5 Reasons Why DWM is My Favorite Window Manager

[@TheLinuxCast]

Once again, KZbin is deleting comments like crazy, so I apologize for that. I'm entirely sick of KZbin comments. Follow me on Odysee if you're sick of it too. odysee.com/$/invite/@thelinuxcast:4

[@fahimabrar2922]

I started using dwm because I was learning C then.Anyone who's familiar with C will love dwm. I use about 16 patches, haven't faced any issues. And using it, helped me (or forced me) to learn C way better, way more than anyone else in my university.

[@danieleccleston7928]

I love c as well I do want to use dwm but I am used to bspwm keybinds so I think I will use them both.

[@colbybraden]

DWM and BSPWM. I keep going back and forth with those two. Love them both fairly equally.

[@themroc8231]

I am a Spectrwm guy and it feels quite lonely, I can' t really figure out why it is not more popular, sometimes I think it might be because it's "too good" in the sense that the kind of guys who use tiling WMs are tinkerers and riding Spectrwm might be too uneventful for them. I say that because usually when a youtuber tries it it tends to go like this: -Huh, it' s super easy to configure (ok, except the bar, maybe) -Huh it' s very capable and it has very sane defaults. -Huh, it' s also super stable. - Huh, well I guess it' s already all set up now. Ok, so next week i will be trying this other WM...

[@swayamshree5951]

I use spectrwm as well. Its is super easy to configure. I love that about it. The only thing i don't like is the fact that it is not very good at handling system trays.

[@colbybraden]

Oh yeah, Spectrwm was the first wm I used after i3. It is fast and ez to configure and very stable.

[@themroc8231]

@@colbybraden And why did you move on, if i may ask? What did you hop to? I find it so comfy, i' m not sure why no one sticks to it.

[@Perry....]

The bar is shit and is locked in for some god forsaken reason. Other than that I love spectr

[@JacobMoen]

I want to really love Spectrwm, but I can't. I keep getting a weird feedback-loop kind of hang-up (where the screens are flashing) and the only way to exit is to do a Ctr+Alt+Del in a tty. That's too bad. I hope the new version fixes that. DWM is solid as a rock. Spectrwm could be that. I hope it will be, sooner than later.

[@leisureloaflightfoot1655]

i3-gaps all the way. Tried pretty much all of the others but i3 just suits my workflow especially on multiple monitors. DWM and Qtile are my backups.

[@hectorcanizales5900]

nice profile picture.

[@mikebrown8239]

I love dwm too. I agree with everything you said. Keep up the good work.

[@motif5775]

Dwm is also my favorite and awesomewm comes in second place.

[@folksurvival]

The youtuber bugswriter has a good video on his 0 patch DWM set-up.

[@dragos-andreirotaru2316]

since dwm flexipatch came around, dwm is my favourite

[@patrickmclaughlin6013]

Shout out, Thanks for any help on dwm! I keep trying other de's but I keep coming back to dwm. I do get some hiccups, like just recently gimp is not behaving well on dwm.

[@TheLinuxCast]

IDK what problem you're having with gimp, but you might try making a rule that makes it floating by default. Sometimes it doesn't like being forced into tiling mode.

[@iAmTheWagon]

I have a decent amount of experience with python so I'm really comfortable with Qtile. I've been using it for several months and never had it break. I just make sure I watch for updates and read the change log, but I can understand how that can be annoying. The constant updates make it exciting for me 😆

[@taidee]

Qtile man here, I've tried many WMs and just keep returning to Qtile. The other thing for me is that, the Qtile devs respond so quickly to any issue you report, that just seals the deal for me.

[@androidbox6876]

Is QTile most light-weighted ?

[@nichtgestalt]

I really like dwm as Well. Right now it is even my favourite wm and as you mentioned earlier it is really satisfying to build my own"fork" of it.

[@zedrobot5864]

I'm using dwm for like two years I tried to switched back to DE like kde or mate but I always find myself using dwm

[@MrNeilypops]

❤️ I totally agree. dwm is the best wm for me too.

[@pedrofrohmut2471]

Im using qtile now. It s my favorite At the moment. I left dwm because the lack of docs and cuz i can get the same functionality with any xmonad clone.

[@ImmortalityYT]

I prefer i3-gaps. I guess I just like being able to reload the config.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Yea, it takes a patch or an xinitrc loop to do that with dwm.

[@hemanthkotagiri8865]

@@TheLinuxCast exactly. Literally any feature that you love from other window manager, there's probably a patch available for you with DWM. I've used i3-gaps for almost an year and I just switched to dwm and it's really good.

[@rick_805]

Love dwm!

[@Aldrenean]

I encourage anyone to also check out dwl, the Wayland rewrite of dwm!

[@deepakshivraj4881]

Is the project completed ? Is it stable?

[@Aldrenean]

@@deepakshivraj4881 completed, not at all. Stable... Kind of? I wouldn't use it for production but it's fine for daily usage.

[@deepakshivraj4881]

@@Aldrenean Thank u. But which wm is compatible with wayland now? I heard about sway but how stable is it?

[@fawzanfawzi9993]

dwm is the easiest WM to use and configure. I have zero knowledge about C programming language yet the configuring and patching, albeit tedious, are easy to do.

[@SwiatLinuksa]

Thx for upload ;) In past i tried to use i3, 3 months on Debian Sid, only one week i need to configure it - I'm Linux noob :P But i switched to Gnome and stay on it for now - about 1.5 years. Why? For my needs "mouse desktop" is more usable, gfx, video editing, some games and not much terminal that's my daily routine. Tried use ranger, vim etc but.. no... If some 1 mostly using terminal, coding, git - window managers are great but in other way? So, let's use that, what the best fit for current user - sry 4 my eng ;)

[@TheLinuxCast]

Some people prefer an actual DE, nothing wrong with that.

[@SwiatLinuksa]

@@TheLinuxCast 100% agree.

[@itstoxicqt]

Wm are amazing

[@vehementham]

I want to use a window manager that has a config file in the language of C. Linus Torvalds likes C, so I will be a nerd too. DWM is the nerdiest window manger, and I love having a nerdy system. Especially because it usually involves stuff that is the OPPOSITE of Windows, and flexing my Linux superiority.

[@shail0124]

I'm using i3wm. It is mine first tilling window manager. I have used awesome for few minutes I don't think I will switch from i3wm because it provides me everything I want. I don't want anything more than what I have in i3wm

[@aniislive6800]

in qtile try to config from bottom-up approach rather than using inbuilt functions, then it will not break so easily, I have created small py files or modules for each API's like group, widgets which will be easy to identify if breaks. I am using qtile for 3.5 years it hasn't break yet will all updates

[@pyrotek45]

im waiting for a good tiling wm that works well with wayland.

[@twb0109]

Dwm is just too comfy, but man I would like to be able to have status2d, notitle and systray all at the same time, that's why sometimes I use bspwm/i3

[@TheLinuxCast]

Yeah, those damn bar patches don't like playing well together. It's because they all play with the width variables, and they all name them something different. It's dumb.

[@ahmadshahzad6674]

status2d and notitle is easy, you just gotta manually remove the lines that draw the title. It has no conflict with status2d. systray + status2d have some issues but I am 10/10 sure I got them to work together in one of my experiments, but I can't say for sure right now. I personally never saw a need for system tray even on complete Desktop Environments and MS Windows, so my build didn't have it.

[@twb0109]

Yeah, but status2d + systray seems impossible

[@ahmadshahzad6674]

@@twb0109 are you also using that status clicky thing which let's you use mouse buttons on status items? statuscmd I think?

[@twb0109]

@@ahmadshahzad6674 nope, at that point I guess I would be better off using barmodules

[@linuxinside6188]

I3's config is unbeatable .

[@TrueWordsOfEternity]

Totally agree i3 is the best of the best

[@milohoffman274]

dynamic > manual, I would like i3 if it was not a manual tiler.

[@BrucesWorldofStuff]

You left out LeftWm, SpectrWm... Lol I never thought I would be using a WM. DistroTube and OTB kinda made me look at it differently... I thought how in the hell can someone remember all the keybindings and they do. It takes time and it will happen. That why they make Rofi... LOL Thanks for the video Matt! LLAP

[@TheLinuxCast]

Yeah, I could have kept naming ones I've used for 20 minutes, LOL

[@BrucesWorldofStuff]

@@TheLinuxCast :-D

[@BrucesWorldofStuff]

@Yassin Zao I don't use Vim, so I can't say... LLAP

[@B10KPlaysGames]

I like dwm because It just works after I configure it and patch it all up lol

[@zeocamo]

BSPWM is great and i am lazy and never switch away, (by lazy i mean i work 12 hours days and got a son i need to time with too and i go to bed and sleep and don't use all nights on Linux as i should) i did try I3 but it is not great for Games, the monitor support for games .... not great i try Qtile but for me the hotkeys was not working right and i had to use the mouse to click on a empty workspace to use a hotkey..... i try xmonad but it got some black line on the screen with in full screen i try awesome and it is really looking as good WM but i am lazy and still waiting for a time to switch if awesome do not work i will try DWM

[@TheLinuxCast]

Sounds like bspwm just might be your favorite.

[@zeocamo]

@@TheLinuxCast for now

[@gl0sek]

I don't get the whole suckless philosphy... I get that some peaople don't want bloat in their software but why there is a great wall on the 2000 lines of code. Why not 1000 or 20000? All that patching doesn't go against that suckless philosophy? After all you are adding bloat to your software. But how can this be bloat if every single user is expected to patch his wm? It just seems to me that this line restriction is stupid.

[@rsmith31416]

The maximum number of lines is always an arbitrary threshold. If you want to impose such a limit, then you need at least enough lines of code in order to ship a functional window manager and previous window managers have shown that LOC

[@gl0sek]

@@rsmith31416 so adding patches isn't considered bloat if you yourself add them... I understand now. It's just not for me ;)

[@rsmith31416]

@@gl0sek Sure. Almost by definition, it can't be "bloat" if you need it :)

[@gl0sek]

@@rsmith31416 that is why that 2000 line limit confused me. I thought everything above that is considered bloat. Thanks!

[@thingsiplay]

I agree on the line limit, it does not make sense, because the quality and features of a software is not defined by how many lines it got. Also the limit should not be the same for every type of application, because specific types require more lines. And this limit could lead to unreadable code, because the coders try to sqeeak out more in shorter ways and unreadable variable names. Commentary is another thing. To me the suckless philosophy is bad programming philosophy.

[@torsten.breswald]

hlwm ftw hehe, well, if dwm works for you, that's nice :)

[@antoniobragah8305]

Nice vid ! I need help. I need a tiling window manager that I can swap workspaces quickly/easily via swipe on mousepad/trackpad or via keyboard shortcuts. I will be needing to swap workspace very frequently to use them as dashboards for monitoring data/network traffic and operating system stats. It must be rocksolid and stable. What can you recommend ?

[@TheLinuxCast]

Hyprland can do that. Not sure how stable it'll be tho

[@antoniobragah8305]

@@TheLinuxCast Thank you for responding, I am going to look into it ... the complete dashboard layout is obviously for me running in urxvt with scripts starting stuff like top and htop (there is more). If all goes well with my testing it will be running on a BSD platform heavy laden with servers and processes and been a desktop as well. Thanks a million. I am think of looking into 'awesome' and possibly 'i3wm', your advice on this for guidance will be appreciated.

[@comedy6631]

Right now, im using alot of bleeding edge software, wayland, pipewire and swaywm, i really like the concept of dwm but i just cant leave my janky sway config, it just works for me

[@TheLinuxCast]

Yeah, wayland isn't something that dwm is going to be taking up anytime soon.

[@Aldrenean]

dwl is a dwm wayland rewrite! It's actually quite functional, though still in active development.

[@comedy6631]

@@Aldrenean i actually heard about it a fair lot, my only concern is just the amount of updates its having right now, ill test it out next weekend and see how it goes, but for my main production machine, sway is suprisingly stable

[@Aldrenean]

@@comedy6631 yeah applying patches is a bit of a crapshoot at the moment lol, everything has multiple versions in the patch diff so you basically have to manually patch if you're doing more than one involved patch, and lots of them break on updates.

[@micaiahflores1592]

I have sxmo on my spare pinephone But I am way too dumb to learn how to configure it I would love to learn how though. I have zero programming skills though and apparently that is needed

[@khushdilshahyousafzai4968]

Based

[@Little-bird-told-me]

I watched this video one year too late :) ...Now his fav WM is i3

[@TheLinuxCast]

LOL, mine too. I've changed my mind since then.

[@dlxpro9342]

I use kde btw.

[@mr.mister311]

The thing that keeps me from trying dwm is that there is no seperate layer for floating windows. Either you put all of the windows in floating mode or none of them. That sounds incredibly annoying when dealing with popup windows and stuff like that. Feels like a choice they made only to keep it minimal, not because it's better. I would like to try a wm that works kind of like dwm (especially interested in trying the whole thing with the tags rather than having workspaces), but that doesn't handle floating windows the way dwm does. If anyone knows of one like that, please let me know :)

[@ahmadshahzad6674]

I have the exact same issue. The tiling and floating layer is dumb.

[@mr.mister311]

@Glizzster I'm unsure, I guess it's worth looking into. Thanks :)

[@shubhampawar7921]

What's best is always going to be subjective but the hate for awesomewm is unreal. Awesomewm is bad because it has too many options 🤦🏽

[@TrueWordsOfEternity]

Matt the patching is endless you just have to know C how to do it the right way not using the patch or git command to patch dwm :)

[@TrueWordsOfEternity]

I do have a dam build tht has 17 patches too but i3 is my way 😸

[@TheLinuxCast]

I think if you stay away from bar patches, you could probably get way more than I have right now.

[@Dorinakis]

Patches patches patches! A window manager can't be great if it needs so many patches. So why do we say that gnome is a crappy desktop because it needs extensions to be awesome?

[@thingsiplay]

It is a bit odd that you like DWM for the reasons you give, but hate GNOME for the same reasons. The simplecity and lack of basic features, forcing me to patch or install third party addons is one of the reasons why I dislike DWM and GNOME. If they lack the features, then they will not test the entire package with all integrated features like in KDE.

[@thingsiplay]

I use Qtile since start of this year 9 months ago or so and it broke only once. And the reason was, because I did not inform myself and read the upcoming changes that was known for ages (deprecated thing). It is the same for Arch. And you as a Arch user, I do not understand this mentality for fear of updates that could potentially break. But which is communicated and you can easily fix it.

[@TheLinuxCast]

You're looking at it in the wrong way. Gnome is "use it our way or not at all", extensions are taboo and third class citizens at best, theming is done through a hack. DWM, patching is encouraged and is a feature that everyone uses, and is just a part of the way it works. The developers know it, and in fact it was their idea. Extensions on GNOME weren't, as far as I know, Gnome's idea, but were instead a community addition in order to reinstate features that Gnome took out. So, no, I don't think it's odd. Could you compare their philosophies? Maybe, but I think you'd be wrong to do so.

[@TheLinuxCast]

I've been using DWM for 2 years and it has never broken from an update. I used qtile for a couple months, it broke twice because they redid modules for the bar.

[@thingsiplay]

@@TheLinuxCast Okay, it makes sense and I understand your view now. You are right, the DWM approach is not the same as GNOME. GNOME besides, I still don't like the suckles approach. In my opinion basic functionality should not be patched in, because the developers should test and make sure these work well together and are developed and maintained by the main developers. And the artificial line limit is one of the worst ideas in programming in my mind. It can lead to unreadable code by trying to sqeaze out as much as possible in short lines and short variable names or leaving out extra testing lines. Also comments and documentation in code is very important to me. While I like the base idea to create programs without unnecessary bloat, this is not the way I would go. Sorry if my comment sounds a bit negative, but as you do, I take the right to criticize the project too (not criticizing any people, nothing against someone using it).

[@SenthilBabuji]

What do you mean by a feature forced on you? If you don't like a feature just disable it. No, you did not put a feature in dwm. Your window manager is only an interface to Xorg. Whether you like it or not you have to deal with X org. I can do everything that you can do with dwm with qtile but the other way around it is not possible or at least not possible without writing a lot of low level C code which is prone to memory leaks and so on. No in qtile you don't have to share workspaces across all monitors. You just need a hook to switch monitor when switching workspaces. And this is what I am telling that you can do everything in qtile that you can do with dwm but the other way around is just impossible. Suckless softwares all break the basic design philosophy of reusing code. They actually suck. And good luck. Dmenu also sucks. There are much better alternatives like rofi. St sucks, yes. Surf sucks, yes and all suckless softwares are actually suckfull. You may realize this very late. With qtile, I can move to Wayland and all my config would just work. And dwm is done when X is done.