Hi, DistroTube. Love your channel. Huge inspiration to me. Time links for later because I'm definitely going to finally try a few. 2:30 - awesome 3:36 - bspwm 5:34 - dwm 7:08 - exwm 9:31 - herbstluftwm 11:08 - i3wm 13:59 - leftwm 16:10 - qtile 17:33 - spectrwm 18:47 - stumpwm 21:28 xmonad

What many people do not know is that 'DT' actually stands for 'Dynamic Tiler'. :D

Im so glad we (leftwm) made it to atleast ok. We are always improving and hope we can make it higher up soon (got so much planned, once uni is done I will have alot of time to put into it). Thanks derek!

I love i3wm. Configuring is so easy without having to learn a language and the documentation is so thorough.

I keep coming back to this tier list and pick the one which suits my taste. thanks for making this list. Helps a lot, before jumping and investing time in learning a new WM.

I absolutely would love to see more tierlists from you, DT! Enjoyed the video - keep up the great work!

Small correction, leftwm doesn't use a custom syntax but rather toml (tom's ovbious minimal language)which is used by cargo (rust package manager)for it's configurations

I'd love to see more FOSS tierlists. Some ideas: terminals, word processors, FOSS games and of course, distros

I used qtile for at least 2 years, thanks to you. It was a great experience, but I say it was because I stopped using it when I got tired of update my arch at night, wake up in the morning to work, (sometimes) reboot my pc and see qtile changed their syntax and at startup my qtile config broke my session and it starts with a black screen.

Future tier-list ideas: terminal emulators, stacking WMs, DEs, distros, programming languages... Sky is the limit.

Way to keep it real DT. I really enjoyed the tier list format.

Happy to see that the Windows Managers that I have actively used for an extended period of time throughout my time being a Linux user, made it to your GREAT tier

Tier lists are great and I think they are great for new to linux users. Would love to see more!

Every now and again I dabble in Linux and I always refer to your videos, you make stuff simple and fun and you have a great personality so thank you, just spent 2 days on a fresh arch then building my own de with open box and your videos, then tried out iw3, then had some fun trying hyprland… I can’t daily drive it yet but what a fun thing to do and you help make it possible ❤

Finally! More Tiling Window managers content please, we want more DT!

I was going to install a window manager on an old laptop then I saw this pop up in my KZfaq recommendations. Perfect timing :D.

Mostly only commenting for engagement, but I think that i3 should at least be in the okay category. I know the keybindings are rough but they are wildly easy to change along with the rest of the config. The main reason I like i3 is the fact that it stays out of my way and looks the way i like it. I love AwesomeWM but it always seemed to have something wrong with it (probably my lua knowledge caused) that would have me focusing on fixing my config or changing something and interrupting my workflow. With i3 i had it set up and out of my way within an hour.

Ironically I found i3wm to be the most user friendly window manager. When I used it I actually didn't touch the default config except to change colors, and the weird keys didn't bug me because I used the arrow keys anyway.

DT thumb-baited us 😆

dude the exact thing happened to me in the documentation with dspwm that you mention. with the tree diagram. that is so funny! I ended up on arco/awesome for the last 2 to 4 years probably, and i just moved garuda/sway, really liking it atm. good video, cheers.

Am I the only one stunned by that "... GIMP!" moment? GIMP of all things? I thought it would be emacs or sth text-based at least. Well, let's now see how it worked

I have been using awesome wm since last 7 years, with very heavily customised configuration(love lua) and workflow. It’s been treating me quite well , probably will stick to it for few more years.

I find i3 to be really great when used in conjunction with Polybar and SXHKD. I don't care for bars nor the default keybinds, but at least i3 asks you if you want Alt first instead of enforcing it by default like others.

I'm an i3 guy, but dwm and awesome are really nice too

For my wm I really like Penrose. Actually, it's not really a window manager, but rather a Rust library (crate) that makes it really easy to create your own.

I'd love to see some more tier list for software videos like this one!

And this video made me want to try to use a WM, and here I am, with a configured bspwm after a week... YAY!

You got my thumbs up at “we shouldn’t reward people for things they’re supposed to do anyway”.

awesome and xmond at meh tier. quality bait

Now that I think about it, it is just crazy how different my WM-Journey could have become. A few weeks ago I tried out SpectrWM and I'm certain, the Philipp of the past would have been amazed by it. I would have liked how it is configured and the fact that the bar is included. Eventually I was stucked with BSPWM and I use it till today, mostly because I can use whatever bar with it I would like to. Also since it is configured by default in a shell script I learned a thing or two about scripting as well which always comes in handy in *Nix Systems. Even though I still have a lot of trouble to customize Awesome, Qtile and Xmonad I can see why someone would put them in top tier. However, thanks to that channel and the incredible community I learned a lot about *Nix, Systemadministration, DEs and WM. *Nix systems are so cool operating systems and after more than 17 months I am still amazed how well these are thought through.

Interesting perspective. Thanks for posting.

good question/request, great response.

Whew! Glad leftwm made the ok tier. I love it because of the Themes.

I will be sure to use exwm and stumpwm thanks for the recomendations

awesome is so cool,period,love hearing you yak dude

I'm gonna finally check out Awesome after years of i3, thanks!

Great overview, DT! 😎 Still amazed at Qtile! I might give Xmonad a try at some point. Until then, Qtile is my WM of choice.

awesome is awesome. It was my first tiling WM and it will likely be my only one. Lua is my favorite language so it was extremely easy for me to get it set up exactly how I wanted it

yes more tierlists pls. they r as awesome as awesome

The great thing about DWM is that it is very easy to configure on one computer and transfer the executable to another computer, even a different distros and it makes all these computers feel the same.

DT, I blame you for the past three years of frustration.. But I love it. Tier list I would like is for WM's like Openbox, JWM, CW, Poison ... Things that you have tried.

Holy crap great video

What a nice way to make Tier List !!!

What I was waiting for.

Great work 🥳🥳🥳 Thank you 💜💜💜

This video inspired me to make an open source Tier list maker web application

DWM is the best because at the end of the day any of the worthy wms are just dwm clones in other programming languages or with config files.

This channel has been lacking a video like this. I've already been using awesome for quite a while, I chose it based on your other videos and got just what I wanted. I'm sure that this video will make it easier for others to make a choice (btw come on, we all know exwm is the best)

Great list, I agree with the top 2 tiers. I'm currently alternating with awesome and dwm. Having trouble installing qtile on debian atm for some reason. I only wish xmobar had a widget/plugin for the system tray. I don't like using trayer as a substitute.

There's literally a webpage that only does tier lists easy and accesible and this lad goes and makes his own on GIMP for them not being open source. Derek, I like your style, but even I get triggered with bs like this lmao

Yes plz for more tier list DT.

Very useful, thanks!

OMG! HE ACTUALLY DID IT, HE MADE A WM TIER LIST VIDEO!

I haven't watch the whole video yet but I already know XMonad is going in the great tier. And that's what it deserves! I absolutely hate dynamic tilers but I just can't use anything other than XMonad now thanks to the BSP layout that makes it behave as a manual tiler

awesome --> lua xmonad --> haskell qtile --> python bspwm --> bash dwm --> C exwm --> elisp stumpwm --> common lisp leftwm --> toml ? i3 --> i3 internal herbst --> ? maybe it's time i took another look at haskell, to see if haskell still hates me.

The hackability of stumpwm trumps all other window managers. It's quite odd that you place xmonad as great and stumpwm as yuck because they both require significant upfront investment (Haskell or Common Lisp). Having used both, I know that the newcomer experience is pretty terrible for both of them. But I ended up sticking with stumpwm because stability of a window manager is far less important than my ability to meld the window manager to my own tastes, real-time.

Awesome!! Awesome is awesome!

Hi DT! Been watching your video's for a while and you got me interested in tiling wm's. I have no clue why I havent tried them all these years since I started using Linux. Anyway, been trying out a few on an old PC and I'm sticking with xmonad for a while. Just got a new laptop and installed Void Linux with XMonad 0.17 on it. Really having fun with it! Weird that 0.17 has been out since last year but no distro seems to have it in their repo's. Luckily it is easy enough to compile yourself. Thanx for your video's!

About exwm being slow/crashing - I haven't used it personally but in general window managers being single threaded is totally fine (see awesomewm), it's probably just a crappy buggy implementation.

I'd also like to see a tier list for stacking window managers.

you should give riverwm a look! (it's over on wayland, and a smaller project, but it's really, really cool. It's especially cool for debugging because it can run nested sessions, so you can launch it from a terminal and see where the errors come from). It's written in zig, configured in any scripting language (personally I went with lua), it's a dynamic tiler and does not coe with a bar (waybar is reccommended by the dev. I just don't use a bar, personally)

It was interesting hearing you go through the pros and cons of every one of these, but I'm quite disappointed by the lack of a single Wayland compositor. The scene is really blooming now, with some fascinating, unique projects such as hyprland and newm (let alone the well-established sway and wayfire).

For a manual tiling I guess it's good if your setting it up for someone that don't want to accidentally mess their layout while working. Great for a CCTV setup, linux + cctv software makes for a "hard to breach" home security system

Awesome is one of the first tiling manager I've used, and honestly, it'll be the last. The default config is so good that I hardly ever bother editing it, and it just works. Lua is an amazing programming language and it's being adopted by more and more projects and I think for good reason.

I use i3 because of the built-in tabbed layout, which I believe is the only one with this type of nice tabs already built for you. My bar sucks big time, I use the standard one that comes with i3. The reason is I just don't hve the motivation to spend a lot of time on a WM or a bar. If I can't get it done within an hour I won't bother. I have other things to do and I'm not a programmer.

I do use EXWM when working on some coding project, or on my thesis and I really don't want any distractions. Besides it being really awesome to use it when you really need to concentrate on some specific task, I wouldn't recommend it.

Finally, a tier list

Love it, using awesomewm right now but am moving to xmonad, thanks to you :) Seems awesomewm don't have colors on every widgets that I need. Just some simple text with colors

11:37 This is one of the most important and overlooked points you've made on this channel. Proper documentation is STILL a problem for soooo many packages, distros, WMs, etc., to the point where things like "They have excellent documentation" are thrown around constantly. That shouldn't be something we compliment! It should be a *_given._* A shell script is one thing, but something as complex and configurable as a *_window manager_* should come with good documentation. You don't get brownie points for that, it should be the standard. Sad that it isn't. Okay, ramble over. Great vid!

Xmonad I put in "Okay" to "Meh". But that's in my teir list.

I've always thought that wms like DWM would be great for creating custom kiosk boards, etc. Any of the tiling managers would but in a commercial setting running binarys seems a heap more secure.

DT is a game of words DT - Derek Tyler DT - Distro Tube DT - Dynamic Tiler

qtile

bspwm is a hyped tiler, DT you get this wrong all the time, it do open windows after the last window open, and you can choose to pick the dir. of the next window, but normaly you use it in auto mode.

I'm a programmer, and learning Haskell fried my brain. I started learning it to do my own, from the ground up, Xmonad configuration. I managed to get Xmonad to a state I liked, and some of it was a bit more complex, but damn I hate Haskell as a language. Despite getting Xmonad to a state of my likeing, I just went back to Qtile. Python is just so much easier to digest for me. I'm mainly a C# developer, but I can work with basically anything with C based syntax fairly well, so Python is just easier for me to poke around in and experiment with compared to Xmonad+Haskell.

A terminal emulator tier list, but in addition to the ones most of us know, it would be useful to include the newer ones that have been made for Wayland (e.g. Foot).

I agree that i3's config is limiting, but i3-msg and IPC makes up for it. So you could basically use any language to configure it or to add custom features.

The thumbnail for this video is messed up, that's what makes me curious to watch. I'd agree with the thumbnail, that's to keep Xmonad below dwm because it's harder to configure Xmonad than to patch dwm.

I started with BSPWM. It just made sense for me. There was an example config, then I scraped github for bspwm configs. It made me felt home. Even though I knew nothing about how window tiling works. But I was in love with the binary tree layout. Then I hopped i3wm and felt it to be trash. Cuz, basically it was not binary tree. 🙂 I hover my mouse (yes, I was still using mouse back then) into a large horizontal window and expect it to be split into two vertical window, and it didn't work. Plus every time I open a new window it aligns it vertically. After 3/4 window, the layout felt trash and unusable. I mean, how is that even productive? Duh! Then, I tried DWM. The layout was very confusing at first. I was used to tiling my windows in grid manner in bspwm. But DWM uses m&s. Which didn't work for me. After some years, I again hopped them. And I found both of them to be great. After I knew how a tree layout works, i3wm felt right. But still bspwm felt more to my type. Now I jump between bspwm and DWM. Only thing I don't like about DWM is, I have to recompile it every time I change any keybindings.

The thing with jkl; is that those are the proper finger positions for touch typing, they are 'terrible' for vim keys, but correct for touch typing.

hehe, looking forward to when u make the wayland tiling wm tier list in 3-5 years :p

i think if i did it to this list 1st spectrwm 2nd qtile 3rd awesome 4th xmonad 5th i3-gaps im currently gonna try to actually config i3, but im gonna try spectr and qtile also because of the "new" user factor

I like your ranking cause to me awesome, qutile and xmonad are my best window managers of choice. Then dwm. That's all.

Hi there DistroTube, What do you mean by being extensible by using programming languages for config file? Is it extensible by creating/adding more widgets and stuff or extensible by looks and customisation or anything else? Could you give example? I am try to get into window managers, and I totally new to this. If it’s about customisation I have found a GitHub project of an archive of rofi launchers, widgets and stuff; so by using those, you could customise pretty much any wm. Thank you in advance

One thing that is important to me is wayland support, and I see that many window managers still are struggling with this...

Any new WM projects interesting you at the moment? I've been keeping a close eye on newm, looks like it'll be a great option optimized for laptops.

You should try IceWM in antiX! The antiX implementation is the only WM I got comfortable enough to use daily as a regular Plasma user.

that stare at the beginning sent me into fight or flight

so i love ratpoison because its just a .ratpoisonrc and it can be simple to complex depending on you the person. also great vid bra!

Thank you for this, Derek. I don't have much experience beyond your commentary of tiling WM and I rely on trusted sources such as DT to get started in one. I am leaning toward QTILE because I have Python experience and also due to the amount in which you have covered it. I have browsed the Awesome and the QTILE forums and find them to be pretty helpful and friendly so long as you do your reading before posting and can speak coherent and relevant to your issues. But what's to stop anyone from dabbling in more than one at a time? Once its step up the way you need them, they obviously aid the user to multitask through his work pretty quickly. Peace!

How about Sway (the Wayland clone of i3)? I use it because I have problems with tearing in Xorg and Wayland solved them for me and it is pretty good, I haven't had a single issue until now. In combination with Waybar, everything from the ricing to the workflow, works perfectly.

i think this is the first window tiling tier list. Bismuth for KDE is also good.

Never used a wm, but J K L ; makes more intuitive sense to me, or even K L ; ' could be good imo. (as sometimes I'll play games with my hands reversed, so like to map WASD to PL;' as it's a lot closer for reaching Shift and Ctrl than some other common bindings)

After using i3 off and on for the last couple of years I just installed Qtile a few days ago. What the hell was I thinking! Should've switched a long time ago!

Fantastic video. Would be really nice to have time codes for videos like this in future:)

I would be very interested in a tier list of floating window managers.

I'd like a Status Bar tier list!!

I've used Herbstluftwm since 2014, can't say I love it, it's just the fact that I lost the drive to discover new things when I had to shift most of my focus into medical school for years and that happened to be the WM I was using when that happened, it's also the only tiling window manager I've ever used.

I was a happy user of plasma KDE and I just wanted windows to tile... then I found i3wm and 3 years after I'm still using it.

I know it's not an actual window manager so don't crucify me, but the Material Shell Gnome Extension is an easy way for someone who's new to tiling window managers to try it out and see if it's for them. Since it's a Gnome extension it's really easy to switch between Material Shell and the default Gnome experience. Originally Material Shell was built on top of awesomewm before the author switched to Gnome Shell as the base, though you can still build a version of Material Shell on top of awesomewm as the project has been maintained by someone else after the author pivoted to Gnome.