DWM - Break Free From Your Desktop Environment

DWM is fast, flexible and a very stable window manager that has become
my favourite tiler over the last year or two.
It's something about it's simplicity and flexibility that appeals to me, and the fact that it always just works.
I feel it makes full blown desktop environments feel very clunky once you
acclimatise to a different, and in my opinion better, way of working.
With the latest release of DWM 6.3 I felt compelled to update my build, but to so in the least difficult way possible. For that reason I went with dwm-flexipatch, as reviewed in my video a few weeks ago.
This video talks through the process of installing dwm using my gitlab build which can be found here:
gitlab.com/OldTechBloke/suckl...
I hope you enjoy the video :-)
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Ramble On!

[@limpa756]

Girlfriend at her mums: He’s probably cheating on me Me: Glass of scotch with OTB on a Saturday evening

[@Blessed2bFresh]

Haha, good stuff 😆

[@Alex-ur3vt]

Binging your videos with a glass of lemon San Pellegrino on a Satursday evening just hits different

[@Thaleios]

Great beginner walkthrough! You could probably make a small series out of this on how to customize dwm. I enjoyed how you explain why you are using a particular patch and how you are able to do things that are commonly done for those that have never used a tiler.

[@nickchristopoulos9613]

Old Tekies must have a resonating vibe for the way we explain and folloe subjects. once again, thanks for your presentation of this subject. Regards, Nick C.

[@Blessed2bFresh]

I just installed Endeavour ystrdy. Good timing. I'll be following along as I've never installed a TWM from scratch, let alone with an existing DE. Appreciate ya Sir! 🍻

[@Little-bird-told-me]

the bike behind you Royal Enfield is made in my city :) Chennai, India. Hope you are having fun with it

[@philippeheyvaert3742]

Hello OTB, I'm using DWM. I live in Belgium so I have got an AZERTY keyboard. There's a patch for that. One key though wasn't right (I think it has to do with French AZERTY versus other AZERTY lay-outs). I've mailed the patch creator and I've got an almost instant respons. These guys (and girls) working on this Suckless project are TOP in my book! Playing with Linux since 2008 and using it as main driver since 2016. All the best from Belgium Philippe

[@OldTechBloke]

That’s impressive. They have a reputation for being unhelpful but it sounds like it’s undeserved

[@OldTechBloke]

IMPORTANT: Please make sure you edit the include line at the top of config.def.h and put your own user name there before compiling

[@aaronwatts1870]

Is this why only half the dwmbar loads up in Pop_OS? I didn't catch the comment as I was streaming on TV while following along on the laptop EDIT: Seen you fixed that! I wonder what's causing mine not to work

[@thedanmethenyshow.6004]

DWM got me interested in other stuff based on C. I used the C-shell for awhile. Which had led me to my favorite shell the mirbsd Korn shell aka mksh. I played around with it patches I think I had gotten to 4 before I started having issues but, I use it now with just one patch because that's all I need really. It's to each their own I think. I got my favorite floating window manager which is icewm but DWM is my favorite tiling window manager. I was thinking about doing a video about dwm 6.3 but I havnt noticed much difference yet. My favorite desktop environment has recently been kde. Anyway have a good one.

[@zoinkshaggy]

Great video as always. I might have to give this a try once I'm done messing about with the other window managers that I have been using. I'm using awesomewm at the moment. This flexipatch method for dwm looks much easier. Well thanks again for the great content.

[@taidee]

Oh yeah, the man is tiling hard 😂, thank you OTB. Keep on doing what you do man.

[@davidwayne9982]

You're EXACTLY right-- after hopping all over the freakin place- I got nothing but TIRED of hopping.. and they all start to look alike after a bit-- especially after I re-configure them!! ha. I've never done window managers so I'm going to take your word for it and try this for a while..

[@shutdowncnn6086]

OTB -- Another excellent video ! Thumbs up ! :)

[@StrikerEureka85]

i've been a litte too intimidated to try DWM but that flexipatch setup looks like what I just might need. thanks for the tip!

[@entelin]

Or maybe just start with the base program. There's no need to immediately start patching it. Personally if it's very far away from what you want then it may be better to use something else. For me the base was about 90% what I wanted, then I added a couple things and I was happy.

[@TheLinuxCast]

DWM is so good. Definitely my favorite. I always return to it no matter what.

[@OldTechBloke]

Thanks for the tip on breaking out the colour configs. You should try flexipatch mate

[@TheLinuxCast]

@@OldTechBloke I have. I like it. I haven’t tried the ST one yet though.

[@OldTechBloke]

Just as easy

[@zeocamo]

@@TheLinuxCast you should make a video like OTB on Flexipatch, maybe with the anybar patch with polybar and dwmc for getting sxhkd to work, i think it will be a hit

[@donaldmickunas8552]

Hey OTB, I made it part way through your video. I'm glad you have found both your distro and WM. I have as well. I am using Debian with BSPWM. I was curious about DWM however I am not interested in digging into it. Congrats on the new/old laptop. Best of luck with that. Take Care and Stay Warm.

[@OldTechBloke]

Cheers Donald

[@goneg1338]

I just switched to gnome after using dwm for months, i found that patching it was the fun part, i learned lots, but I'm simply not as productive with it even after i got used to it.

[@mikael2313]

Slackware 15 has been released today.

[@eznix]

I am so glad that desktop environments exist! If I had to configure a window manager, it would be IceWM. At least that window manager makes some sense to me. 😛

[@OldTechBloke]

I must try that at some point mate

[@BrucesWorldofStuff]

Yay! It's here! The DWM video! Right EndeavourOS for sure as the base or Ezarcher... :-) I have a Dell laptop issue too, I have 7.. LOL May be getting 2 more from a friend. :-) WE could need some intervention OTB. HaHaHa Just remember OTB is in Britain and you will have to change the keyboard layout for the USA folks if you use any of his builds... :-) Hay Bruce, what ya doing Saturday night? I'm installing OTB's DWM build... You? What ya Doing? LOL Thanks OTB and Cheers! LLAP

[@OldTechBloke]

Ha ha cheers Bruce

[@drishalballaney6590]

Lol just noticed that you have a bike parked in your room xD

[@RobBoudreau]

I know what you mean about finding a favorite and settling in with it. Mine's been bspwm for quite some time now. Lately though with all the inertia that seems to be behind Wayland, thought I'd give a Wayland tiler a try. Picked Sway as I felt it was likely the most stable currently. Gotta say Steve, I'm pretty impressed. Not a big fan of i3's way of doing things, but the smoothness of it really does impress me. Easy setup for my dual monitors, fonts and all look great, everything works under it, so far I've had no problems. You might want to check it out sometime for something different. Cheers!

[@OldTechBloke]

Hi Rob, yes I know I’m going to have to take a look at a wayland wm at some point but I’m not really an i3 fan so I’ve avoided sway

[@entelin]

I quite like dwm, I started using it as my main maybe a year ago. I don't install very many patches to it as I like simplicity, but I have a few, plus a little custom tweak. For example when sending a window somewhere I will automatically follow it (switch virtual desktop or screen)

[@essetee]

Before compiling you need to edit the config.dev.h files if your name is not steve :)

[@OldTechBloke]

Where?

[@OldTechBloke]

Just seen it in the import line ☺️

[@twb0109]

This would make good use of GNU Stow, your directory tree is already set up for it, so everything can be installed by doing "stow ."

[@Abdelkrim.]

Bspwm pls for new user pls and how to do or change easy configuration

[@andrewpalm2103]

HI OTB. Is there any chance you could look at tiling window managers that work with Wayland? I know about sway, but I wonder if there are any others in the works. I have a bad feeling that as Wayland replaces X11 many of the TWMs currently in use may fall by the wayside. Any thoughts on this?

[@OldTechBloke]

Ive never used way land to be honest but I think there is a dwm variant in development. Early days for it so probably rubbish, but I’ll dig around

[@rizkyadiyanto7922]

i have been using 'river' for several months, its good. it has stacking layout by default like dwm, unlike i3/sway.

[@kimcosmos]

what is xorg xep root (sic)? Xsetroot 33:00 I assume it will be listed as a dependancy somewhere but I can't see it. I was planning to use polybar as it integrates with dwm. [X11 rootscreen drawing tool]

[@OldTechBloke]

Xsetroot

[@kimcosmos]

@OldTechBloke The dwm setstatus patch replaces Xsetroot, but can't pipe directly. Sounds pedantic as most bar items would need rescripting. I assume only the bars use Xsetroot and not the windows?

[@OldTechBloke]

Yes to echo status to the bar you will need xorg-xsetroot. I’ve no idea what polybar requires with dwm

[@OldTechBloke]

I’ve just looked at that patch you mentioned but never used it

[@phonewithoutquestion80]

I have a feeling this flexipatch effort will fork into something else. That would be an interesting turn. I only ever redo slock via the flexipatch build, so I don't have to deal with the jank of its few available patches failing.

[@glidersuzuki5572]

But it's there been for so long

[@zeocamo]

the changelog for DWM 6.3 2022-01-07 11:39 bump version to 6.3 Hiltjo Posthuma diff --git a/config.mk b/config.mk @@ -1,5 +1,5 @@ # dwm version -VERSION = 6.2 +VERSION = 6.3 so, just a version bump ....

[@michaelwrest6145]

How do you see Window Managers developing, in the light of the fact that Wayland seems to be gradually taking over? Will they adapt to accommodate Wayland? Qtile includes experimental Wayland support, I think. If they did change, would this mean essentially rewriting the WM's?

[@OldTechBloke]

My understanding is that WMs would need rewriting. There’s already sway of course that’s essentially i3 for wayland and dwl is a wayland version of dwm, although still at the alpha stage. Who knows what will happen in the future but I wouldn’t be surprised to see wayland becoming more popular

[@JanuszKrysztofiak]

As the author of the channel has written - they would need rewriting. Wayland and X differ conceptually. In Wayland, there is no middle man in the form of an X server through which WMs and apps operate. Instead, each WM/DE has to implement Wayland protocol + extra features (such as remoting/screen sharing) on its own => each DE is a full-blown Wayland compositor. One of the rationales - apart from performance - (according to the developers of Wayland) is security: Wayland protocol as such does not provide one app with the ability to spy on another app: cannot get their window positions, log keys, and so on - these have to be optionally provided by the compositor with some security model. All that makes a DE/WM a more complex piece of software than in the case of X. However, the developer of Sway (who is also one of Wayland developers) abstracted out his implementation of Sway Wayland compositor in the form of the wlroots library, so anyone can build his own DE/WM on top of this. Still, there is a mess because there are roughly 4 separate implementations of Wayland protocol in circulation, with varying degrees of stability/completeness/features and quirks: Gnome/Mutter, KDE/KWin, Weston (the 'reference' implementation of Wayland compositor - not meant to be used as a daily driver) and wlroots (Sway and the rest). My personal experience is only Gnome and Sway are usable for daily work. Wayland KDE has some annoying bugs yet to be resolved (but they are progressing).

[@thanasiskormas]

Nice video dwm is great. More video for slackware plz

[@folksurvival]

15 is out now.

[@thanasiskormas]

@@folksurvival thanks man 😄

[@thompsog40]

Hi. I was using your build, love it by the way, but I wanted to go back to 9 desktops. I added an additional 3 icons and incresed the additional tags A-I and 1thru 9. Now it won't make. Any ideas? I have tried to look for an answer online but not having much luck. Thanks in advance. Appreciate it.

[@OldTechBloke]

Yes you need to modify the NUMTAGS macro back to 9 in dwm.c

[@thompsog40]

@@OldTechBloke Thanks for the quick reply. Done and working like a charm. Thank you so much. I tried dwm previously but found the patching a pain. Your build is exactly what I was looking for. Have moved from Xmonad so giving dwm OTB build few weeks. Now I have 9 workspaces on my laptop, should do well. Thanks again.

[@OldTechBloke]

You’re welcome :-)

[@folksurvival]

DWM is good but MATE is so comfy.

[@rhwinner]

Personally I don't see the value of a DE other than as a common interface for a multi- user system. But for a single user system, why _wouldn't_ you want the faster, lighter, more robust WM? It just seems like a no brainer to me.

[@entelin]

Users can fire up whatever de/wm they want, there's no notion of a "common" interface.

[@rhwinner]

@@entelin I was thinking more in terms of a corporate environment where you have an IT dept. One common interface would much simplify support.

[@folksurvival]

It depends what you are using a computer to do and how you use it. Sometimes full DEs are just more productive.

[@paulraw]

When you have done the first make you only need to sudo make install. Sudo make clean install builds dwm again

[@alankjohn9263]

wait dwm is still being updated?? this is cool I thought the suckless project was dead

[@folksurvival]

Why did you think it was dead?

[@jetwarker1169]

Why do you have a motorbike in your home?

[@OldTechBloke]

It’s not my living room, it’s a fancy shed at the bottom of my garden

[@justins7796]

lol they really don't use the word 'period'?

[@zeocamo]

Window management... is just better then DEs, but you just need to learn stuff

[@davidwayne9982]

I get the feeling MOST guys on here don't want anyone "asking questions" -- and that's a CROCK-- most of them are just plain AS____LEs as far as I'm concerned- and there are one or two that if I meet them-- I'm going to teach them that they DO NOT know what they think they know-- and I am one that CAN easily do it!!!

[@CDMS_pt]

0.00000000000001% like this video.

[@donaldmickunas8552]

LOL Oh well, they are the true Linux Nerds. ;-)