> I don't know if there's a way to switch WMs without shutting down the whole x session though. Would be interested to know if it's possible. Some WM's support

> I don't know if there's a way to switch WMs without shutting down the whole x session though. Would be interested to know if it's possible. Some WM's support the '--replace' flag (Both the WM being replaced and the one you're starting have to support it). If you run a new WM with the '--replace' flag, the old WM will shutdown and the new WM will take-over all the windows it was handling. This is only switching WM's though, so you can't really switch into Gnome or KDE doing this and then switch-out. i3 doesn't support it though (It would have a bit of a hard time supporting it anyway), so you can't do it with i3. If you can't do it that way though, then just have your X session start a terminal on screen instead of a WM. The X session will stay live as long as that terminal stays open, so you can start and kill any number of WM's as you want as long as your other programs don't mind it. Not everything shuts down very cleanly though, so you might not be able to start and close Gnome and then start KDE in the same session. You should be able to kill i3 and start openbox or xfwm though, for example.