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First, I strongly recommend using a tiling window manager. There aren't many logistical things you can do to improve your programming output but this is one.

I used XMonad for many years and finally had to give up and switch to i3, so I would recommend using that

The first problem was that they broke my configuration file with every release. I'm not a Haskell expert so fixing it was very time consuming

The second is that their gnome integration is quite bad. Also it's different for every combination of XMonad version and Ubuntu version and eventually I hit a combination that I couldn't get to work

So it was great when it worked but it didn't always work, and I'm now a happy i3 user



I seem to post this in every tiling window manager story comment section but if you are on Ubuntu an extremely easy way to try out a tiling WM is to install Regolith and select it at login (you can always go back, but you won't want to):

https://regolith-linux.org/

From their homepage: "Regolith is a modern desktop environment designed to let you work faster by reducing unnecessary clutter and ceremony. Built on top of Ubuntu, GNOME, and i3, Regolith stands on a well-supported and consistent foundation."

I'm not affiliated with the project, just a happy user.


I agree about the effectiveness of tiling WMs. I use dwm, which I think is nearly perfect software, but I guess not to everyone’s taste.


Currently using dwm on OpenBSD, and I gotta say, it's one of my favorite environments I've tried yet.


Dwm is extremely pleasant to use.


> The first problem was that they broke my configuration file with every release.

This is the same reason I gave up on AwesomeWM—sometimes things would break and it would take a long time for me to figure out how to fix them.

Nowadays I use i3 as well. Sometimes I do wish the configuration language was more powerful, but I value the stability a lot more.


Just a little note that we (AwesomeWM team) have stable APIs since 4.0 and each releases no longer break the API. We also have reached 90% code/behavior coverage (from 0% in < 4.0 days).

From a maintainer PoV, this is often a pain since AwesomeWM exposes most of its internal guts, but with enough compatibility code and Android style API levels, we still manage compatibility pretty well.


I know this thread is almost 20h old. But, I started using awesomewm maybe 8 years ago, decided on a look and config and haven't changed it since, every computer i use have the same setup, it is indeed awesome! Thank you so much for your time and dedication, it's a pleasure to use


Yeah, if you started using `git-master` around ~7 years ago, it hasn't broken ever since. The last breaking release was v4.0 in 2016, but it was in development for years before that in the git-master branch. 3.5->4.0 was a pretty nasty upgrade process since we had to nuke a lot of the unsustainable things one last time (https://awesomewm.org/apidoc/documentation/17-porting-tips.m...).

Glad it works for you!


I love using awesomeWM , thanks a lot for making it !


At this point I think things are quite stable?

I just use a one line config that selects the gnome integration. Always worked great for me on Ubuntu. I think there is little reason for most to do much configuration of XMonad.


do they still just call derriving(Show,Read) on their configuration types? the configs are just haskell adts right?




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