Do any of you use an Alternative WM like awesome or Xmonad?
I recently gave Xmonad a shot and it is pretty cool, however it comes with a bunch of pitfalls which I think the average user will find frustrating.
- If you are not familiar with scripting or basic coding, you will likely get lost in trying to configure them properly. eg: Xmonad is written in Haskell and it can be a difficult to know what specific things do, but there are docs available, and the configs are well commented
- They require more than you think and everything is essentially a plugin. You need to configure your own compositors, well plug them into Xmonad, this is also done in its configs
- Dependencies. While I am sure that i3 or awesome have less dependencies, Xmonad by default uses Xterm - when i first tried I never knew this and had to log into an XFCE session to read which packages I needed to download.
- Keyboard shortcuts. This is something that I am still busy mapping for myself as I am not sure what works for me just yet, but if you are not used to using custom keymappings, a WM will be crappy to use
- Not every application may play well with your WM - this is usually well documented on your distro specific forum.
- WM can break non-related Desktop environments
It will likely take me another 2 weeks to a month to get Xmonad set up the way I want it, but if you are willing to give it a shot I think it will be cool and very r/Unixporn but if I can give you guys some advice - do not remove your previous Desktop environment and make sure you have its WM configs backed up. I gave this a shot yesterday without doing any back ups and I ruined XFCE becuase I needed to turn off renderers and compositors etc etc.
I recently gave Xmonad a shot and it is pretty cool, however it comes with a bunch of pitfalls which I think the average user will find frustrating.
- If you are not familiar with scripting or basic coding, you will likely get lost in trying to configure them properly. eg: Xmonad is written in Haskell and it can be a difficult to know what specific things do, but there are docs available, and the configs are well commented
- They require more than you think and everything is essentially a plugin. You need to configure your own compositors, well plug them into Xmonad, this is also done in its configs
- Dependencies. While I am sure that i3 or awesome have less dependencies, Xmonad by default uses Xterm - when i first tried I never knew this and had to log into an XFCE session to read which packages I needed to download.
- Keyboard shortcuts. This is something that I am still busy mapping for myself as I am not sure what works for me just yet, but if you are not used to using custom keymappings, a WM will be crappy to use
- Not every application may play well with your WM - this is usually well documented on your distro specific forum.
- WM can break non-related Desktop environments
It will likely take me another 2 weeks to a month to get Xmonad set up the way I want it, but if you are willing to give it a shot I think it will be cool and very r/Unixporn but if I can give you guys some advice - do not remove your previous Desktop environment and make sure you have its WM configs backed up. I gave this a shot yesterday without doing any back ups and I ruined XFCE becuase I needed to turn off renderers and compositors etc etc.
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j/k - it’s easy enough to bring outlook or chrome to the foreground.