Anyone on Solus with a Minimal Window Manager? Which ones?

downhill

elfprince I hope development on Openbox continues. I have concerns because not much has been done development-wise on it for awhile. I've looked at other window managers and I haven't seen anything that would be a good replacement, at least for my liking.

elfprince

downhill What kind of things keep you on Openbox?

downhill

elfprince

I prefer a floating window manager versus a tiling window manager.
I am familiar with it.
It's better and more lightweight than a full-blown desktop environment.
It pairs well with the Tint2 panel.
It's easy to learn.

OldTechBloke did a really nice video on Openbox and Tint2 that may be persuasive.

elfprince

downhill Yes, I like OldTechBloke and I viewed that one as well. Like I said earlier, I've used OB before for a while, but was looking for an even lighter feel, without the extra panels and accessory programs. That's when I stumbled upon JWM, and stayed on it since then. 😀 My old time favourite from BSD days, Window Maker, didn't compare as well either.

downhill

Reading through the thread, I realized I didn't tell my story.

I was introduced to Openbox and Tint2 as a desktop environment when I discovered Crunchbang Linux. I had purchased an ASUS EeePC and Windows ran like a dog on it. A bit of searching turned up Crunchbang. I installed Crunchbang on the EeePC and I was smitten.

I stopped using Crunchbang because I really didn't have the time to tinker with Linux at the time. In 2010 when I saw a Windows 8 preview, I said no way and decided to install Crunchbang in a VM. I eventually installed Crunchbang in a separate partition on my laptop and I've continued using Openbox and Tint2 to this day.

One other thing that I forgot to mention about why I like Openbox is the keybindings. As someone who has suffered from repetitive strain injury (RSI), using the keyboard more has been a lifesaver.

elfprince

downhill I've used Crunchbang for a while during my short days of distro search. It went all right, until something broke after an update, and I simply threw up my arms and moved on. Not an expert to fix Debian thingies. 🤣
It was nice while it lasted.

downhill

elfprince You should have asked for help. When I began using Crunchbang as my daily driver, I was using a Dell Inspiron laptop that had an AMD GPU, requiring a proprietary driver. Kernel upgrades would break the driver resulting in a black screen. I would have to manually re-install the driver to get things working again.

elfprince

downhill At that time I considered it a very young enthusiasts' distro, so probably did not have much faith in staying with it. 😅

tomocafe

I use i3 on CentOS for work and I use a common set of dotfiles for work and home (where I run Solus obviously 😉). So technically I have both Budgie and i3 set up on Solus. I’m on Budgie like 95% of the time, but if I’m doing something that requires lots of terminals open, or some type of coding work, I tend to use i3. I’m a bit old school with my development workflow (vim, grep, gdb, ...) and the applications I tend to work on are all CLIs, especially shells. So it’s a lot of terminals. 👍

elfprince

I prefer mouse driven WMs, and avoid keyboard binding stuff. Guess for same reason also never got into emacs. Used vi, pico, and now sticking with nano and kate. Yes, I know about micro, but don't feel like moving over. 🤣

WetGeek

elfprince Yes, I know about micro, but don't feel like moving over.

Compared with Nano, it only requires typing one additional letter.

Girtablulu

elfprince you are seeing the light at the end of the dark tunnel, you need to walk to it and install micro 😉

elfprince

WetGeek I only type 2 letters: ed. 😆 It is my alias for nano -I .

h3o

elfprince RE: startx w/ xinitrc

hey, so been meaning to follow up on this comment to better understand how you're using startx w/ your xinitrc. I got rid of lightdm over the weekend and wrote a script that I can run from tty that lets me choose which DE or WM to login to. I have (1) Budgie, (2) i3, (3) Spectrwm, and (4) Sway as my four options. So now I basically just login to my user account from tty, run the script from tty, select an option from the script output (1,2,3,or 4), and it boots me into the corresponding environment from there. Seems to be working well - and lets me boot in/out of either an X or Wayland environment - but wondering how that compares to running startx with some xinit logic instead.

elfprince

h3o Basicalliy is the same idea/process. I login on tty, then use startx to execute .xinitrc file. The .xinitrc specifies which programs I wish to start up and which wm or de I wish to use.

downhill

elfprince Don't know if it would work on Solus, but I came across a post recently where you could specify the window manager or desktop environment you wish to use from the command line as follows:

startx <path-to-window-manager-or-desktop-executable>

For example:

startx \usr\bin\openbox

elfprince

downhill Neat, but I need to set some X11 things and start some programs first. That is why I would prefer to use startx with .xinitrc . 😀

elfprince

Girtablulu Micro is installed, just not used. 🤣

stalebrim

I use i3 every once in a while if that's minimal enough. Though I usually end up being back at Plasma.

nazar

for quite some time i3 and rofi as a launcher. No major changes to config, mostly I use three virtual desktops 1=emacs 2=firefox 3=kitty(terminal). All is running on almost a decade year old laptop and solus, that's how I roll, and it has been good experience :-)

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