this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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Thanks for the suggestions. Do you think I can get away with running just
xfwm4instead of the entire XFCE DE? I'm trying to stay light, which is why I would like to avoid DEs for the most part.Isn't
labwcjust a compositor?I've run plain ol' openbox without a desktop environment on top of it, and it's quite nice. IIRC I also had a standalone status bar application, but I can't remember which one I used.
There are a couple utility programs (obconf and obkey?) that help to configure everything comfortably.
Ah, I thought that
xfwm4wouldn't work without XFCE, but I'm wrong. This is a good idea, thanks a bunch! I'll have to look at panels/status-bars and see what I like. I'm not really one to configure GUI so this might be a learning curvexfwm4 could work w/o Xfce, though I doubt that it would be worth the effort to script the missing bits by hand. Xfce is pretty modular; once you turn off the tracker/indexer, and whatever useless package manager gui the distro may have included (e.g., 'dnfdragora'), it's pretty lightweight. You can also turn off the compositor. The stock xfce4-panel is also miles ahead (IMHO) of various independent panel programs, both in functionality, as well as looks -- and its widgets are also entirely modular.
labwc is a window manager in the vein of openbox; I guess under wayland a window manager has to be a compositor too (?); but it's no different from sway in this regard.
There's also wayfire; which is a bit more beefy, and aims to preserve all the compiz plugins. Some of those are notorious for being silly eye candy (windows that burn down on close; wobbly windows, etc.) but others are pretty useful (esp. those that emulate the exposé view from OS X; pinning/grouping windows, etc.) -- though in my experience it isn't as stable as labwc; which is understandable because it's a lot more complex.
Thanks for the comment. I haven't played around with XFCE enough, but it doesn't seem as light on resources in recent years as other, leaner WMs (that is to be expected, but XFCE is no longer the bastion of "DE with Low RAM usage" like it and LXDE were).
I'll look into the other options you mentioned. Thanks!
You'll also want a root window and other essential features. This is provided by xfdesktop4 (or you can use an equivalent from another DE). You can use just the window manager if you want but you won't like it. Or you can use something like Openbox which includes everything needed (it's a tiny complete DEs not just a window manager).
Thanks, I'm looking at OpenBox, IceWM and FWM for now. I believe there are some other niche floating window managers too, but after attempting to configure ratpoison a while back (after which I realised that it was no longer supported) I don't want to configure as much for a WM to work.