The Top 8 Linux Window Managers of 2020

as 2020 winds to a close it's time to reflect on what some of the best free and open source software of the year has been i've already done my top five linux distributions of 2020 and today i wanted to do my top eight linux window managers for the year 2020 and this will be a mixture of floating window managers and tiling window managers and starting out at number 8 is the i3 window manager i3 is a very popular tiling window manager it has a very easy to understand syntax as far as the config file that it has it's written not in necessarily a programming language but it's written in a very simple syntax that even someone that doesn't know anything about programming or scripting should be able to figure out how to edit this config file i3 is what i like to call a manual tiler meaning that you can decide on the fly exactly where the next window is going to be placed on the screen so if i do mod v in my config so super v i can do a vertical split so the next window i open will be up underneath my current window if i instead did mod z for a horizontal split now the next window i open will be out to the side horizontally so that is a manual tiler and that's what i3 is and if i use any terminology that you're unsure about because i'm going to talk about manual telling window managers and dynamic tiling window managers and things like that i urge you to go check out my guide to tiling window manager video it's a lengthy video it's about an hour long video but it will answer all your questions about window managers in general and especially about tiling window managers one neat thing about i3 that's unique really to i3 most other window managers don't have this is i3 has what is known as binding modes where i hit a key binding and it gets gets me into a different mode where i could have another set of key bindings let me show you if i did mod r right now you see at the top it tells me i'm now in resize mode so now i have a set of key bindings just for this mode and hjkl the motion keys is what i use you know j to go up k to go down because it's resizing the windows that's what that mode is to get out of this mode i just hit escape by default i3 has three different layout modes you have this particular layout here which is called the stacked layout and you see my two windows are now just displaying one window because i have a stack here you see the different title bars that are stacked on top of each other you can click on them with a mouse or you can do the motion keys j and k as well to do that if i do mod w i go into a tabbed layout where instead of the title bars being stacked on top of each other they're out to the side in tabs and of course the other layout is simply the standard tiling window mode number seven on my top eight window managers of 2020 is ice wm now iswm is a floating window manager rather than a tiling window manager so it's what most people are used to you just open a window it appears somewhere on the screen and you just drag it around with the mouse you resize it with the mouse you can minimize it to the panel it has a built-in panel too this is part of ice wm of your standard window controls on the windows you have a menu system very old school menu system very reminiscent to the old windows workflow like windows 98 windows xp no flashy tiling widget thingy buttons in the menu system like with windows 10 so for those of you that like a traditional kind of workflow and maybe you have a machine that's kind of underpowered too you know ice wm is perfect for that because it's a very fast and lightweight window manager and quite frankly it's attractive i mean for an old-school kind of window manager it has that retro look but it looks good other than the menu that's on the panel you can get the same start menu anywhere on the desktop simply by right-clicking on the desktop for those of you looking for a distribution that actually has iswm installed and configured out of the box i strongly recommend antics coming in at number six is spectre wm or spectrum depending on how you want to pronounce it i think the w in the name is actually kind of synonymous for a u this project actually used to be called scrat wm i guess scrotum and they ended up changing the name to something more appropriate spectrum but spectre wm is a fantastic dynamic tiling window manager and my favorite window managers typically are dynamic tiling window managers spectre wm much like i3 has a config file written in a very easy to understand syntax so if i pull up the config file you can see it's nothing crazy yeah anybody can edit this file there's no programming it's not written in c or python or haskell or anything like that the reason it comes in at number six and not higher on my list is because of these simple config files it and i3 as well it is limiting in the configuration you can do because by not being configured in the language that the window manager is actually written in it is limiting somewhat on what you can do but for the most part all the options most people want are there being a dynamic tiling window manager probably the most common layout the most popular layout in dynamic window managers is what is known as the master and stack mode and that is the default layout here inspector wms master and stack it has a lot of the same functions that you would expect in most other dynamic tiling window managers spectre wm does have a very simple panel that is built in it is a bit of a chore to configure it but it's not too bad for those of you wanting some information on how to configure spectre wm i have done a video about this particular window manager on my channel in the past so look for that video and coming in at number five is another floating window manager this time it is open box open box i have a soft spot for open box because if this was the very first standalone window manager that i ever used was open box and it is very configurable and just it looks good it's light it's fast it has this customizable right-click menu that you can actually have scripts output dynamic information into the menu for example i could open my music player right now this is the dead beef music player and i'm gonna mute this because i don't want it to actually bleed through but i'm going to play a song and if i right click on my open box menu i have this music player script that actually tells me the name of the song what the run time is what playlist it would be in and i could even control the music player through my right-click open box menu i could pause the player so that is very cool and i've got all kinds of these shell scripts and python scripts that output information into my open box right-click menus such as virtualbox here here are all my virtual machines that i have installed inside virtualbox right now that way i don't have to open up virtualbox to open up these virtual machines i just click on them and they automatically open up one cool thing about open box is you can configure it to do some pseudo tiling for example window snapping i have key combinations where i could snap this window to the left side or to the right side or the top half or the bottom half of the screen i've also got some key bindings where i could resize things make it full screen i have a key binding of course to close the window as well so open box is one of those window managers that for standalone window manager is probably the most popular one out there in linux because open box for a long time was the default window manager within the lxde desktop environment and for the most part it's the one that typically ships with the lxq desktop environment although lxq doesn't have necessarily a window manager built in you can use any window manager within it what most distributions that use lxq ship with is actually the open box window manager coming in at number four is the original dynamic window manager dwm dynamic window manager it is a dynamic tiling manager and it has the default layout the master and stack layout that so many people love and you know it has all the standard controls that you expect most tiling window managers to have now dwm is built by the suckless guys you go and grab the source code from suckless.org and it's very minimal by design it's written in under i think 2000 lines of code it was written in c and because of the anti-bloat stance of the sucklus guys and the fact that they have this strict lines of code limit there's not a lot of features built into dwm it's very light on features really to get the most out of it you have to add all of these patches to dwm and that's one of the issues a lot of people have with it is the patching of dwm is a bit tedious anytime you make a change of any kind to dwm you have to recompile so that can be an issue for some people but to be honest i find dwm one of the most comfortable window managers that i've ever used for those of you wanting to get into dwm and you're unsure about it an easy way to check it out if you're on an arch-based system is simply to install my build of dwm that is in the aur the arch user repository simply install dwm distrotube dash get coming in at top three getting the bronze medal is the awesome window manager awesome was originally a fork of dwm it wanted to be a much more well-rounded fully functional window manager than what dwm was at at that time but it was sport from dwm many many years ago more than a decade ago like 10 15 years ago and because of that dwm and awesome actually don't share much of the same code anymore awesome is configured in the lua programming language and if you know a little lua scripting that makes awesome window manager a very powerful window manager because you can do so much with it this is probably the most extensible window manager available some of the screenshots that you find of awesome window manager go to unix porn over on reddit and look at some of the awesome window manager screenshots you find with all these cool lua widgets on the desktop and you know whatever you can imagine you can make happen with the awesome window manager because it was originally a fork of dwm of course the standard layout is the master and stack layout you know your standard kind of window controls here the panel at the top is extremely customizable with a lot of built-in widgets and that's one of the really cool things about awesome you don't have to go and find a third-party panel and try to configure this thing it also has a right-click menu that's built into it i sometimes forget about this right-click menu because it's a tiling window manager you never really are clicking on the desktop you're often not even using your mouse but for those of you that are used to a right-click menu maybe you're coming from a floating window manager such as open box or ice wm it's a very easy transition to make awesome window manager your first tiling window manager and our silver medalist coming in at number two is q-tile q-tile is a fantastic dynamic tiling window manager so that makes it very similar to dwm awesome spectre then we have the standard master and stack layout a lot of the same kind of things that you can do and all of those other dynamic tilers you can do in qtil q-tile has long been one of my favorite window managers i've spent a lot of time covering q-tile on the youtube channel and really before i started talking about q-tile a lot on camera most people had never heard of this particular tiling window manager and it's been around for years it's been around for many years and you never heard anybody talk about it you couldn't find youtube videos about it it was like it didn't even exist and i started talking about it on the youtube channel i'm very proud that now a lot of people are actually giving qtile a serious look it seems to be gaining a lot of popularity we have linux distributions actually making q-tile editions of their distributions if you want to try out a great pre-configured qtile desktop check out arco linux they make a qtile edition one of the really neat things about qtile is the fact that it is configured in python this window manager is written and configured entirely in python so if you know a little bit about python and most people know a little python even if you don't python is a pretty easy programming language to get up to speed with just looking at this config file you can tell these are all the key bindings i have set it this is not very hard to read i set the group names here i set the layouts i want to use by the way this really neat panel at the top here that is actually built into qtile much like the awesome window manager q-tile comes with its own panel and it has a ton of built-in widgets so it's very easy to configure to your liking you don't have to go grab a third-party panel and try to shoehorn that thing into q-tile and our gold medalists coming in as the number one window manager of 2020 is xmonet xmoned is another dynamic tiling window manager the default layout is once again the master and stack layout it has a lot of the same window controls that the other dynamic tiling window managers we covered in this list also had a matter of fact there are two window managers in my top eight that are exact clones of x-moned q-tile and spectre wm essentially are exact clones of xmo.net except they're written in different programming languages than xmoded xmonad is written in haskell it is written and configured entirely in haskell which makes it one of the more difficult window managers to get into i'm not going to lie you know you you're going to have to learn a little haskell to configure this thing and not everybody wants to have to learn haskell which is a functional programming language it's it's not something that most people want to jump into especially if you're not a programmer you've never done any programming haskell's a tough one to get into as a first programming language now to make it a little less painful a while back i did a video on getting started with haskell it's about an hour long video where i cover some of the very basics with the haskell programming language i've also done tons of videos about xmonet how to configure your xmode config and of course i have my exmonet config and my xmobar configs over on my gitlab by the way xmonad being rather minimal by design does not come with a built-in panel you have to use some third-party panel with it most exmonet users use which is a panel also written in haskell so that is my top eight window managers of 2020. now i know a lot of people are going to disagree with my top eight you're going to have different window managers that didn't make my top eight in your top eight and maybe you're gonna rank them a little differently i know not everybody likes the same things like i like dynamic window managers obviously from my list rather than manual tilers but a lot of you guys prefer the manual tilers some of you guys like floating window managers you don't really get tiling window managers and i understand that what i would love for you guys to do though is share your top five or your top eight window managers that you guys love to use in the comments below now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of the show devon friend gabe corbinian mitchell akami arch chris chuck david the other david donny dylan gregory lewis paul pick veganum scott and willie they are the producers of the show these guys they are my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this list of my top eight window managers of 2020 it wouldn't have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well these are all my supporters over on patreon because the distrotube channel is supported by you guys the community if you'd like to support my work please consider doing so look for distrotube over on patreon alright guys peace oh i forgot to add stump wm to the list

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 124,849

Keywords: window manager, desktop environment, gnu linux, window manager linux, i3 window manager, window managers linux, awesome window manager, dwm window manager, qtile, xmonad, spectrwm, openbox window manager, icewm, linux, distrotube, bspwm, herbstluftwm, i3 vs dwm, i3 vs xmonad, xmonad vs dwm, top window managers, best window manager, top tiling window manager, best tiling window manager

Id: wGXdqZv71CA

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/yzia2000]

bspwm?

[u/Danrobi1]

My Top 8 WM = Spectrwm

[u/AddicTemple]

Heil DWM!