On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:17:27 -0800 (PST) Daniel Clemente <dcl441-b...@yahoo.com> wrote:
DC> To those who feel too limited by ion's complexity or Tuomo's DC> opinions, I would recommend wmii. I successfully migrated from DC> ion3 to wmii and don't regret it. The migration is easy since DC> they're feature-alike, and it's faster to customize. Brief summary of my experience looking for a good window manager: Ion3: not actively developed, also I intensely dislike Lua (this is a matter of personal taste). Doesn't integrate with Gnome well. Installation is easy. Customization is OK. wmii (as of 6 months ago): a real duct-tape window manager, lots of broken advice online because there's like 30 ways to set it up. Once you get it going it's all right, but you better have lots of shell scripting experience. Doesn't integrate with Gnome well. Installation is hard if you don't know what you're doing. I respect the design, it's very powerful and flexible, but wouldn't recommend this one to new users. StumpWM (as of 2 months ago): pretty good feature-wise, does almost everything OK, very slow if you don't fine-tune the VM. If you don't know Common Lisp it will be very confusing. I like Lisp so it was OK for me. Also it doesn't integrate with Gnome well. Installation is OK with Ubuntu. I would have loved to recommend this one because Lisp is so flexible but it's just not for everyone. XMonad: really good in every way, configuring beyond the basics requires learning Haskell. To me that was actually a plus, I like Haskell a lot but certainly it's not for everyone. This one is very fast, has multiple layouts besides tabbed (full screen, side by side, etc.). Supports floating windows, integrates well with Gnome. Extending it is easy. Installation is really easy with Ubuntu and the docs are good (lots of sample configs and every module is documented). I'd recommend this one to people looking to try a new WM, unless they want deep customization and Haskell is outside their comfort zone. Ted
