason every six or twelve months I tend to switch Linux distros. Some of that history can be read here, here, here, here, here and here. My mid-2021 switch has been from Fedora 32 running Gnome 3 to Arch running i3. What precipitated this flip? A couple of things: a new release of the Gnome Desktop Environment had been released and Fedora seemed a little slow (to me) in making it available in their stable branch.