I've probed a few tiling wms: dwm: never ending tinkering, a lot of frustration and despair with incombatible patches. i3: manual tiling is not for me. spectrewm: nice, but too less features. xmonad: nice, but Haskell. Awesome: at first it was not my favourite, but it comes with most of the features I need. Missing features can be added in a short time (awesome is build from C and Lua, awesome's plugins are pretty simple lua scripts). Awesome is full operable via the mouse or the keyboard - awesome is able to act as a stacking window manager; a very handy feature, when coming from a stacking window manager (I've used icewm for twenty years). Summary: a very good tool to form a work environment that is adapted to your personal workflow.
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AwesomeWM because nice defaults and you can configure it with Lua like neovim but I want to try hyprland in the future
Sway with autotiling
and a few nifty scripts (launch or focus and such) and Waybar. The combination of having scratchpads, sensible autotiling along with titlebars and the wonderful world of wayland is supreme.
I've tried AwesomeWM but couldn't get anything going with it really.
I then moved on to Material Shell (yes that's a Gnome Extension) and it brought enough to really make me want to dig in more.
Now I'm slowly working on a Sway configuration on my Fedora 38 machine. Can't work in it yet, but unlike my attempt at AwesomeWM...I'm actually making progress on getting things setup. My 4 monitors were configured fairly easily, but now I need to figure out why dmenu isn't working to launch applications. Could be on my end since I'm using a Moonlander keyboard with a custom DVORAK profile.
I started with for a bit awm, however i am giving qtile a try since im learning how to code python so good practice.
I use i3, but to say that I like it is a bit overstated. It's fine, does what I expect the very basic of a tiling window manager to do. I used Nimdow for a while and it's pretty good, the default bar is way better than i3 (supports ANSI colour coding, mouse presses, etc.), but I could never quite get to grips with the tiling algorithm.
I'm working on my own WM though, it's not tiling per-se, I choose to call in non-overlapping and I'm trying to solve my gripes with i3. Basically windows should not be forcefully expanded if they don't want to. Try open galculator under i3 and watch the horror. And when expanded the size should be split based on their initial sizes. So if I have Firefox open and want to do something in a quick terminal window the terminal won't get 1/2 of the screen. Firefox wanted more space than the terminal initially, so the terminal gets to take up a smaller share of the space.
When I was using it, I LOVED Hyprland. It was my most flawless experience with Wayland on an Nvidia GPU. I switched off of it however, because I primarily game on my PC and a lot of games just didn't work and I did not want to have to figure out how to get them working all the time.
Currently using sway, but mostly for the lack of good Auto tilers on Wayland
i3wm, tho I do wanna move to wayland.
switched to hyperland from i3. Both work well in the end.
herbstluftwm - because it just works and does not try to think for me;
The configuration is a shell script using herbstclient to talk to the wm process, that's a plus for me, too.
I used suckless ecosystem for 5+ years, but I wanted to use Wayland so now I'm transitioning into Sway and holymoly how fast and easy it is. So simple to configure and written in C.
I've been pleasantly surprised by sway coming from dwm. It feels as responsive and most things I patched into dwm are built in.
I use sway because when I came back after a long break, it seemed to be the one to go with. I kind of miss awesome, though.