Window Manager

Nowadays, in the online *nix community, it seems that you will become an underdog, if you go with a DE. Seriously, this kind of unhealthy WM elitism, along with distro elitism, should be stopped RIGHT NOW. (However, the user base of DEs is probably bigger than that of WMs.)

To be honest, the major caveat of using a window manager, is that:

I am convinced that every Linux users that choose WM over DE aren't afraid of ricing. So time-consuming ricing process will not be that much of an issue. The problem lies in the difficulty of ricing per se.

As far as I know, Linux desktop IS A HOT MESS. The largest competitors in the GUI market are gtk and qt. They go complete separated way with regard to configurations. Usually, applications made by those two respectively don't blend well with a set of rules. Some actions need to be taken in order to reach an uniform styles. And it's both annoying and frustrating. I love the diversity of Linux desktop, but I also hope there are some open standards to make the whole developing/configuring process at least a bit easier.

And to add another fuel to the fire, X, sigh and the freedesktop standards are old and somewhat poorly documented. What? you say EXWM? Sorry, most popular window managers do not/partially support it.

That's why a lot of distros shipping with default DEs, or different flavors. The folks building desktop have at least riced something for you. Otherwise, Linux is daunting for new-comers.

But as long as I do not care much about look, all should be breeze right?

Since UI/UX is so important accessbility-wise, most of applications are not built with tiling in mind. Hence, there are usually some utilities implemented as pop-ups in a large, sophisticated app. And those dialog boxes are infamous for ignoring size hinting. Sometimes you need to hardcode them into your WM's configuration files to prevent them from showing up like a normal application window.

The biggest joy of using a WM instead of DE, some might argue, is to pick all your desktop applications. Handpicking everything is, to a degree, tedious. Maybe we just need a sane set of default apps, and swap them out if they are not satisfactory. Although the applications DE provide are not bullet-proof, they still deliver basic funcionality and might come in handy sometimes. Pick a medium or lightweight DE. the utilities that come with a DE can be disabled. You can still choose your favorite apps without compromise anything.

If tiling is needed, find one with good floating box/mouse support. Users should still have the privileges to disable the unwanted features within a DE. If a DE is not able to do that, choose another DE.

Keyboard driven people. It saves time by avoiding constant resizing. It might help increase productivity and efficiency.

Warning: this section is very subjective. You hear me. ALL pros and cons are subjective.

Although it's not a tiling window manager, you can configure it to mimic tiling behaviors.

1. Minimal

2.

HLWM works well with lxqt-panel too. Just switch the window manager in Settings and you are done.

Thanks to the client/server architecture, HLWM can be configured with simple shell scripts.

xft currently doesn't have support for font fallback system. A deal breaker for me :(

As HLWM, i3 works well with lxqt-panel too. Just switch the window manager to i3 and you are done.

I disabled lxqt-desktop and lxqt-panel. It unexpectedly works better than I thought.

This one is minor. One can put them in .xinitrc or .xprofile .

Still minor. One can still put them in .xinitrc , .xprofile, or anywhere fitting.

E.g. monitor settings (raw way: xrandr), notification daemon, policy kit daemon, etc.

The main reason I keep it...

duh

I don't need lots of fancy widgets. But I require the status informative.

This one is a gem. It allows you to configure GTK2/GTK3 apps at ease.

Simple yet powerful menu application without bloated dependencies.