Im so glad we (leftwm) made it to atleast ok. We are always improving and hope we can make it higher up soon (got so much planned, once uni is done I will have alot of time to put into it). Thanks derek!
I use LeftWm and love it! I started with Awesome but I have quickly set on SpectrWm as it was the first one to love and then I tried LeftWm. It is always a toss up between the two. I use them both daily and they are both installed on 95% of all of my computers. 🙂I have just spent 4 days this week totally redoing both with fresh looks and some new themes for both... LLAP 🖖
Small correction, leftwm doesn't use a custom syntax but rather toml (tom's ovbious minimal language)which is used by cargo (rust package manager)for it's configurations
I used qtile for at least 2 years, thanks to you. It was a great experience, but I say it was because I stopped using it when I got tired of update my arch at night, wake up in the morning to work, (sometimes) reboot my pc and see qtile changed their syntax and at startup my qtile config broke my session and it starts with a black screen.
I've been using qtile for about a year now and it never broke out of the blue. In fact I think they updated it only once in this entire time, and it didn't break.
Basically why I don't trust these kinds of reviews. DT was promoting Manjaro for the longest time and it's easily the most hated Arch based distro by far. -If only he did some actual research rather than going by first impressions. Also, initially i3wm is meh, but it has a master-stack or an auto-tiling patch that make it better (sticking things out and investing time and research can totally change the experience). I didn't quite grasp his reasoning for dissing DWM in favor of Xmonad either. Thank you for the feedback!
@@rishirajsaikia1323 I could make a good argument that no tier list is ever "needed". They make for good content, but they are opinion pieces in the end.
Ironically I found i3wm to be the most user friendly window manager. When I used it I actually didn't touch the default config except to change colors, and the weird keys didn't bug me because I used the arrow keys anyway.
Mostly only commenting for engagement, but I think that i3 should at least be in the okay category. I know the keybindings are rough but they are wildly easy to change along with the rest of the config. The main reason I like i3 is the fact that it stays out of my way and looks the way i like it. I love AwesomeWM but it always seemed to have something wrong with it (probably my lua knowledge caused) that would have me focusing on fixing my config or changing something and interrupting my workflow. With i3 i had it set up and out of my way within an hour.
My experience with awesome was similar to yours. I really liked the customizability of it and even made my own theme, but stuff broke a bit too often. I want something that is stable and isn't going to break when updated. I'm going to try i3 and leftwm.
@@maximofernandez196 What i mean by that is that the default nav keys are jkl; as apposed to the very common hjkl vim motion keys. Takes like 10 seconds to fix but the problem is then you have to steer away from the intuitive split horizontal and vertical keys
@@UnhingedNW oh, yeah, I also changed that after some days of being confused by it. Being fair with i3, I think that those keys are actually better for someone who has never used vim motions, specially because you use j and ; a lot more. But if someone is just trying tiling wm for the first time, they probably would use the arrow keys, so yeah, not using vim bindings is weird
@@maximofernandez196 I can definitely agree with that. I would be hard pressed to find someone who made their way to a TWM without having used vim motions at least a few times in their travels though. That being said, i am not an arrow key hater like many vim users. never really thought about changing the binds to those though lol. would probably be nice because i do always dislike trying to find new keys for doing splits.
Terminals can be very personal. I'll use a specific one for Newsboat and Cmus (st) with tdrop, and another for image support and gpu acceleration (kitty). I also like Wezterm and Alacritty in that order but feel they're personal tastes. There's only one FOSS game I'd recommend: Super Tux Kart (unless you're die-hard FOSS and like running 20 year old game engines on modern GPUs).
@@madthumbs1564 Minetest is pretty sweet, it's just Minecraft but libre and better in my opinion. That's the only FOSS game I particularly care for off the top of my head.
@@dustinmorse8497 Not my type of game, and i assumed there are games like it that are more modern or improved. I could be wrong though; it's not like we'll ever see another Kung Fu Chaos.
@@dustinmorse8497 Super Tux Kart is indeed great. - It spoiled me as I can't really get into the Mario Kart games anymore. -But it's nothing compared to Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed.
I find i3 to be really great when used in conjunction with Polybar and SXHKD. I don't care for bars nor the default keybinds, but at least i3 asks you if you want Alt first instead of enforcing it by default like others.
also I don't get the enthusiasm for Wayland as a daily driver? It's for people who don't do much other than browse the internet, reply to emails, and do standard document editing -- assuming that isn't utterly broken under Wayland as well. Also combining two vectors of failure into one single point of total failure is a hard sell.
@@phonewithoutquestion80 You do know the Wayland developers are basically those who wrote Xorg ? I think they know better than you why Xorg is a mountain of unmaintable crap buid on top of each others, and why it need to be replaced. Also = apps being able to listen to each others keystrokes is the true hard sell.
I keep coming back to this tier list and pick the one which suits my taste. thanks for making this list. Helps a lot, before jumping and investing time in learning a new WM.
Am I the only one stunned by that "... GIMP!" moment? GIMP of all things? I thought it would be emacs or sth text-based at least. Well, let's now see how it worked
DT, I blame you for the past three years of frustration.. But I love it. Tier list I would like is for WM's like Openbox, JWM, CW, Poison ... Things that you have tried.
For my wm I really like Penrose. Actually, it's not really a window manager, but rather a Rust library (crate) that makes it really easy to create your own.
which bar are you using with Penrose? It's a real struggle for me to display any widgets on it's native bar, so I end up using polybar(which I really don't want to).
I have been using awesome wm since last 7 years, with very heavily customised configuration(love lua) and workflow. It’s been treating me quite well , probably will stick to it for few more years.
awesome is awesome. It was my first tiling WM and it will likely be my only one. Lua is my favorite language so it was extremely easy for me to get it set up exactly how I wanted it
11:37 This is one of the most important and overlooked points you've made on this channel. Proper documentation is STILL a problem for soooo many packages, distros, WMs, etc., to the point where things like "They have excellent documentation" are thrown around constantly. That shouldn't be something we compliment! It should be a *_given._* A shell script is one thing, but something as complex and configurable as a *_window manager_* should come with good documentation. You don't get brownie points for that, it should be the standard. Sad that it isn't. Okay, ramble over. Great vid!
It was interesting hearing you go through the pros and cons of every one of these, but I'm quite disappointed by the lack of a single Wayland compositor. The scene is really blooming now, with some fascinating, unique projects such as hyprland and newm (let alone the well-established sway and wayfire).
Hadn't looked into those, but I'd definitely be delighted to see a current review of what stage waymonad, dwl, river, velox, vivarium and hikari have reached by now.
There's literally a webpage that only does tier lists easy and accesible and this lad goes and makes his own on GIMP for them not being open source. Derek, I like your style, but even I get triggered with bs like this lmao
Happy to see that the Windows Managers that I have actively used for an extended period of time throughout my time being a Linux user, made it to your GREAT tier
awesome --> lua xmonad --> haskell qtile --> python bspwm --> bash dwm --> C exwm --> elisp stumpwm --> common lisp leftwm --> toml ? i3 --> i3 internal herbst --> ? maybe it's time i took another look at haskell, to see if haskell still hates me.
2 года назад+2
The thumbnail for this video is messed up, that's what makes me curious to watch. I'd agree with the thumbnail, that's to keep Xmonad below dwm because it's harder to configure Xmonad than to patch dwm.
I use i3 because of the built-in tabbed layout, which I believe is the only one with this type of nice tabs already built for you. My bar sucks big time, I use the standard one that comes with i3. The reason is I just don't hve the motivation to spend a lot of time on a WM or a bar. If I can't get it done within an hour I won't bother. I have other things to do and I'm not a programmer.
About exwm being slow/crashing - I haven't used it personally but in general window managers being single threaded is totally fine (see awesomewm), it's probably just a crappy buggy implementation.
The great thing about DWM is that it is very easy to configure on one computer and transfer the executable to another computer, even a different distros and it makes all these computers feel the same.
Awesome is one of the first tiling manager I've used, and honestly, it'll be the last. The default config is so good that I hardly ever bother editing it, and it just works. Lua is an amazing programming language and it's being adopted by more and more projects and I think for good reason.
Yeah, I didn't like my first couple attempts at using i3 and bspwm (albeit very briefly). Recently I set up awesomewm on a new install and Lua is so much easier to work with to customize it myself. Been loving it so far
Lua might be amazing if you start out with it. The lack of brackets doesn't really help readability though. Same goes for python. I much prefer something like C
@@TheExileFox Oh I agree it can be hard to read, but it’s far from my first programming language. But, it’s nice having a programming language for customizing my desktop instead of predetermined switches and config files.
I've always thought that wms like DWM would be great for creating custom kiosk boards, etc. Any of the tiling managers would but in a commercial setting running binarys seems a heap more secure.
I'm a programmer, and learning Haskell fried my brain. I started learning it to do my own, from the ground up, Xmonad configuration. I managed to get Xmonad to a state I liked, and some of it was a bit more complex, but damn I hate Haskell as a language. Despite getting Xmonad to a state of my likeing, I just went back to Qtile. Python is just so much easier to digest for me. I'm mainly a C# developer, but I can work with basically anything with C based syntax fairly well, so Python is just easier for me to poke around in and experiment with compared to Xmonad+Haskell.
I agree that i3's config is limiting, but i3-msg and IPC makes up for it. So you could basically use any language to configure it or to add custom features.
Now that I think about it, it is just crazy how different my WM-Journey could have become. A few weeks ago I tried out SpectrWM and I'm certain, the Philipp of the past would have been amazed by it. I would have liked how it is configured and the fact that the bar is included. Eventually I was stucked with BSPWM and I use it till today, mostly because I can use whatever bar with it I would like to. Also since it is configured by default in a shell script I learned a thing or two about scripting as well which always comes in handy in *Nix Systems. Even though I still have a lot of trouble to customize Awesome, Qtile and Xmonad I can see why someone would put them in top tier. However, thanks to that channel and the incredible community I learned a lot about *Nix, Systemadministration, DEs and WM. *Nix systems are so cool operating systems and after more than 17 months I am still amazed how well these are thought through.
Never used a wm, but J K L ; makes more intuitive sense to me, or even K L ; ' could be good imo. (as sometimes I'll play games with my hands reversed, so like to map WASD to PL;' as it's a lot closer for reaching Shift and Ctrl than some other common bindings)
Yeah that's the thing about Linux, people stick with standards with arbitrary decisions. HJKL was probably or was made because of the creators keyboard symbols. If you shift movement keys one step to the left, that should be a punishable crime. If you are a touch typist you can probably relate to being extremely uncomfortable to leave the homerow like that for what? Seriously, is the command mode in vim that important to screw up the home row?
bspwm is a hyped tiler, DT you get this wrong all the time, it do open windows after the last window open, and you can choose to pick the dir. of the next window, but normaly you use it in auto mode.
i think if i did it to this list 1st spectrwm 2nd qtile 3rd awesome 4th xmonad 5th i3-gaps im currently gonna try to actually config i3, but im gonna try spectr and qtile also because of the "new" user factor
I do use EXWM when working on some coding project, or on my thesis and I really don't want any distractions. Besides it being really awesome to use it when you really need to concentrate on some specific task, I wouldn't recommend it.
For a manual tiling I guess it's good if your setting it up for someone that don't want to accidentally mess their layout while working. Great for a CCTV setup, linux + cctv software makes for a "hard to breach" home security system
i3 is considered the best by many people! What if you don't know programming languages (there are people in the world who are not programmers). What if you just don't need to go that deep in settings? If you want many people to use Linux, don't force them to learn Lua just to adjust some settings in a window manager. Linux is not for programmers, it's for people, so i3 is GREAT.
you should give riverwm a look! (it's over on wayland, and a smaller project, but it's really, really cool. It's especially cool for debugging because it can run nested sessions, so you can launch it from a terminal and see where the errors come from). It's written in zig, configured in any scripting language (personally I went with lua), it's a dynamic tiler and does not coe with a bar (waybar is reccommended by the dev. I just don't use a bar, personally)
Have set it up on my machine, and boy it is beautiful. But until they implement the "startontag" feature. i can't bring myself to use it as my daily driver. Happy with dwm at the moment.
I haven't watch the whole video yet but I already know XMonad is going in the great tier. And that's what it deserves! I absolutely hate dynamic tilers but I just can't use anything other than XMonad now thanks to the BSP layout that makes it behave as a manual tiler
I started with BSPWM. It just made sense for me. There was an example config, then I scraped github for bspwm configs. It made me felt home. Even though I knew nothing about how window tiling works. But I was in love with the binary tree layout. Then I hopped i3wm and felt it to be trash. Cuz, basically it was not binary tree. 🙂 I hover my mouse (yes, I was still using mouse back then) into a large horizontal window and expect it to be split into two vertical window, and it didn't work. Plus every time I open a new window it aligns it vertically. After 3/4 window, the layout felt trash and unusable. I mean, how is that even productive? Duh! Then, I tried DWM. The layout was very confusing at first. I was used to tiling my windows in grid manner in bspwm. But DWM uses m&s. Which didn't work for me. After some years, I again hopped them. And I found both of them to be great. After I knew how a tree layout works, i3wm felt right. But still bspwm felt more to my type. Now I jump between bspwm and DWM. Only thing I don't like about DWM is, I have to recompile it every time I change any keybindings.
It's true that i3 uses its own language for configuration that is really easy and not powerful but it is not true that it can't be configured with whatever language you want, it just makes it oprional instead of mandatory (which is the best option for new twm users). Check i3-msg
How about Sway (the Wayland clone of i3)? I use it because I have problems with tearing in Xorg and Wayland solved them for me and it is pretty good, I haven't had a single issue until now. In combination with Waybar, everything from the ricing to the workflow, works perfectly.
DT has work he needs to get done. Wayland isn't a work machine protocol. It's for very basic usage, then you go back to bulk standard X11 for actual work.
@@phonewithoutquestion80My line of work is in the academia and Wayland has been perfect for me since day one. With X11 I had huge screen tearing problems on the laptop which were not resolved even after messing with the TearFree option and AccelMethod. Everyone has different needs and does different work on his machine. Don't judge only by your own standards.
Just a minor comment; you don't need to create a new layer every time you want your text in a new layer. When you click to type outside of an existing textbox, it creates its own layer. Then if you want text merged with the layer below it you have to do it manually. You can even paint on a text layer, but then the text stops being editable. Finally, if you notice on your right where the layers are displayed, you will see that the layers you created and named "great", "good", etc are actually empty and the text is on separate layers. Sorry for being that guy, but I do digital art and it was painful to see that chaos being manifested.
I know it's not an actual window manager so don't crucify me, but the Material Shell Gnome Extension is an easy way for someone who's new to tiling window managers to try it out and see if it's for them. Since it's a Gnome extension it's really easy to switch between Material Shell and the default Gnome experience. Originally Material Shell was built on top of awesomewm before the author switched to Gnome Shell as the base, though you can still build a version of Material Shell on top of awesomewm as the project has been maintained by someone else after the author pivoted to Gnome.
dude the exact thing happened to me in the documentation with dspwm that you mention. with the tree diagram. that is so funny! I ended up on arco/awesome for the last 2 to 4 years probably, and i just moved garuda/sway, really liking it atm. good video, cheers.
I've used Herbstluftwm since 2014, can't say I love it, it's just the fact that I lost the drive to discover new things when I had to shift most of my focus into medical school for years and that happened to be the WM I was using when that happened, it's also the only tiling window manager I've ever used.
about the 'hjkl' and 'jkl;' : the position of the ';' is not the same in every qwerty keyboard around the world, where the key ';' is positioned in US keyboards is the character 'ç' in mine (Brazilian abnt2), the ';' key is on the lower row
I was looking for this comment, indeed in many other keyboard (may be on all except US or "english") some default tillin WM manager keys makes no sense or are messed up. There could be some quick initial mapping sorting this by selecting a layout on every default configuration on any tiling WM
This channel has been lacking a video like this. I've already been using awesome for quite a while, I chose it based on your other videos and got just what I wanted. I'm sure that this video will make it easier for others to make a choice (btw come on, we all know exwm is the best)
After using i3 off and on for the last couple of years I just installed Qtile a few days ago. What the hell was I thinking! Should've switched a long time ago!
Used Awesome, config via Lua is great BUT backwards compatibility and documentation sucks: after upgrade too many things didn't worked. Switched to i3wm for 3 years now, still happy.
No love or hate for Calm Window Manager (cwm)? The greatest thing about F/LOSS aside from the freedoms is the multitude of choice for almost every type of software.
Never have used the H, J, K, L or even ; keybindings. I use the arrow keys in VIM and in any TWM. I even change VIM keybindings to suite me. Also, if you ever took typing class you know home row keys for the right hand are J, K, L, ; So the default in those programs is very improper and I find awkward in use. My hands always sit on the home row keys on a keyboard and G and H are always open.
I would argue that the VIM default keybindings are bad, not I3. since, on the standart QWERTY layout, JKL; is the home row. The only reason vim uses HJKL instead is that it's older than the QWERTY layout, and so didn't have a defined home row. I3's keybindings are therefore better then vim, but vim keybinding is just so ubiquitous that nobody expects the change and therefore is percieved as bad
I forget where I heard this information, it might have been from Uncle Bob Clean Coders, but I can't fully remember. But if you know absolutely nothing about any programming languages, and you have an end goal of wanting to fully master several of them... If you start with Haskell to begin with, you will be better off in the learning process. And with that one being first, when you go to learn the others, in general you will be a better programmer.
A terminal emulator tier list, but in addition to the ones most of us know, it would be useful to include the newer ones that have been made for Wayland (e.g. Foot).
Bspwm user here. Wanna try awesome. Qtile and xmonad could be the best but i dont wanna learn haskell or python so will stay with bspwm and will try awesome
So, I will look into Awesome and DWM. The former is new user friendly and the latter I always wanted to try but was a bit intimidated by it having to be recompiled from C everytime you want a new feature.
Don't be intimidated by it. It takes literally 5 seconds to compile and restart dwm (mod + shift + q). Maybe if you're constantly changing it as a hobby, it could be tiresome, but if you just want to make adjustments that fit your workflow better (apply patches, change configuration settings), compilation is a non-issue.
great thing is once u 'build' dwm per ur liking, that build is going to be useful for yearssss no major changes nd u can port it very easily on other machines
Hello DT. For start I just wan't to clear that I'm no i3wm fanboy (used it in the past, now DWM user). I don't get it. You put Bspwm in Good tier, mentioning that You have to write your own config (despite having to also install sxhkd for keybindings), but You place i3wm in Meh because it's config (easy to read and customize) has "missplaced" few keybinds?? "Say whaaat??" Not to mention that there are some "extentions" to make i3wm literally dynamic tiler (or allowing to spawn new windows in tabs out of the box). I must disagree with You on this. I would put i3wm in good or at least ok, but for sure placed it above bspwm. I also can't agree with placing qtile as great. I admitt that it's easy to customize using Python, but the biggest Con is that You cannot restart it in-place (like i3) to see changes right away, not to mention no feedback if error occurs. And lastly - how on Earth leftwm and spectrwm placed above i3wm? Just because using Haskell? No way. Leftwm doesn't even come with any panel by default, so it's disqualified as for new users. Best regards
![WE GOT ACCESS TO GPT-3! [Epic Special Edition]](/img/1.gif)
Hi, DistroTube. Love your channel. Huge inspiration to me. Time links for later because I'm definitely going to finally try a few.
2:30 - awesome
3:36 - bspwm
5:34 - dwm
7:08 - exwm
9:31 - herbstluftwm
11:08 - i3wm
13:59 - leftwm
16:10 - qtile
17:33 - spectrwm
18:47 - stumpwm
21:28 xmonad
ok
@@devooko ok
nice
ok
ok
What many people do not know is that 'DT' actually stands for 'Dynamic Tiler'. :D
Now the question is if DTs' name is Derek.
Actually, it's his alter-ego, "Dynamic Tyler".
@@tamoozbr Not to be confused with his Nemesis "Derek Tiler".
Dynamic Tyler
strong and complicated password
Im so glad we (leftwm) made it to atleast ok. We are always improving and hope we can make it higher up soon (got so much planned, once uni is done I will have alot of time to put into it). Thanks derek!
I use LeftWm and love it! I started with Awesome but I have quickly set on SpectrWm as it was the first one to love and then I tried LeftWm. It is always a toss up between the two. I use them both daily and they are both installed on 95% of all of my computers. 🙂I have just spent 4 days this week totally redoing both with fresh looks and some new themes for both...
LLAP 🖖
Leftwm gets my vote, tried them all (apart from exwm and stumpwm) and it's my favourite. Thanks for all the work put into it 😃
I started using left again after over a year. I liked it before, but the experience is so much better now! I've been loving it!
I'm using LeftWM right now and I'm very happy with it. The possibility of use themes is what make it my favorite WM.
@@BrucesWorldofStuff Can you say what you prefer in them over Awesome? (only if you have time & desire)
I love i3wm. Configuring is so easy without having to learn a language and the documentation is so thorough.
i3/sway are great , strait to the point no fansy UI or animations , i use them for work
and i use hypr and wayfire with waybar to try new stuff
Small correction, leftwm doesn't use a custom syntax but rather toml (tom's ovbious minimal language)which is used by cargo (rust package manager)for it's configurations
TOML is basically INI files but with a formal-ish specification.
I wanted to use left to play around with rust but no, it uses toml. That disappointed me.
Also you could go into the source code in any of those.. the fact that it's written in rust doesn't mean you magically can't change the source code
@@iAmTheWagon Fork it
Also it's github page explains how to manually install it, which makes modifying it fairly easy.
I used qtile for at least 2 years, thanks to you. It was a great experience, but I say it was because I stopped using it when I got tired of update my arch at night, wake up in the morning to work, (sometimes) reboot my pc and see qtile changed their syntax and at startup my qtile config broke my session and it starts with a black screen.
I've been using qtile for about a year now and it never broke out of the blue. In fact I think they updated it only once in this entire time, and it didn't break.
Basically why I don't trust these kinds of reviews. DT was promoting Manjaro for the longest time and it's easily the most hated Arch based distro by far. -If only he did some actual research rather than going by first impressions. Also, initially i3wm is meh, but it has a master-stack or an auto-tiling patch that make it better (sticking things out and investing time and research can totally change the experience). I didn't quite grasp his reasoning for dissing DWM in favor of Xmonad either. Thank you for the feedback!
Same here! I loved Qtile but it's so unreliable! I need to get work done not to waste time on broken configs.
Future tier-list ideas: terminal emulators, stacking WMs, DEs, distros, programming languages... Sky is the limit.
Out of those, only the terminal emulators is most needed.
@@rishirajsaikia1323 I could make a good argument that no tier list is ever "needed". They make for good content, but they are opinion pieces in the end.
Ironically I found i3wm to be the most user friendly window manager. When I used it I actually didn't touch the default config except to change colors, and the weird keys didn't bug me because I used the arrow keys anyway.
Mostly only commenting for engagement, but I think that i3 should at least be in the okay category. I know the keybindings are rough but they are wildly easy to change along with the rest of the config. The main reason I like i3 is the fact that it stays out of my way and looks the way i like it.
I love AwesomeWM but it always seemed to have something wrong with it (probably my lua knowledge caused) that would have me focusing on fixing my config or changing something and interrupting my workflow. With i3 i had it set up and out of my way within an hour.
My experience with awesome was similar to yours. I really liked the customizability of it and even made my own theme, but stuff broke a bit too often. I want something that is stable and isn't going to break when updated. I'm going to try i3 and leftwm.
i3 keys rough? i3 was the one that actually made me able to learn it in just a day or so
@@maximofernandez196 What i mean by that is that the default nav keys are jkl; as apposed to the very common hjkl vim motion keys.
Takes like 10 seconds to fix but the problem is then you have to steer away from the intuitive split horizontal and vertical keys
@@UnhingedNW oh, yeah, I also changed that after some days of being confused by it. Being fair with i3, I think that those keys are actually better for someone who has never used vim motions, specially because you use j and ; a lot more. But if someone is just trying tiling wm for the first time, they probably would use the arrow keys, so yeah, not using vim bindings is weird
@@maximofernandez196 I can definitely agree with that. I would be hard pressed to find someone who made their way to a TWM without having used vim motions at least a few times in their travels though.
That being said, i am not an arrow key hater like many vim users. never really thought about changing the binds to those though lol. would probably be nice because i do always dislike trying to find new keys for doing splits.
I'd love to see more FOSS tierlists. Some ideas: terminals, word processors, FOSS games and of course, distros
Terminals can be very personal. I'll use a specific one for Newsboat and Cmus (st) with tdrop, and another for image support and gpu acceleration (kitty). I also like Wezterm and Alacritty in that order but feel they're personal tastes. There's only one FOSS game I'd recommend: Super Tux Kart (unless you're die-hard FOSS and like running 20 year old game engines on modern GPUs).
@@madthumbs1564 Super Tux cart is great but if also recommend 0AD. No I don't care that the engine is old or whatever. A great game is a great game.
@@madthumbs1564 Minetest is pretty sweet, it's just Minecraft but libre and better in my opinion. That's the only FOSS game I particularly care for off the top of my head.
@@dustinmorse8497 Not my type of game, and i assumed there are games like it that are more modern or improved. I could be wrong though; it's not like we'll ever see another Kung Fu Chaos.
@@dustinmorse8497 Super Tux Kart is indeed great. - It spoiled me as I can't really get into the Mario Kart games anymore. -But it's nothing compared to Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed.
I find i3 to be really great when used in conjunction with Polybar and SXHKD. I don't care for bars nor the default keybinds, but at least i3 asks you if you want Alt first instead of enforcing it by default like others.
also I don't get the enthusiasm for Wayland as a daily driver? It's for people who don't do much other than browse the internet, reply to emails, and do standard document editing -- assuming that isn't utterly broken under Wayland as well. Also combining two vectors of failure into one single point of total failure is a hard sell.
@@phonewithoutquestion80 You do know the Wayland developers are basically those who wrote Xorg ?
I think they know better than you why Xorg is a mountain of unmaintable crap buid on top of each others, and why it need to be replaced.
Also = apps being able to listen to each others keystrokes is the true hard sell.
DT thumb-baited us 😆
I wouldn't do that! ;)
I keep coming back to this tier list and pick the one which suits my taste. thanks for making this list. Helps a lot, before jumping and investing time in learning a new WM.
Am I the only one stunned by that "... GIMP!" moment? GIMP of all things? I thought it would be emacs or sth text-based at least. Well, let's now see how it worked
Finally! More Tiling Window managers content please, we want more DT!
You got my thumbs up at “we shouldn’t reward people for things they’re supposed to do anyway”.
DT, I blame you for the past three years of frustration.. But I love it.
Tier list I would like is for WM's like Openbox, JWM, CW, Poison ... Things that you have tried.
For my wm I really like Penrose. Actually, it's not really a window manager, but rather a Rust library (crate) that makes it really easy to create your own.
which bar are you using with Penrose? It's a real struggle for me to display any widgets on it's native bar, so I end up using polybar(which I really don't want to).
@@sergiuoanes4635 Opaaa, daca cineva putea sa lase un mesaju la comentu-l asta, trebuia sa fie un roman. BRAVO, mai vreau :))
OMG! HE ACTUALLY DID IT, HE MADE A WM TIER LIST VIDEO!
I have been using awesome wm since last 7 years, with very heavily customised configuration(love lua) and workflow. It’s been treating me quite well , probably will stick to it for few more years.
awesome is awesome. It was my first tiling WM and it will likely be my only one. Lua is my favorite language so it was extremely easy for me to get it set up exactly how I wanted it
I'm an i3 guy, but dwm and awesome are really nice too
11:37 This is one of the most important and overlooked points you've made on this channel. Proper documentation is STILL a problem for soooo many packages, distros, WMs, etc., to the point where things like "They have excellent documentation" are thrown around constantly. That shouldn't be something we compliment! It should be a *_given._* A shell script is one thing, but something as complex and configurable as a *_window manager_* should come with good documentation. You don't get brownie points for that, it should be the standard. Sad that it isn't. Okay, ramble over. Great vid!
awesome and xmond at meh tier. quality bait
And this video made me want to try to use a WM, and here I am, with a configured bspwm after a week... YAY!
I was going to install a window manager on an old laptop then I saw this pop up in my RUclips recommendations. Perfect timing :D.
DWM is the best because at the end of the day any of the worthy wms are just dwm clones in other programming languages or with config files.
It was interesting hearing you go through the pros and cons of every one of these, but I'm quite disappointed by the lack of a single Wayland compositor. The scene is really blooming now, with some fascinating, unique projects such as hyprland and newm (let alone the well-established sway and wayfire).
Wayland in of itself is hardly blooming. Do you just want to switch back to X if you're doing more than browsing the internet and writing?
@@phonewithoutquestion80 No, I do everything on Wayland. Anything that doesn't support it directly works perfectly through XWayland.
@@phonewithoutquestion80 gtk and qt apps work natively on wayland, which is 99% of apps on linux.
I'm running Wayland right now with no issues (in Gnome though).
Hadn't looked into those, but I'd definitely be delighted to see a current review of what stage waymonad, dwl, river, velox, vivarium and hikari have reached by now.
There's literally a webpage that only does tier lists easy and accesible and this lad goes and makes his own on GIMP for them not being open source.
Derek, I like your style, but even I get triggered with bs like this lmao
Happy to see that the Windows Managers that I have actively used for an extended period of time throughout my time being a Linux user, made it to your GREAT tier
awesome --> lua
xmonad --> haskell
qtile --> python
bspwm --> bash
dwm --> C
exwm --> elisp
stumpwm --> common lisp
leftwm --> toml ?
i3 --> i3 internal
herbst --> ?
maybe it's time i took another look at haskell, to see if haskell still hates me.
The thumbnail for this video is messed up, that's what makes me curious to watch. I'd agree with the thumbnail, that's to keep Xmonad below dwm because it's harder to configure Xmonad than to patch dwm.
I use i3 because of the built-in tabbed layout, which I believe is the only one with this type of nice tabs already built for you. My bar sucks big time, I use the standard one that comes with i3. The reason is I just don't hve the motivation to spend a lot of time on a WM or a bar. If I can't get it done within an hour I won't bother. I have other things to do and I'm not a programmer.
Way to keep it real DT. I really enjoyed the tier list format.
About exwm being slow/crashing - I haven't used it personally but in general window managers being single threaded is totally fine (see awesomewm), it's probably just a crappy buggy implementation.
This video inspired me to make an open source Tier list maker web application
The great thing about DWM is that it is very easy to configure on one computer and transfer the executable to another computer, even a different distros and it makes all these computers feel the same.
exactly ... nd its guaranteed that its going to run as fast as possible. great for old machines
Very true :)
Awesome is one of the first tiling manager I've used, and honestly, it'll be the last. The default config is so good that I hardly ever bother editing it, and it just works. Lua is an amazing programming language and it's being adopted by more and more projects and I think for good reason.
Yeah, I didn't like my first couple attempts at using i3 and bspwm (albeit very briefly). Recently I set up awesomewm on a new install and Lua is so much easier to work with to customize it myself. Been loving it so far
Lua might be amazing if you start out with it. The lack of brackets doesn't really help readability though. Same goes for python. I much prefer something like C
@@TheExileFox Oh I agree it can be hard to read, but it’s far from my first programming language. But, it’s nice having a programming language for customizing my desktop instead of predetermined switches and config files.
Wow I wrote a comment almost exactly like this one and then scrolled down and saw this
No, it's not a good language lmao. Its one of the most hated languages by far but ok.
I've always thought that wms like DWM would be great for creating custom kiosk boards, etc. Any of the tiling managers would but in a commercial setting running binarys seems a heap more secure.
Meh tbh you can do alot of dwm things outside dwm, sometimes even easier. If you're not a minimal nut i'd stay away from it
you can actualy start X and a program directly without window manager.
@@rizkyadiyanto7922 heard that one from an old man who claimed 'that how it was back in the 90s'
@@rizkyadiyanto7922 I've done that. It's a horrible UX.
@@encycl07pedia- you can make a script or something to do it at startup.
I'm a programmer, and learning Haskell fried my brain. I started learning it to do my own, from the ground up, Xmonad configuration. I managed to get Xmonad to a state I liked, and some of it was a bit more complex, but damn I hate Haskell as a language. Despite getting Xmonad to a state of my likeing, I just went back to Qtile. Python is just so much easier to digest for me. I'm mainly a C# developer, but I can work with basically anything with C based syntax fairly well, so Python is just easier for me to poke around in and experiment with compared to Xmonad+Haskell.
I agree that i3's config is limiting, but i3-msg and IPC makes up for it. So you could basically use any language to configure it or to add custom features.
Now that I think about it, it is just crazy how different my WM-Journey could have become. A few weeks ago I tried out SpectrWM and I'm certain, the Philipp of the past would have been amazed by it. I would have liked how it is configured and the fact that the bar is included.
Eventually I was stucked with BSPWM and I use it till today, mostly because I can use whatever bar with it I would like to. Also since it is configured by default in a shell script I learned a thing or two about scripting as well which always comes in handy in *Nix Systems.
Even though I still have a lot of trouble to customize Awesome, Qtile and Xmonad I can see why someone would put them in top tier.
However, thanks to that channel and the incredible community I learned a lot about *Nix, Systemadministration, DEs and WM. *Nix systems are so cool operating systems and after more than 17 months I am still amazed how well these are thought through.
Whew! Glad leftwm made the ok tier. I love it because of the Themes.
DT is a game of words
DT - Derek Tyler
DT - Distro Tube
DT - Dynamic Tiler
I absolutely would love to see more tierlists from you, DT! Enjoyed the video - keep up the great work!
I'd also like to see a tier list for stacking window managers.
Never used a wm, but J K L ; makes more intuitive sense to me, or even K L ; ' could be good imo.
(as sometimes I'll play games with my hands reversed, so like to map WASD to PL;' as it's a lot closer for reaching Shift and Ctrl than some other common bindings)
I think everyone who has used a computer in the last 30 years has used a window manager.
Yeah that's the thing about Linux, people stick with standards with arbitrary decisions. HJKL was probably or was made because of the creators keyboard symbols. If you shift movement keys one step to the left, that should be a punishable crime. If you are a touch typist you can probably relate to being extremely uncomfortable to leave the homerow like that for what? Seriously, is the command mode in vim that important to screw up the home row?
bspwm is a hyped tiler, DT you get this wrong all the time, it do open windows after the last window open, and you can choose to pick the dir. of the next window, but normaly you use it in auto mode.
I will be sure to use exwm and stumpwm thanks for the recomendations
i think if i did it to this list
1st spectrwm
2nd qtile
3rd awesome
4th xmonad
5th i3-gaps
im currently gonna try to actually config i3, but im gonna try spectr and qtile also because of the "new" user factor
I do use EXWM when working on some coding project, or on my thesis and I really don't want any distractions. Besides it being really awesome to use it when you really need to concentrate on some specific task, I wouldn't recommend it.
Exwm ❤️
awesome is so cool,period,love hearing you yak dude
Tier lists are great and I think they are great for new to linux users. Would love to see more!
For a manual tiling I guess it's good if your setting it up for someone that don't want to accidentally mess their layout while working. Great for a CCTV setup, linux + cctv software makes for a "hard to breach" home security system
i3 is considered the best by many people! What if you don't know programming languages (there are people in the world who are not programmers). What if you just don't need to go that deep in settings?
If you want many people to use Linux, don't force them to learn Lua just to adjust some settings in a window manager. Linux is not for programmers, it's for people, so i3 is GREAT.
he doesnt, he just stated the fact that other wms have more options to play with if you are advanced enough, i3wm is still great
you should give riverwm a look! (it's over on wayland, and a smaller project, but it's really, really cool. It's especially cool for debugging because it can run nested sessions, so you can launch it from a terminal and see where the errors come from).
It's written in zig, configured in any scripting language (personally I went with lua), it's a dynamic tiler and does not coe with a bar (waybar is reccommended by the dev. I just don't use a bar, personally)
Have set it up on my machine, and boy it is beautiful. But until they implement the "startontag" feature. i can't bring myself to use it as my daily driver.
Happy with dwm at the moment.
I haven't watch the whole video yet but I already know XMonad is going in the great tier. And that's what it deserves! I absolutely hate dynamic tilers but I just can't use anything other than XMonad now thanks to the BSP layout that makes it behave as a manual tiler
What a nice way to make Tier List !!!
I like your ranking cause to me awesome, qutile and xmonad are my best window managers of choice. Then dwm. That's all.
I started with BSPWM. It just made sense for me. There was an example config, then I scraped github for bspwm configs. It made me felt home. Even though I knew nothing about how window tiling works. But I was in love with the binary tree layout.
Then I hopped i3wm and felt it to be trash. Cuz, basically it was not binary tree. 🙂 I hover my mouse (yes, I was still using mouse back then) into a large horizontal window and expect it to be split into two vertical window, and it didn't work. Plus every time I open a new window it aligns it vertically. After 3/4 window, the layout felt trash and unusable. I mean, how is that even productive? Duh!
Then, I tried DWM. The layout was very confusing at first. I was used to tiling my windows in grid manner in bspwm. But DWM uses m&s. Which didn't work for me.
After some years, I again hopped them. And I found both of them to be great. After I knew how a tree layout works, i3wm felt right. But still bspwm felt more to my type.
Now I jump between bspwm and DWM. Only thing I don't like about DWM is, I have to recompile it every time I change any keybindings.
It's true that i3 uses its own language for configuration that is really easy and not powerful but it is not true that it can't be configured with whatever language you want, it just makes it oprional instead of mandatory (which is the best option for new twm users). Check i3-msg
I'm gonna finally check out Awesome after years of i3, thanks!
How about Sway (the Wayland clone of i3)? I use it because I have problems with tearing in Xorg and Wayland solved them for me and it is pretty good, I haven't had a single issue until now. In combination with Waybar, everything from the ricing to the workflow, works perfectly.
sway ❤❤❤❤❤
And it has vim keys by default
DT has work he needs to get done. Wayland isn't a work machine protocol. It's for very basic usage, then you go back to bulk standard X11 for actual work.
@@phonewithoutquestion80My line of work is in the academia and Wayland has been perfect for me since day one. With X11 I had huge screen tearing problems on the laptop which were not resolved even after messing with the TearFree option and AccelMethod.
Everyone has different needs and does different work on his machine. Don't judge only by your own standards.
Just a minor comment; you don't need to create a new layer every time you want your text in a new layer. When you click to type outside of an existing textbox, it creates its own layer. Then if you want text merged with the layer below it you have to do it manually. You can even paint on a text layer, but then the text stops being editable. Finally, if you notice on your right where the layers are displayed, you will see that the layers you created and named "great", "good", etc are actually empty and the text is on separate layers. Sorry for being that guy, but I do digital art and it was painful to see that chaos being manifested.
Should probably just set the line spacing to line up with the boxes and use it as a text editor.
I know it's not an actual window manager so don't crucify me, but the Material Shell Gnome Extension is an easy way for someone who's new to tiling window managers to try it out and see if it's for them. Since it's a Gnome extension it's really easy to switch between Material Shell and the default Gnome experience. Originally Material Shell was built on top of awesomewm before the author switched to Gnome Shell as the base, though you can still build a version of Material Shell on top of awesomewm as the project has been maintained by someone else after the author pivoted to Gnome.
dude the exact thing happened to me in the documentation with dspwm that you mention. with the tree diagram. that is so funny!
I ended up on arco/awesome for the last 2 to 4 years probably, and i just moved garuda/sway, really liking it atm.
good video, cheers.
I've used Herbstluftwm since 2014, can't say I love it, it's just the fact that I lost the drive to discover new things when I had to shift most of my focus into medical school for years and that happened to be the WM I was using when that happened, it's also the only tiling window manager I've ever used.
yes more tierlists pls. they r as awesome as awesome
about the 'hjkl' and 'jkl;' : the position of the ';' is not the same in every qwerty keyboard around the world, where the key ';' is positioned in US keyboards is the character 'ç' in mine (Brazilian abnt2), the ';' key is on the lower row
On German keyboards, it's even worse, because here it's Shift+. (period) to type a ; (semicolon).
I was looking for this comment, indeed in many other keyboard (may be on all except US or "english") some default tillin WM manager keys makes no sense or are messed up. There could be some quick initial mapping sorting this by selecting a layout on every default configuration on any tiling WM
Stumpwm is probably the best one for me
This channel has been lacking a video like this. I've already been using awesome for quite a while, I chose it based on your other videos and got just what I wanted. I'm sure that this video will make it easier for others to make a choice (btw come on, we all know exwm is the best)
One thing that is important to me is wayland support, and I see that many window managers still are struggling with this...
Wayland is struggling to be anything more than a basic web browsing and document editing environment.
After using i3 off and on for the last couple of years I just installed Qtile a few days ago. What the hell was I thinking! Should've switched a long time ago!
Used Awesome, config via Lua is great BUT backwards compatibility and documentation sucks: after upgrade too many things didn't worked. Switched to i3wm for 3 years now, still happy.
No love or hate for Calm Window Manager (cwm)? The greatest thing about F/LOSS aside from the freedoms is the multitude of choice for almost every type of software.
Never have used the H, J, K, L or even ; keybindings. I use the arrow keys in VIM and in any TWM. I even change VIM keybindings to suite me.
Also, if you ever took typing class you know home row keys for the right hand are J, K, L, ; So the default in those programs is very improper and I find awkward in use. My hands always sit on the home row keys on a keyboard and G and H are always open.
I'd love to see some more tier list for software videos like this one!
I would argue that the VIM default keybindings are bad, not I3. since, on the standart QWERTY layout, JKL; is the home row. The only reason vim uses HJKL instead is that it's older than the QWERTY layout, and so didn't have a defined home row. I3's keybindings are therefore better then vim, but vim keybinding is just so ubiquitous that nobody expects the change and therefore is percieved as bad
so i love ratpoison because its just a .ratpoisonrc and it can be simple to complex depending on you the person. also great vid bra!
i think this is the first window tiling tier list. Bismuth for KDE is also good.
qtile
The thing with jkl; is that those are the proper finger positions for touch typing, they are 'terrible' for vim keys, but correct for touch typing.
You really baited us with the thumbnail, putting xmonad in the c tier
Xmonad I put in "Okay" to "Meh". But that's in my teir list.
I forget where I heard this information, it might have been from Uncle Bob Clean Coders, but I can't fully remember.
But if you know absolutely nothing about any programming languages, and you have an end goal of wanting to fully master several of them...
If you start with Haskell to begin with, you will be better off in the learning process. And with that one being first, when you go to learn the others, in general you will be a better programmer.
that stare at the beginning sent me into fight or flight
Awesome!! Awesome is awesome!
Yes plz for more tier list DT.
I am using Wayfire because I love what wayland has been doing lately. I wonder, where that goes.
You should try IceWM in antiX! The antiX implementation is the only WM I got comfortable enough to use daily as a regular Plasma user.
A terminal emulator tier list, but in addition to the ones most of us know, it would be useful to include the newer ones that have been made for Wayland (e.g. Foot).
Bspwm user here. Wanna try awesome. Qtile and xmonad could be the best but i dont wanna learn haskell or python so will stay with bspwm and will try awesome
my favourite is AwesomeWM: you can build a whole Desktop Environement with it
Qtile, a.k.a the only tiling wm that I can figure out how to use
Great overview, DT! 😎 Still amazed at Qtile! I might give Xmonad a try at some point. Until then, Qtile is my WM of choice.
So, I will look into Awesome and DWM. The former is new user friendly and the latter I always wanted to try but was a bit intimidated by it having to be recompiled from C everytime you want a new feature.
Don't be intimidated by it. It takes literally 5 seconds to compile and restart dwm (mod + shift + q). Maybe if you're constantly changing it as a hobby, it could be tiresome, but if you just want to make adjustments that fit your workflow better (apply patches, change configuration settings), compilation is a non-issue.
great thing is once u 'build' dwm per ur liking, that build is going to be useful for yearssss no major changes nd u can port it very easily on other machines
Hello DT.
For start I just wan't to clear that I'm no i3wm fanboy (used it in the past, now DWM user).
I don't get it. You put Bspwm in Good tier, mentioning that You have to write your own config (despite having to also install sxhkd for keybindings), but You place i3wm in Meh because it's config (easy to read and customize) has "missplaced" few keybinds?? "Say whaaat??" Not to mention that there are some "extentions" to make i3wm literally dynamic tiler (or allowing to spawn new windows in tabs out of the box).
I must disagree with You on this. I would put i3wm in good or at least ok, but for sure placed it above bspwm. I also can't agree with placing qtile as great. I admitt that it's easy to customize using Python, but the biggest Con is that You cannot restart it in-place (like i3) to see changes right away, not to mention no feedback if error occurs.
And lastly - how on Earth leftwm and spectrwm placed above i3wm? Just because using Haskell? No way. Leftwm doesn't even come with any panel by default, so it's disqualified as for new users.
Best regards
hehe, looking forward to when u make the wayland tiling wm tier list in 3-5 years :p
yes please especially now when we have Hyprland, River, Vivarium, Sway etc..
Holy crap great video
What I was waiting for.