11 ms·

To his point, even in the Linux world, DEs have accumulated the bloat of features, animations, complex compositing, front-to-back theming, and other frivolities

To his point, even in the Linux world, DEs have accumulated the bloat of features, animations, complex compositing, front-to-back theming, and other frivolities that have made them large and slow. Not to mention that "flat" theming has somehow consumed everything. Try using an older stacking WM. It is shocking how fast they are and how few resources they use. Their problem is that they're not maintained. Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? I'd love a simple, opinionated WM that takes the features we know are useful today (workspaces, expo mode, sensible file manager layouts, system trays) and gives them a color-adjustable window theme inspired by 90's aesthetics, with minimal compositing that can run fast on hardware as minimal as a prototype RISC-V board. Or really, what we need is a truly minimal DE. Something that doesn't care about GTK or Qt or Kvantum, and stays lean. Edit: I've already tried tiling WMs and I don't like them. I want a primarily mouse-driven UI. I'm sort of in agreement with the NeXT philosophy there. I primarily use Mint and Cinnamon these days. I also understand that applications are bloated, but they can be bloated in their own little sandbox instead of creeping out to the rest of the system.

gibspaulding 3y ago
Its been a while since I distro/desktop hopped around the Linux world, but these are definitely still out there. Bodhi Linux especially comes to mind with their enlightenment fork moksha. LXQT or XFCE might also for the bill if you want something a bit less foreign. Or Openbox if you want to go all the way minimalist. Or i3/sway if you're into tiling WM's.
- Sander_Marechal 3y ago
  I love my AwesomeWM
  - tmtvl 3y ago
    Same, it really nice to be able to say "this tag has floating windows, that tag has maximized windows, and that other tag tiles in a spiral."
myth2018 3y ago
I've been using xfce and it's been a good compromise. However I think it's impossible to stay 100% away from the bloat. Even if your desktop is lean, you will have to use some "modern" app, eventually. Especially when it comes to web apps.
eru 3y ago
XMonad still works well for me with ArchLinux. I don't know what extra I would want from a desktop environment? However, XMonad can't do wonders: it doesn't make your browser use less memory or speed up your compile times.
satysin 3y ago
I use a Mac as my main system and what frustrates me is there is no way to truly disable all animations in the system. Sure you can reduce them which gets you about 80% of the way there but there is no supported way to totally disable them all. It actually surprises me given Apple is very pro accessibility. The reduce motion option is after all an accessibility feature. It is always why I never understood why Apple don't embrace more keyboard shortcuts for simpler app window management (snapping) rather than the decade old, half assed implementation we have currently. For me macOS would be perfect with just a few very small features for better window management built in along with the ability to customise it a bit. I'm not talking full on tiling window manager level features with gaps, master-stack, fib spiral, etc. Basically just something like Magnet/Rectangle built into the OS out of the box, plus two-window resizing (like we already have with the current full screen snapping feature).
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  > there is no supported way This is why KDE is better than GNOME. Guess who GNOME models after? ;)
  - talentedcoin 3y ago
    Sorry, what? You absolutely can disable animations in the GNOME control panel.
    - Krssst 3y ago
      Note that you also need an extension to remove the alt-tab delay even if animations are disabled: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1317/alt-tab-switcher-popup-delay-removal/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1317/alt-tab-switcher... (though otherwise GNOME is pretty nice to use without animations)
  - satysin 3y ago
    You can disable all the animations in Gnome with the following: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false This is exactly what I do on my Fedora system and as far as I can tell every animation is disabled. Do you have an example of something not disabled with the above setting change?
manaskarekar 3y ago
I was the biggest fan of LXDE for ten years, then they abandoned all the polish and maturity for the brand new LXQt. They lost me due to the bugginess and relative bloat. Before that, it was the same with GNOME 2 to 3. I’m sure there were good reasons for both of these, but I have moved on to XFCE.
loudmax 3y ago
I'd argue that a file manager shouldn't be a function of the Desktop Environment. No that a GUI file manager is necessarily bloat, but a file manager should be independent of whatever DE you're using. Tiling window managers like i3 (or Sway) are very performant, if not really intuitive. XFCE is still under active development and it behaves the way you'd expect a normal desktop to.
- yoyohello13 3y ago
  The DE independent file manager is ls, cd, mkdir, etc.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    Or mc.
mananaysiempre 3y ago
To be fair, while I remember the Windows 95 shell being quite snappy on a 133 MHz 5x86, it’s not exactly the epitome of the suckless ideal internally—it’s centered around COM/OLE2 (with Unicode strings!), has a full-blown object browser under the guise of Explorer, and to avoid the slowness all of that causes, has a restricted reimplementation of COM inside[1] that through carnal knowledge of Windows internals is capable of interoperating with the system one. One would think displaying seconds[2] would be the least of its problems, but apparently not. (Maybe the Unicode-only TrueType renderer really hurts that much? Did they not have the time to write a eleven-glyph cache?) [1] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20040705_265_whats_the_difference_between_shgetmalloc_shalloc_cogetmalloc_and_cotaskmemalloc.htm http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20040705_265_... [2] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20031010_091_why_doesnt_the_clock_in_the_taskbar_display_seconds.htm http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20031010_091_...
- toyg 3y ago
  Compromises were made, because of the hardware limitations of the time. A "Windows 2095", rebuilt for modern processors and security practices while maintaining the essential aesthetic of the original, would be blazing fast.
  - mysterydip 3y ago
    I think serenityOS is heading that direction: "Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix." https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/
    - mustacheemperor 3y ago
      Anybody interested in Serenity or in OS design in general would probably love the youtube channel[0] of Andreas Kling, the primary author. He streams videos porting games and applications to Serenity, deep dives on individual issues, etc. Great content.
jack-torrance 3y ago
you could try i3wm that stacks windows in a tree structure. people who take it up do it for the purpose of "ricing" their desktops, but if you just use the stock default settings, its a pretty sweet WM. https://i3wm.org/screenshots https://i3wm.org/screenshots
bbojan 3y ago
> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? I'd love a simple, opinionated WM that takes the features we know are useful today (workspaces, expo mode, sensible file manager layouts, system trays) and gives them a color-adjustable window theme inspired by 90's aesthetics, with minimal compositing that can run fast on hardware as minimal as a prototype RISC-V board. Or really, what we need is a truly minimal DE. Something that doesn't care about GTK or Qt or Kvantum, and stays lean. Mate desktop environment in my opinion comes closest to the simplicity of the Windows 95/GNOME 2 environments of the old: https://mate-desktop.org/ https://mate-desktop.org/. Not sure how hardware-frugal it is since maintaining it under GTK 2 was not feasible and it's now developed against GTK 3 (with still maintaining the look and feel of GNOME 2).
- gspencley 3y ago
  xfce is probably closer to what the OP had in mind: https://www.xfce.org/ https://www.xfce.org/ I use MATE, personally, because it gives me the configurability that I want without the resource hungriness of KDE or cinnamon. Cinnamon, while more resource hungry than MATE, actually isn't bad except that Nemo (its file manager) seems to have this bug where if you're doing a lot of batch file operations it just gets slower and slower to the point of becoming unusable... and it seems like its gone unfixed for ages. That's a deal breaker for me since I do photo and video editing and have to work with a lot of files. Caja (MATE's file manager) never seems to have a problem no matter how much I throw at it. I find that MATE looks pleasing enough to me and is fast enough that it never reminds me that I'm slowing down my machine with a full-featured DE. That said, I tend to run modern hardware even though its by no means a powerful gaming rig. For those who need something similar on older hardware, or who want a bare minimal but "nice" DE that will consume minimal resources, xfce is likely it.
- gnramires 3y ago
  Indeed, I believe MATE is still quite close to GNOME 2 which has launched in 2002 according to wikipedia. You can still probably run it in the low 100MBs of RAM comfortably :)
chrsw 3y ago
The Linux desktop ecosystem still feels more like a playground. And that's not a pejorative in the sense that a lot of serious work hasn't been done on making powerful software and doing professional work on Linux desktops. I mean that in the sense that "Linux desktop" isn't very defined, formalized or standardized. It comes in all shapes and sizes and people are very free to customize it and use it as they see fit. Many people think this is a good thing and a benefit of software freedom. For example, if I walk up to a random person's Linux desktop, I don't know what I'm in for. That's very different than walking up to someone's Windows desktop, macOS desktop or even Solaris back in the day.
- hulitu 3y ago
  Haha, you should take a look at Windows. Even MS does not follow the same style.
  - zdimension 3y ago
    The average Linux desktop has never been fully standardized. The average Windows desktop today (let's say, W10/11) is descended from W7 which was arguably really consistent. Even if they took W7 and bastardized it by introducing 10 different design languages (Metro, Modern, Fluent, new Fluent, ...) there was something to build on top of. On Linux, there are some GNOME guidelines, there are some KDE guidelines, nothing really universal. As much as I dislike the general macOS experience, Apple got it right early on by simply forcing you to adhere to the general vibe of the OS
    - julianeon 3y ago
      Fwiw I use the i3 window manager so whenever I see conversations about Gnome vs. KDE vs. whatever - I could care less. It's irrelevant to me. So that idea, that Linux isn't standardized, really resonates w me.
    - hulitu 3y ago
      > On Linux, there are some GNOME guidelines, there are some KDE guidelines, nothing really universal Because, although X has (or had) ICCCM, "we" can ignore it. Especially if "we" are desktop.org.
jmclnx 3y ago
> To his point, even in the Linux world, DEs have accumulated the bloat of features True, and if you want lean and mean, look at OpenBSD or NetBSD. Both are very tight. > Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? fvwm is your friend, it can do just about anything, but for things that need root, add entries to sudoers similar to: YOURID ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: shutdown -h now or for doas(1): permit nopass YOURID as root cmd shutdown -h now Then add a menu pick to exec sudo|doas shutdown -h now You may want to add shutdown's path to whatever it is on your distro.
entropie 3y ago
>To his point, even in the Linux world, DEs have accumulated the bloat of features, animations, complex compositing, front-to-back theming, and other frivolities that have made them large and slow. I use xmonad for over a decade now on multiple workstations. No bloat here.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? For some reason nearly all standalone Wayland WM development is tied up in hyperminimal tiling WMs, which is frustrating. Boring old floating-first WMs with lightweight tiling options might not be trendy but they're what a lot of us work best with.
Ninovdmark 3y ago
What you describe sounds an awful lot like SerenityOS, with the exception that it's not a VM, but a full-blown Operating System. It really does embody that pragmatic sense of no-fluff UI design that peaked in the 90s, but applies it to systems design as well.
mid-kid 3y ago
You might like IceWM or on wayland maybe Hikari.
augustk 3y ago
I have been using the Blackbox Window Manager for more than ten years now and I'm quite happy with it. I really like it's austere looks. http://www.stokebloke.com/cygwin/blackbox0701.jpg http://www.stokebloke.com/cygwin/blackbox0701.jpg
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  Hotlink Preventor The url /hotlink.php cannot be served. Referrer was https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ You have tried to link directly to software or images from StokeBloke.com. This is not allowed. Please follow the menu on the left to find what you were looking for. My software is accessible from the Software link. Video software is accessible from the Video downloads link. Blackbox 0.65.0 tarball for cygwin is accessible from the cygwin link.
  - celsoazevedo 3y ago
    Alt link: https://web.archive.org/web/20160810141012id_/http://stokebloke.com/cygwin/blackbox0701.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20160810141012id_/http://stokebl...
  - 2b3a51 3y ago
    Try https://www.k58.uk/pages/images/blackbox.png https://www.k58.uk/pages/images/blackbox.png [around 11Kb] [Fun fact: about 15 years ago, 30% of the total bandwidth from my vanity home page was produced by a picture that some teenager had linked to from a death metal forum. It was just a snap of a bit of wall art locally.]
    - augustk 3y ago
      Thanks! That's an even better image showing the default theme.
      - 2b3a51 3y ago
        A default (i.e. full) Slackware install has blackbox, fluxbox, fvwm, window-maker and icewm available by default along side kde and xfce desktop environments. And twm. And hidden away, not available from `xwmconfig` for some reason, lurks mwm.
hulitu 3y ago
> Try using an older stacking WM. It is shocking how fast they are and how few resources they use. Their problem is that they're not maintained Fvwm is maintained. Vtwm is maintained. Ctwm is maintained. Mwm is maintained. Window Maker seems to be maintained. CDE has been resurected. etc.
- npteljes 3y ago
  IceWM is also maintained!
- lelanthran 3y ago
  Until recently (3/4 years ago?) I had been using Window Maker. Since 1998. My only reason for abandoning it is because it doesn't support workspaces arranged in a matrix, only as an array. I started using workspaces in a 3x3 grid, with the center one the "main" one and each of the compass points from center dedicated to a specific project. Maybe I should see if Window Maker can be modified the way I want it to be.
  - massysett 3y ago
    In FVWM you can configure a workspace grid in whatever dimensions you want.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Windowmaker allows you to map keybindings to workspaces, the default is to use the first 12 function keys. That's ... usually ... enough for me. You can also pin the workspaces menu as a poor man's switch / navigation tool. Logically, Windowmaker's workspace topology is either a list or a loop (daisy chain), depending on whether or not you've configured it to wrap last to first or not.
bachmeier 3y ago
Budgie might be worth checking out (I've used it on Manjaro): https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop It was extremely responsive on a 2009 laptop. Otherwise whatever AntiX and Puppy use, which are mouse-driven UIs, are probably lower-resource than Budgie.
Laaas 3y ago
What's wrong with sway?
- phone8675309 3y ago
  Parent post was looking for non-tiling window managers.
badsectoracula 3y ago
> Try using an older stacking WM. It is shocking how fast they are and how few resources they use. Their problem is that they're not maintained. Window Maker is still maintained, it even gets new features now and then :-).
- GuB-42 3y ago
  That's what I am using, with a few dockapps, including one for the system tray. It works fine even with modern apps. And since GP mentioned NeXT, it should be the perfect match. Window Maker is based on the NeXT UI.
  - HeckFeck 3y ago
    There's also the NEXTSPACE fork for a more complete implementation: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
    - badsectoracula 3y ago
      FWIW NEXTSPACE isn't just a Window Maker fork but an attempt for a complete NeXTSTEP-like desktop environment based on GNUstep and Window Maker is only for the window management bits.
  - maxmalkav 3y ago
    I have a soft spot for Window Maker and I have been using it until recently , when I moved to Wayland-based environments. I also really like its dockapps (I even wasted some time writing one to display and control screen brightness), the only weak point for me is the systray dockapps, probably because it is a concept “transplanted” from other desktop paradigmsthat does not fit great.
    - badsectoracula 3y ago
      Personally i'm not that invested in what NeXT came up for their DE, i don't even think they were that great from a UX perspective (i used Window Maker long before i even learned about NeXTSTEP and once i used one i found its window management way inferior to Window Maker), so i don't mind the systray stuff. I use a dockapp (wmsystray) that "splits" the icons into pages with (IIRC) four icons per page and little arrows below. The only thing i'd like (and i might do and try to submit a patch at some point since AFAIK it is still being maintained) is for it to put a small frame around the icons like some other dockapps do for their contents as right now it just displays the icons on top of the dock tile background. But that is very minor.
unethical_ban 3y ago
>Something that doesn't care about GTK or Qt or Kvantum, and stays lean Aren't Qt and GTK the building blocks of Linux GUIs? Sure, you can ask someone to build a GUI framework from scratch for shits and giggles, but to what end? Now every GUI program will need to use its framework, or else have Qt or GTK dependencies. Its like asking for an OS built in rust that compiles all its programs from source ala Gentoo and "doesn't care if I have GCC or the JVM installed".
shreyshnaccount 3y ago
try instantOS (and WM)
danjoredd 3y ago
You could try Chicago95 for XFCE. It is a custom theme you have to download and install, but it gets the 95 theming down EXACTLY. If you don't care about customizing like crazy and want something minimalist by default, the best thing I can point you to is GNUstep. Its a bit basic, old, doesn't really care about modern features, etc. It is, for lack of a better word, comfy. IceWM is also very nice. My biggest problem with these is that it takes a bit of config file editing to change the wallpaper. Now if you want a lightweight WM with more modern features, I recommend enlightenment. Changing wallpapers is pretty easy and there are a few widgets...but it still feels very old-school.
d_tr 3y ago
User gibspaulding mentioned Openbox and I second giving it a look. Robust, compliant, minimal and finished (i.e., do not be disappointed by the lack of activity).
nycticorax 3y ago
Seriously, just use KDE Plasma. Sure, it's not 'minimal', but on modern hardware it sings. It just works. It's a batteries-included desktop. It's built on a toolkit that people actually like using (Qt) and they don't change it constantly in backwards-incompatible ways just because the mood strikes them. It doesn't treat you like an infant with ADHD. They don't constantly fix things that aren't broken. Plus if you have a problem you have a decent chance of finding the solution via Google, unlike with a lot of the 'long tail' WMs/DEs people have mentioned.
- johnfonesca 3y ago
  As a KDE user i agree with this point of view. KDE is the most customizabile DE ever created. You can tweak the crap out of it to make it look and behave EXACTLY the way you want it. And, from my experience, the performance of the current 5.x version (running on Wayland) is very good.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    And if you turn off composition (something you can't even do on most DEs), it runs even better. :D (Actually, though, I've never used it on Wayland, so I limit my statement to X11.)
- harha_ 3y ago
  Never even tried KDE, I'm using XFCE4 and it's good enough. Is KDE better or is it just a matter of what you're used to?
  - dizhn 3y ago
    I switched to KDE from xfce4 because it handles dual monitor better and remembers settings for various second displays. Then I started using Bismuth for tiling. Add to that the need for various desktop things like status icons, notifications, wallets etc, I am pretty much stuck because no wm provides this combination of features unless you take a tiling wm and spend days configuring it. (There's also the option of using something like xfce4 with the wm bits from a tiling wm.)
happymellon 3y ago
There are modern minimal Wayland stacking window managers if that's what you are requesting. Have you looked at Labwc https://github.com/labwc/labwc https://github.com/labwc/labwc Or Hikari https://hub.darcs.net/raichoo/hikari https://hub.darcs.net/raichoo/hikari And nwg-shell to give the no frills panels that you want.
- netbioserror 3y ago
  Oh wow. Exactly what I was looking for, these are promising projects. Thank you! Looks like FVWM may be a good choice if I stick to X11.
- bj-rn 3y ago
  Do you know if Hikari supports fractional scaling? A quick search didn't yield any answers.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    It looks like it's an open feature request.
ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
One would think Linux would make sometging clean and responsive, instead it's a hot sticky mess. Remember i was aleays looking for that clean distro, elementaryOS luna was the pinnacle, then came updates and bloat
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  Who is this Linux you speak of and does he develop everything for the OS with the same name him/herself? Seriously though, if the problems you mentioned are shared by enough people, someone will make something like that. Chances are though that something fitting your needs already exists or they are so niche/specific/nitpicky that you'll never find what you're looking for (in any OS).
interroboink 3y ago
I have been using fluxbox[1] for many years now, happily. It's a very barebones thing (in a good way) while also being highly configurable — customizable keyboard shortcuts, menus, scriptability, etc. It is not a tiling WM. It also doesn't have desktop icons by default. I thought I would miss those, but have found I do not. There are options[2] to add that if you want it. It also has no file manager. I use xfe[3] on the rare occasions I want that. So, my setup is ~8 virtual desktops, with very minimal window decoration and task bar. Applications are easily launched via either custom shortcuts or the "right click" menu (though I use the keyboard to trigger it). I also have a few keyboard shortcuts to position windows manually (eg: WinKey+NumPad key squashes the current window into a N,S,E,W -style location onscreen) Standard X11 window management (eg: alt+drag to move a window) work as expected, etc. [1] http://fluxbox.org/ http://fluxbox.org/ [2] https://wiki.debian.org/FluxboxIcon https://wiki.debian.org/FluxboxIcon [3] http://roland65.free.fr/xfe/ http://roland65.free.fr/xfe/
79a6ed87 3y ago
My favourite WM is awesomewm[1] It's mainly tiling but it has a floating mode. Also it's very customizable using Lua scripts. I love it because it's the closest thing to a modern back ion3/notionwm[2] But now I think that getting away from X11 is one of my main concerns so I'm not using any of these things. _1: https://awesomewm.org/ https://awesomewm.org/ _2: https://notionwm.net/ https://notionwm.net/
paulddraper 3y ago
> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions... i3! > Edit: I've already tried tiling WMs and I don't like them. :(
thomastjeffery 3y ago
Are you really telling me you haven't used XFCE4?
gentleman11 3y ago
I returned a macbook today. My previous one, a 2015 mba, runs like garbage now. It's the slowest thing you can imagine. My equally old linux laptop runs just fine though. Not 100% as fast as before, but there's so much less cruft that it's still good to use. The mac I returned had 8gb of ram and was meant to be an internet box, but the m-series aggressively uses swap memory to burn out the SSDs and force you to replace the entire machine within a few years. It's nuts. I had 1TB of SSD writes in a single day when I downloaded and installed nothing due to all the swap being used--7GB. That was just web browsing. The same workload on my old 2015 mba uses like 6-7GB of ram and no swap. At 1TB per day of writes to swap, the lifespan of the machine was going to be extremely short It's so gross. I don't know what I'm going to do for my next laptop. I wish more companies could make good keyboards
- KyeRussell 3y ago
  [dead]
- eckza 3y ago
  I just picked up a Surface Laptop 5. Much like the Surface Laptop 3 and 2 that I had before it, it is a best-in-class piece of hardware. I actually prefer its form factor to my M1 MBP; it's thinner, lighter, and I prefer a 3:2 display to 16:10. It runs 3x4k + 1x1080p over a single Thunderbolt cable into a dock (granted, I am using a USB 3.0 to dual DisplayPort adapter, but the SL5 is driving 2 of the 4k displays.) I still use my M1 MBP for most things, and I have one for my job, as well; but the SL5 may be the nicest physical laptop hardware available today. (Windows is another story. If I could run Linux on it with no compromises and no hassle, I'd likely ditch the Mac. So it goes.)
  - altintx 3y ago
    Surface Laptop 4 here. Great keyboard. Great screen. Great trackpad. Surface Dock is great. And WSL gets the job done too. It's lighter than the Mac. Dunno that battery is better, but it's certainly good enough. And it was relatively cheap! But I still try to copy & paste like it's a Mac. And it's not a question of remapping. I want Alt+C and Alt+V to copy and paste system wide.
7speter 3y ago
Dunno if this is what you’re getting at, but as much as I feel nostalgic for pre-windows xp/7 interfaces, computers do a lot more than they used to. Its at the very least much better to have a search bar that (only) filters through all the programs we have installed on a given system, no? I wonder too what it would be like to use one of those old uis to navigate a modern system but I think theres just an overwhelming amount of “stuff” on systems now.
deleted 3y ago
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ivlad 3y ago
fvwm2 may work for you. With enough effort put into configuring it and its modules, you may get almost any look-and-feel. Depending on what do you mean with “NeXT philosophy”, Window Maker and the whole GNUStep suite may also be worth checking.
dredmorbius 3y ago
What exactly is the downside of no (or as many others have noted, far more accurately relatively minimal) maintenance? What I'd already come to chafe at in the 1990s regarding GUI environments (applications, window shells, etc.) was that they changed gratuitously between versions. What's remarkable about classic Linux / Unix / X11 window managers is how little they change, if at all. I've been a Windowmaker user for going on three decades, and recall how the switch to proportional rather than bitmapped fonts was jarring. (I got over it.) Pop up twm (it's stock on MacOS with XQuartz) and you're transported back to 1987 ... and not at all in a bad way. (For those who are under the misapprehension that such WMs are obsolete or impede performance, I can only point at a former cow-orker who'd had a heavily modded vtwm configuration that was virtually completely keyboard-driven and with which he'd swap between windows and workspaces with blinding and mesmerizing speed and agility.) The biggest issues of which I'm aware are issues such as fonts, possibly Unicode support, and ... what exactly?
ydlr 3y ago
> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? I think FVWM is what you are looking for. Last commit on May 10. https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/ https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/
amatecha 3y ago
Luckily you can get an efficient, clean Desktop Environment that works well and is actively developed: Xfce ( https://xfce.org/ https://xfce.org/ ) I think you will like it. It has a very early-2000's feel IMO.

gibspaulding 3y ago

Its been a while since I distro/desktop hopped around the Linux world, but these are definitely still out there. Bodhi Linux especially comes to mind with their enlightenment fork moksha. LXQT or XFCE might also for the bill if you want something a bit less foreign. Or Openbox if you want to go all the way minimalist. Or i3/sway if you're into tiling WM's.

Sander_Marechal 3y ago
I love my AwesomeWM
- tmtvl 3y ago
  Same, it really nice to be able to say "this tag has floating windows, that tag has maximized windows, and that other tag tiles in a spiral."

myth2018 3y ago

I've been using xfce and it's been a good compromise. However I think it's impossible to stay 100% away from the bloat. Even if your desktop is lean, you will have to use some "modern" app, eventually. Especially when it comes to web apps.

eru 3y ago

XMonad still works well for me with ArchLinux. I don't know what extra I would want from a desktop environment? However, XMonad can't do wonders: it doesn't make your browser use less memory or speed up your compile times.

satysin 3y ago

I use a Mac as my main system and what frustrates me is there is no way to truly disable all animations in the system. Sure you can reduce them which gets you about 80% of the way there but there is no supported way to totally disable them all. It actually surprises me given Apple is very pro accessibility. The reduce motion option is after all an accessibility feature. It is always why I never understood why Apple don't embrace more keyboard shortcuts for simpler app window management (snapping) rather than the decade old, half assed implementation we have currently. For me macOS would be perfect with just a few very small features for better window management built in along with the ability to customise it a bit. I'm not talking full on tiling window manager level features with gaps, master-stack, fib spiral, etc. Basically just something like Magnet/Rectangle built into the OS out of the box, plus two-window resizing (like we already have with the current full screen snapping feature).

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
> there is no supported way This is why KDE is better than GNOME. Guess who GNOME models after? ;)
- talentedcoin 3y ago
  Sorry, what? You absolutely can disable animations in the GNOME control panel.
  - Krssst 3y ago
    Note that you also need an extension to remove the alt-tab delay even if animations are disabled: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1317/alt-tab-switcher-popup-delay-removal/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1317/alt-tab-switcher... (though otherwise GNOME is pretty nice to use without animations)
- satysin 3y ago
  You can disable all the animations in Gnome with the following: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false This is exactly what I do on my Fedora system and as far as I can tell every animation is disabled. Do you have an example of something not disabled with the above setting change?

manaskarekar 3y ago

I was the biggest fan of LXDE for ten years, then they abandoned all the polish and maturity for the brand new LXQt. They lost me due to the bugginess and relative bloat. Before that, it was the same with GNOME 2 to 3. I’m sure there were good reasons for both of these, but I have moved on to XFCE.

loudmax 3y ago

I'd argue that a file manager shouldn't be a function of the Desktop Environment. No that a GUI file manager is necessarily bloat, but a file manager should be independent of whatever DE you're using. Tiling window managers like i3 (or Sway) are very performant, if not really intuitive. XFCE is still under active development and it behaves the way you'd expect a normal desktop to.

yoyohello13 3y ago
The DE independent file manager is ls, cd, mkdir, etc.
- hulitu 3y ago
  Or mc.

mananaysiempre 3y ago

To be fair, while I remember the Windows 95 shell being quite snappy on a 133 MHz 5x86, it’s not exactly the epitome of the suckless ideal internally—it’s centered around COM/OLE2 (with Unicode strings!), has a full-blown object browser under the guise of Explorer, and to avoid the slowness all of that causes, has a restricted reimplementation of COM inside[1] that through carnal knowledge of Windows internals is capable of interoperating with the system one. One would think displaying seconds[2] would be the least of its problems, but apparently not. (Maybe the Unicode-only TrueType renderer really hurts that much? Did they not have the time to write a eleven-glyph cache?) [1] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20040705_265_whats_the_difference_between_shgetmalloc_shalloc_cogetmalloc_and_cotaskmemalloc.htm http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20040705_265_... [2] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20031010_091_why_doesnt_the_clock_in_the_taskbar_display_seconds.htm http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20031010_091_...

toyg 3y ago
Compromises were made, because of the hardware limitations of the time. A "Windows 2095", rebuilt for modern processors and security practices while maintaining the essential aesthetic of the original, would be blazing fast.
- mysterydip 3y ago
  I think serenityOS is heading that direction: "Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix." https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/
  - mustacheemperor 3y ago
    Anybody interested in Serenity or in OS design in general would probably love the youtube channel[0] of Andreas Kling, the primary author. He streams videos porting games and applications to Serenity, deep dives on individual issues, etc. Great content.

jack-torrance 3y ago

you could try i3wm that stacks windows in a tree structure. people who take it up do it for the purpose of "ricing" their desktops, but if you just use the stock default settings, its a pretty sweet WM. https://i3wm.org/screenshots https://i3wm.org/screenshots

bbojan 3y ago

> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? I'd love a simple, opinionated WM that takes the features we know are useful today (workspaces, expo mode, sensible file manager layouts, system trays) and gives them a color-adjustable window theme inspired by 90's aesthetics, with minimal compositing that can run fast on hardware as minimal as a prototype RISC-V board. Or really, what we need is a truly minimal DE. Something that doesn't care about GTK or Qt or Kvantum, and stays lean. Mate desktop environment in my opinion comes closest to the simplicity of the Windows 95/GNOME 2 environments of the old: https://mate-desktop.org/ https://mate-desktop.org/. Not sure how hardware-frugal it is since maintaining it under GTK 2 was not feasible and it's now developed against GTK 3 (with still maintaining the look and feel of GNOME 2).

gspencley 3y ago
xfce is probably closer to what the OP had in mind: https://www.xfce.org/ https://www.xfce.org/ I use MATE, personally, because it gives me the configurability that I want without the resource hungriness of KDE or cinnamon. Cinnamon, while more resource hungry than MATE, actually isn't bad except that Nemo (its file manager) seems to have this bug where if you're doing a lot of batch file operations it just gets slower and slower to the point of becoming unusable... and it seems like its gone unfixed for ages. That's a deal breaker for me since I do photo and video editing and have to work with a lot of files. Caja (MATE's file manager) never seems to have a problem no matter how much I throw at it. I find that MATE looks pleasing enough to me and is fast enough that it never reminds me that I'm slowing down my machine with a full-featured DE. That said, I tend to run modern hardware even though its by no means a powerful gaming rig. For those who need something similar on older hardware, or who want a bare minimal but "nice" DE that will consume minimal resources, xfce is likely it.
gnramires 3y ago
Indeed, I believe MATE is still quite close to GNOME 2 which has launched in 2002 according to wikipedia. You can still probably run it in the low 100MBs of RAM comfortably :)

chrsw 3y ago

The Linux desktop ecosystem still feels more like a playground. And that's not a pejorative in the sense that a lot of serious work hasn't been done on making powerful software and doing professional work on Linux desktops. I mean that in the sense that "Linux desktop" isn't very defined, formalized or standardized. It comes in all shapes and sizes and people are very free to customize it and use it as they see fit. Many people think this is a good thing and a benefit of software freedom. For example, if I walk up to a random person's Linux desktop, I don't know what I'm in for. That's very different than walking up to someone's Windows desktop, macOS desktop or even Solaris back in the day.

hulitu 3y ago
Haha, you should take a look at Windows. Even MS does not follow the same style.
- zdimension 3y ago
  The average Linux desktop has never been fully standardized. The average Windows desktop today (let's say, W10/11) is descended from W7 which was arguably really consistent. Even if they took W7 and bastardized it by introducing 10 different design languages (Metro, Modern, Fluent, new Fluent, ...) there was something to build on top of. On Linux, there are some GNOME guidelines, there are some KDE guidelines, nothing really universal. As much as I dislike the general macOS experience, Apple got it right early on by simply forcing you to adhere to the general vibe of the OS
  - julianeon 3y ago
    Fwiw I use the i3 window manager so whenever I see conversations about Gnome vs. KDE vs. whatever - I could care less. It's irrelevant to me. So that idea, that Linux isn't standardized, really resonates w me.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    > On Linux, there are some GNOME guidelines, there are some KDE guidelines, nothing really universal Because, although X has (or had) ICCCM, "we" can ignore it. Especially if "we" are desktop.org.

jmclnx 3y ago

> To his point, even in the Linux world, DEs have accumulated the bloat of features True, and if you want lean and mean, look at OpenBSD or NetBSD. Both are very tight. > Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? fvwm is your friend, it can do just about anything, but for things that need root, add entries to sudoers similar to: YOURID ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: shutdown -h now or for doas(1): permit nopass YOURID as root cmd shutdown -h now Then add a menu pick to exec sudo|doas shutdown -h now You may want to add shutdown's path to whatever it is on your distro.

entropie 3y ago

>To his point, even in the Linux world, DEs have accumulated the bloat of features, animations, complex compositing, front-to-back theming, and other frivolities that have made them large and slow. I use xmonad for over a decade now on multiple workstations. No bloat here.

kitsunesoba 3y ago

> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? For some reason nearly all standalone Wayland WM development is tied up in hyperminimal tiling WMs, which is frustrating. Boring old floating-first WMs with lightweight tiling options might not be trendy but they're what a lot of us work best with.

Ninovdmark 3y ago

What you describe sounds an awful lot like SerenityOS, with the exception that it's not a VM, but a full-blown Operating System. It really does embody that pragmatic sense of no-fluff UI design that peaked in the 90s, but applies it to systems design as well.

mid-kid 3y ago

You might like IceWM or on wayland maybe Hikari.

augustk 3y ago

I have been using the Blackbox Window Manager for more than ten years now and I'm quite happy with it. I really like it's austere looks. http://www.stokebloke.com/cygwin/blackbox0701.jpg http://www.stokebloke.com/cygwin/blackbox0701.jpg

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
Hotlink Preventor The url /hotlink.php cannot be served. Referrer was https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ You have tried to link directly to software or images from StokeBloke.com. This is not allowed. Please follow the menu on the left to find what you were looking for. My software is accessible from the Software link. Video software is accessible from the Video downloads link. Blackbox 0.65.0 tarball for cygwin is accessible from the cygwin link.
- celsoazevedo 3y ago
  Alt link: https://web.archive.org/web/20160810141012id_/http://stokebloke.com/cygwin/blackbox0701.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20160810141012id_/http://stokebl...
- 2b3a51 3y ago
  Try https://www.k58.uk/pages/images/blackbox.png https://www.k58.uk/pages/images/blackbox.png [around 11Kb] [Fun fact: about 15 years ago, 30% of the total bandwidth from my vanity home page was produced by a picture that some teenager had linked to from a death metal forum. It was just a snap of a bit of wall art locally.]
  - augustk 3y ago
    Thanks! That's an even better image showing the default theme.
    - 2b3a51 3y ago
      A default (i.e. full) Slackware install has blackbox, fluxbox, fvwm, window-maker and icewm available by default along side kde and xfce desktop environments. And twm. And hidden away, not available from `xwmconfig` for some reason, lurks mwm.

hulitu 3y ago

> Try using an older stacking WM. It is shocking how fast they are and how few resources they use. Their problem is that they're not maintained Fvwm is maintained. Vtwm is maintained. Ctwm is maintained. Mwm is maintained. Window Maker seems to be maintained. CDE has been resurected. etc.

npteljes 3y ago
IceWM is also maintained!
lelanthran 3y ago
Until recently (3/4 years ago?) I had been using Window Maker. Since 1998. My only reason for abandoning it is because it doesn't support workspaces arranged in a matrix, only as an array. I started using workspaces in a 3x3 grid, with the center one the "main" one and each of the compass points from center dedicated to a specific project. Maybe I should see if Window Maker can be modified the way I want it to be.
- massysett 3y ago
  In FVWM you can configure a workspace grid in whatever dimensions you want.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Windowmaker allows you to map keybindings to workspaces, the default is to use the first 12 function keys. That's ... usually ... enough for me. You can also pin the workspaces menu as a poor man's switch / navigation tool. Logically, Windowmaker's workspace topology is either a list or a loop (daisy chain), depending on whether or not you've configured it to wrap last to first or not.

bachmeier 3y ago

Budgie might be worth checking out (I've used it on Manjaro): https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop It was extremely responsive on a 2009 laptop. Otherwise whatever AntiX and Puppy use, which are mouse-driven UIs, are probably lower-resource than Budgie.

Laaas 3y ago

What's wrong with sway?

phone8675309 3y ago
Parent post was looking for non-tiling window managers.

badsectoracula 3y ago

> Try using an older stacking WM. It is shocking how fast they are and how few resources they use. Their problem is that they're not maintained. Window Maker is still maintained, it even gets new features now and then :-).

GuB-42 3y ago
That's what I am using, with a few dockapps, including one for the system tray. It works fine even with modern apps. And since GP mentioned NeXT, it should be the perfect match. Window Maker is based on the NeXT UI.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  There's also the NEXTSPACE fork for a more complete implementation: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    FWIW NEXTSPACE isn't just a Window Maker fork but an attempt for a complete NeXTSTEP-like desktop environment based on GNUstep and Window Maker is only for the window management bits.
- maxmalkav 3y ago
  I have a soft spot for Window Maker and I have been using it until recently , when I moved to Wayland-based environments. I also really like its dockapps (I even wasted some time writing one to display and control screen brightness), the only weak point for me is the systray dockapps, probably because it is a concept “transplanted” from other desktop paradigmsthat does not fit great.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    Personally i'm not that invested in what NeXT came up for their DE, i don't even think they were that great from a UX perspective (i used Window Maker long before i even learned about NeXTSTEP and once i used one i found its window management way inferior to Window Maker), so i don't mind the systray stuff. I use a dockapp (wmsystray) that "splits" the icons into pages with (IIRC) four icons per page and little arrows below. The only thing i'd like (and i might do and try to submit a patch at some point since AFAIK it is still being maintained) is for it to put a small frame around the icons like some other dockapps do for their contents as right now it just displays the icons on top of the dock tile background. But that is very minor.

unethical_ban 3y ago

>Something that doesn't care about GTK or Qt or Kvantum, and stays lean Aren't Qt and GTK the building blocks of Linux GUIs? Sure, you can ask someone to build a GUI framework from scratch for shits and giggles, but to what end? Now every GUI program will need to use its framework, or else have Qt or GTK dependencies. Its like asking for an OS built in rust that compiles all its programs from source ala Gentoo and "doesn't care if I have GCC or the JVM installed".

shreyshnaccount 3y ago

try instantOS (and WM)

danjoredd 3y ago

You could try Chicago95 for XFCE. It is a custom theme you have to download and install, but it gets the 95 theming down EXACTLY. If you don't care about customizing like crazy and want something minimalist by default, the best thing I can point you to is GNUstep. Its a bit basic, old, doesn't really care about modern features, etc. It is, for lack of a better word, comfy. IceWM is also very nice. My biggest problem with these is that it takes a bit of config file editing to change the wallpaper. Now if you want a lightweight WM with more modern features, I recommend enlightenment. Changing wallpapers is pretty easy and there are a few widgets...but it still feels very old-school.

d_tr 3y ago

User gibspaulding mentioned Openbox and I second giving it a look. Robust, compliant, minimal and finished (i.e., do not be disappointed by the lack of activity).

nycticorax 3y ago

Seriously, just use KDE Plasma. Sure, it's not 'minimal', but on modern hardware it sings. It just works. It's a batteries-included desktop. It's built on a toolkit that people actually like using (Qt) and they don't change it constantly in backwards-incompatible ways just because the mood strikes them. It doesn't treat you like an infant with ADHD. They don't constantly fix things that aren't broken. Plus if you have a problem you have a decent chance of finding the solution via Google, unlike with a lot of the 'long tail' WMs/DEs people have mentioned.

johnfonesca 3y ago
As a KDE user i agree with this point of view. KDE is the most customizabile DE ever created. You can tweak the crap out of it to make it look and behave EXACTLY the way you want it. And, from my experience, the performance of the current 5.x version (running on Wayland) is very good.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  And if you turn off composition (something you can't even do on most DEs), it runs even better. :D (Actually, though, I've never used it on Wayland, so I limit my statement to X11.)
harha_ 3y ago
Never even tried KDE, I'm using XFCE4 and it's good enough. Is KDE better or is it just a matter of what you're used to?
- dizhn 3y ago
  I switched to KDE from xfce4 because it handles dual monitor better and remembers settings for various second displays. Then I started using Bismuth for tiling. Add to that the need for various desktop things like status icons, notifications, wallets etc, I am pretty much stuck because no wm provides this combination of features unless you take a tiling wm and spend days configuring it. (There's also the option of using something like xfce4 with the wm bits from a tiling wm.)

happymellon 3y ago

There are modern minimal Wayland stacking window managers if that's what you are requesting. Have you looked at Labwc https://github.com/labwc/labwc https://github.com/labwc/labwc Or Hikari https://hub.darcs.net/raichoo/hikari https://hub.darcs.net/raichoo/hikari And nwg-shell to give the no frills panels that you want.

netbioserror 3y ago
Oh wow. Exactly what I was looking for, these are promising projects. Thank you! Looks like FVWM may be a good choice if I stick to X11.
bj-rn 3y ago
Do you know if Hikari supports fractional scaling? A quick search didn't yield any answers.
- happymellon 3y ago
  It looks like it's an open feature request.

ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago

One would think Linux would make sometging clean and responsive, instead it's a hot sticky mess. Remember i was aleays looking for that clean distro, elementaryOS luna was the pinnacle, then came updates and bloat

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
Who is this Linux you speak of and does he develop everything for the OS with the same name him/herself? Seriously though, if the problems you mentioned are shared by enough people, someone will make something like that. Chances are though that something fitting your needs already exists or they are so niche/specific/nitpicky that you'll never find what you're looking for (in any OS).

interroboink 3y ago

I have been using fluxbox[1] for many years now, happily. It's a very barebones thing (in a good way) while also being highly configurable — customizable keyboard shortcuts, menus, scriptability, etc. It is not a tiling WM. It also doesn't have desktop icons by default. I thought I would miss those, but have found I do not. There are options[2] to add that if you want it. It also has no file manager. I use xfe[3] on the rare occasions I want that. So, my setup is ~8 virtual desktops, with very minimal window decoration and task bar. Applications are easily launched via either custom shortcuts or the "right click" menu (though I use the keyboard to trigger it). I also have a few keyboard shortcuts to position windows manually (eg: WinKey+NumPad key squashes the current window into a N,S,E,W -style location onscreen) Standard X11 window management (eg: alt+drag to move a window) work as expected, etc. [1] http://fluxbox.org/ http://fluxbox.org/ [2] https://wiki.debian.org/FluxboxIcon https://wiki.debian.org/FluxboxIcon [3] http://roland65.free.fr/xfe/ http://roland65.free.fr/xfe/

79a6ed87 3y ago

My favourite WM is awesomewm[1] It's mainly tiling but it has a floating mode. Also it's very customizable using Lua scripts. I love it because it's the closest thing to a modern back ion3/notionwm[2] But now I think that getting away from X11 is one of my main concerns so I'm not using any of these things. _1: https://awesomewm.org/ https://awesomewm.org/ _2: https://notionwm.net/ https://notionwm.net/

paulddraper 3y ago

> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions... i3! > Edit: I've already tried tiling WMs and I don't like them. :(

thomastjeffery 3y ago

Are you really telling me you haven't used XFCE4?

gentleman11 3y ago

I returned a macbook today. My previous one, a 2015 mba, runs like garbage now. It's the slowest thing you can imagine. My equally old linux laptop runs just fine though. Not 100% as fast as before, but there's so much less cruft that it's still good to use. The mac I returned had 8gb of ram and was meant to be an internet box, but the m-series aggressively uses swap memory to burn out the SSDs and force you to replace the entire machine within a few years. It's nuts. I had 1TB of SSD writes in a single day when I downloaded and installed nothing due to all the swap being used--7GB. That was just web browsing. The same workload on my old 2015 mba uses like 6-7GB of ram and no swap. At 1TB per day of writes to swap, the lifespan of the machine was going to be extremely short It's so gross. I don't know what I'm going to do for my next laptop. I wish more companies could make good keyboards

KyeRussell 3y ago
[dead]
eckza 3y ago
I just picked up a Surface Laptop 5. Much like the Surface Laptop 3 and 2 that I had before it, it is a best-in-class piece of hardware. I actually prefer its form factor to my M1 MBP; it's thinner, lighter, and I prefer a 3:2 display to 16:10. It runs 3x4k + 1x1080p over a single Thunderbolt cable into a dock (granted, I am using a USB 3.0 to dual DisplayPort adapter, but the SL5 is driving 2 of the 4k displays.) I still use my M1 MBP for most things, and I have one for my job, as well; but the SL5 may be the nicest physical laptop hardware available today. (Windows is another story. If I could run Linux on it with no compromises and no hassle, I'd likely ditch the Mac. So it goes.)
- altintx 3y ago
  Surface Laptop 4 here. Great keyboard. Great screen. Great trackpad. Surface Dock is great. And WSL gets the job done too. It's lighter than the Mac. Dunno that battery is better, but it's certainly good enough. And it was relatively cheap! But I still try to copy & paste like it's a Mac. And it's not a question of remapping. I want Alt+C and Alt+V to copy and paste system wide.

7speter 3y ago

Dunno if this is what you’re getting at, but as much as I feel nostalgic for pre-windows xp/7 interfaces, computers do a lot more than they used to. Its at the very least much better to have a search bar that (only) filters through all the programs we have installed on a given system, no? I wonder too what it would be like to use one of those old uis to navigate a modern system but I think theres just an overwhelming amount of “stuff” on systems now.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ivlad 3y ago

fvwm2 may work for you. With enough effort put into configuring it and its modules, you may get almost any look-and-feel. Depending on what do you mean with “NeXT philosophy”, Window Maker and the whole GNUStep suite may also be worth checking.

dredmorbius 3y ago

What exactly is the downside of no (or as many others have noted, far more accurately relatively minimal) maintenance? What I'd already come to chafe at in the 1990s regarding GUI environments (applications, window shells, etc.) was that they changed gratuitously between versions. What's remarkable about classic Linux / Unix / X11 window managers is how little they change, if at all. I've been a Windowmaker user for going on three decades, and recall how the switch to proportional rather than bitmapped fonts was jarring. (I got over it.) Pop up twm (it's stock on MacOS with XQuartz) and you're transported back to 1987 ... and not at all in a bad way. (For those who are under the misapprehension that such WMs are obsolete or impede performance, I can only point at a former cow-orker who'd had a heavily modded vtwm configuration that was virtually completely keyboard-driven and with which he'd swap between windows and workspaces with blinding and mesmerizing speed and agility.) The biggest issues of which I'm aware are issues such as fonts, possibly Unicode support, and ... what exactly?

ydlr 3y ago

> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? I think FVWM is what you are looking for. Last commit on May 10. https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/ https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/

amatecha 3y ago

Luckily you can get an efficient, clean Desktop Environment that works well and is actively developed: Xfce ( https://xfce.org/ https://xfce.org/ ) I think you will like it. It has a very early-2000's feel IMO.