I'm mildly bemused at the other comments treating this as a blast from the past. I use icewm today as a super low resource DE for a headless remote desktop system, with a major benefit being that it's all in one with no configuration needed; one unit includes panel, app menu, and window manager that work out of the box.
IceWM is a good not-quite-DE for xrdp servers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xrdp). This makes it the main window manager I run on a workstation I access through Remote Desktop. On my old ThinkPad, I migrated to Wayland and KDE on Debian 13 because Xorg no longer had video acceleration.
With IceWM, you need to take care of ssh-agent yourself that KDE or Cinnamon would start for you. You can do it with something like this in your `.xinitrc`:
I use it as my main DE for many of my systems, including my writing laptop. It is really, just as you say, pretty much install-and-use. At one time, I maintained a fairly extensive FVWM configuration, but trying ICEWM a few times freed me.
I've been running a whole band (16in, 8out) with Ardour, 3x Guitarix and "standard effects" (EQ, Compression, Barry's Satan Maximizer, etc) for some years now on a 10th gen i7.
That's with -rt patches and running live.
I considered switching to Xfwm, but even with Gnome3 I never had issues with performance.
Why is it bemusing because you happen to have a use case for it? It's a 30 year old piece of software that only supports X11, which is itself rapidly becoming legacy software.
I just switched to IceWM after trying so many different versions of tiling window managers. The one that worked best for me was MangoWM, but in the end it also interfered more than helped with my work.
A simple floating wm like IceWM works best for the apps I use: basic tools like terminal and Thunar, Reaper, windows apps via wine.
Really happy I found out about it. It lets me concentrate on the things that matter.
> It lets me concentrate on the things that matter
I don’t know if it’s the case of me being old-ish, but you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ve been using i3 with pretty much the same dot files for well over a decade, simply because it stays the hell away from the work I am doing.
Same here but with Xfce. It's a trajectory I've seen in many comments. Starting out trying every new DE, customizing them, etc. Eventually ending up on one DE for a decade plus and not even bothering to change the default wallpaper.
IceWM is great. I think there are a lot of great deployments you could use it for. If you had old computers to give to kids and teach them linux for example, IceWM would be a really great desktop for that. I use dwm still personally but Ice is Nice, and that's for sure! ;)
I tried tiling managers too but I always found them awkward.
My favourite WM still is fluxbox though it died, so I am using IceWM. I'd wish configuring it would be easier and more logical; it was never a problem to configure fluxbox, but configuring IceWM is a headstopper. Removing all workspaces I have not managed to achieve, for instance; it simply does not work here.
Fluxbox has started seeing more activity recently[1] and one of my first "let's see what this claude code thing is all about" projects was making Fluxbox for Wayland[2].
Some of the screenshots look a lot more modern than I remember when I played around with it, but then I guess that was 20+ years ago. It was one of the first WMs I looked at when I considered moving away from KDE/GNOME. I found its minimalism and low resource usage compared to those environments exciting but never actually liked the UI, I found it too clunky. I eventually settled on AwesomeWM. It seems that for the last decade or so all of the momentum in the minimalist WM space has been with tiling WMs.
I use AwesomeWM in all my computers, almost always with floated windows because most of the stuff cannot really be tiled, and occasionally with tiled windows if screen space gets very busy with terminals.
I still use IceWM whenever I need to use a proper X session. The only thing that always trips me up is the lack of an Aero-Snap like mechanism, which I have gotten very used to.
I worked for a commercial Linux distribution in 2004-2005 (not existing anymore). Our default desktop user IceWM, but if I recall correctly, we used GNOME’s Nautilus to provide the desktop background/folders.
IceWM was really lightweight, so it ran well on a variety of customer machines.
Gods, what a blast from the past! I used IceWM religiously back in the early 2000s, and it was one of the first projects I submitted patches to (long before PRs were a thing). It was always snappy, even on the lowest-end hardware.
I don't understand why we couldn't just update x11 to address our current concerns, at the very least by deprecating unused stuff and enabling features like variable DPI.
It clarifies, from the people who actually get their hands dirty with X, why it's not such a good idea to keep evolving X11, why most of the things you think is handled by X are actually handled by many different components that are also used by Wayland environments and why so much of X11's design has fallen into disuse, and why X actually got "better" for a while (hint: it's because desktop environments depends on it less).
It is a shame that wayland took this long and had to deal with so much technical debt, and maybe didn't take the best approach for everything, but as someone who has been using linux desktop since 2006 and always thought it was very flaky and unprofessional... I say good riddance to X11 and am happy to how much more stable and polished modern linux desktop is, mainly on wayland but even including how much better it is to use modern environments under X11.
FWIW variable DPI has been supported for a long time (try typing `xrandr` with multiple monitors and you'll see their actual dimensions). The issue isn't on the X11/Xorg side but on the application/toolkit side and extending EWMH so that the window manager can request scaling from toplevel windows.
I'm using three monitors with 2 DPI (4K/42" x2 and one 1920x1200 turned portrait) with XFCE.
When I first connected it, I set a multiplier for the portrait monitor and I haven't thought about it since. It holds a chat system, status bar, notifications and background music.
Yeah, I'm using a fairly esoteric dual-screen laptop in Xfce which took five minutes of xrandr to get it's 2x mode looking great. Keep expecting to be forced to use Wayland one day, but it's not happened yet.
Completely agree. There have been too many unnecessary leaps in Linux to incompatible revisions or entirely new standards that just created more problems than we had before. X11 just needs a cleanup crew and better defaults.
Love how we had fancy glass transparency effects calculated in software (see also - enlightenment ) then shit got slow, and now we're back transparency stuff working again but instead of hand optimized assembly we're throwing a giant ass GPU at the problem.
Though I do have to admit they maybe the resolution increases are to blame for part of that, alpha blending 800x600 is easier than alpha blending a 4k ultra wide with HDR at 120hz...
That's always the excuse for sloppy programming: "Things are bigger now". The truth is: CPU and RAM progressed at a speed not just a bit but much faster than real estate (pixels) growth and refresh rate.
Anyways... IceWM used to be my window manager of choice but since many years now I'm a happy camper with The Awesome WM (a tiling WM, but it can of course also be used in floating mode: one of my virtual desktop is always in "floating" mode).
Desktop images are generally large blobs of pixels next to each other. I haven't verified but I would be surprised if 10x compression is not possible. So maybe 2-5GB/s? Also it's not like the GPU doesn't use up energy itself while doing this.
awesomewm is great and pretty stable. I have been running it by default on all my machines since 2014 with very little changes and almost the same config.
As you say, purely software rendering was almost certainly infeasible to scale as resolution and refresh rates went up, but we've had at least a decade of having stupidly powerful 2D GPU hardware in all our shit.
Bring back my stupid Compiz effects. They were fun, and sometimes genuinely useful.
Cosmic has sexy transparency effects but God the color schemes are so poorly thought through.
Out of the box their light terminal theme is flat out unreadable. Some of the chosen colors have almost no contrast.
Ugh.
And then if it is dark mode time but I pull up a terminal window that is semi transparent and it is on top of a browser window that has bright colors, again, unreadable.
Which is why transparency effects are mostly limited to cool screenshots.
IceWM was amazing: fast, relatively configurable but very usable out of the box. The Motif window decorations looked real cool on screenshots as if I was running CDE. If memory serves, you could roll a window only to its title bar which is an old Mac OS9 feature that didn't carry to OS X.
AmiWM and WindowMaker also saw their usage but at the end of the day I always kept coming back to IceWM.
I personally liked IceWM for its speed and lightweightedness. On my current machine I have XFCE installed though, and I'd say it's a better experience if you're looking for a more modern and featured X11 window manager. Otherwise IceWM is my goto.
Honestly I'm not gonna miss X Windows. I currently main a tablet with just 4 GiB of RAM (even though it's a machine from before RAM prices went up, heh) with an equivalent of Compiz (wayfire) running at full framerate, with really smooth multitasking for both FDO- and Android-based apps. In my experience, this simply would've not been possible with all of the bloat needed to support X Windows (not even with a bare-bones WM like IceWM [oh nostalgia]), but fortunately, I don't even need Xwayland installed, as basically all big and small apps run natively on Wayland now.
I still run into problems with Wayland because not everything works well with Wayland. here is a recent example that other people have already run into:
We use this on some graphical Debian servers at work. I hate it. The servers are beefy and the displays have high resolitions. There is no technical reason for having to use IceWM. Our 63-year-old veteran colleague simply likes it and blocks suggestions to move to a modern minimal WM. There are better options in big 2026. I cannot wait until he retires, so that we can retire IceWM.
There are about 300 people working daily on these servers. I'm team "enlightenment" and got about 50 people supporting me. There is the i3/sway camp (30ish people), there is the dwm camp (10-15 people), and there is the "please anything with modern UX at all" (estimate: 200 people).
I remember at university, we'd all log into our remote X sessions at the start of a lesson. I used blackbox back then which zipped along quite happily, but 30 people all trying to boot up KDE 3 at once rarely went well. I'd say careful what you wish for, but I assume modern servers can handle this better.
IceWM is quite nice; I am currently using it. Personally I actually preferred fluxbox, but fluxbox kind of died some years ago. It is not 100% dead, as there is still activity on github every now and then, but largely if you know it, you also know that you had a rather sizeable community about it back in the days, and now that is ... gone.
IceWM is in many ways actually more sophisticated than fluxbox; unfortunately on the other hand, IceWM has a few annoyances that I reported, and ... all of these got ignored. Now I understand the problem domain, the lead dev lacks time - fair enough. But it also means that I no longer file issues about features, since they'll just be ignored. Bug reports I may still do, but it kind of is no longer so useful since I have the impression that the lead dev will mostly not care that much.
KDE and GNOME I can not use for various reasons, but also one reason is speed-use. Fluxbox was sooooo snappy compared to KDE and I also dislike the trend of making KDE worse ever since Nate was put in charge (the guy who added a donation-daemon; see a complaint about Nate and him tying his own personal business into KDE as an ad-platform for it, from 2025: https://web.archive.org/web/20250914213714/https://jriddell....).
I had a look at some other WMs, such as awesome WM and so forth. They are all somewhat ok-ish, but always worse than fluxbox. Next step would be some tiling WM but for some reason I found them annoying, requiring my brain to think more. WMs also seem to be significantly less popular these days; there was more variety in the past here. Also, wayland kind of changed the situation a bit, though I can not say if wayland itself reduced variety - not a whole lot of software available on wayland either, I was surprised about that when I tested it some months again. Consider they constantly promote wayland as the successor to xorg, it is in some ways like a dumbed-down path, with fewer features. Very strange. Then you have also the GTK devs who will transition into a wayland-only future for GTK5; that was also one reason why I stopped writing any more ruby-gtk code, since I would here help transition to a wayland-only way and I don't want to abandon xorg merely because the GTK devs have received their corporate order to do so (thankfully https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver exists but it needs a lot more polishing and ideally more developers, but that seems also super-hard, since it requires domain-knowledge, time ... people lack that naturally in the open source world, and the AI slop also seems to have further reduced the number of open source devs in general. Claude is now our uberlord here, see the ruby programming language, where claude writes most of the code now).
I’d like to echo this question - I’ve never used IceWM extensively, but I’ve considered using this window manager on several occasions, and in general, I have a good opinion of it.
So, I'm curious if there are any rough edges in it.
I personally haven't found rough edges in it other than it will not really be a modern UX if you're looking for one. If you're comfortable with IceWM's UX then it's fine.
Good memories, but I am glad to see that X11 is now well and thoroughly legacy. Wayland and Pipewire has been thoroughly amazing by just breaking clean with the past. iw has done the same to a large degree. While systemd has its short comings, systemd-networkd, journald, and so on are now providing a cohesive system that is well aligned, even if not perfectly aligned with ones' expectation, I don't have to tinker to make systemd-networkd to work with journactl or the likes.
We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends. Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.
X11 is absolutely NOT legacy.
It's still better in any relevant way than wayland. Freedesktop just wanted to kill it for weird reasons. But Xorg forks like Xlibre are very active and there are even new implementations like YServer.
I still use X11 for every new setup.
The great thing about Wayland is that if someone comes up with something better, this time around they can just implement that without the friction coming from X Window System's custom driver layer.
The Wayland ecosystem just runs on top of standard kernel interfaces and that's a really huge win for any future protocols.
> Freedesktop just wanted to kill it for weird reasons.
I wouldn't wish to defend them, but by all accounts the biggest reason is because Xorg's code quality is quite poor, which is (if true) somewhat fair. I wish they tried replacing it without breaking everything and shipping the terrible design that is Wayland, but the goal of replacing Xorg is reasonable.
No, that is a straw man argument; metux already debunked this
if you go through all the comments he made in the last ~5 years,
before Red Hat banned him:
The reality is much simpler. The parent corporations, mostly Red Hat really back in the days, wanted to have more control. And, in some ways, wayland is indeed simpler as a protocol.
Also, you write "replacing Xorg is reasonable". First, I don't think it is, but even more importantly than that, wayland is NOT a replacement. It is another display server and protocol. They do not have as goal to be compatible to Xorg at all, so "replacing" is the wrong term here. They indeed broke a ton of things, or rather, required of downstream applications to be rewritten - but the statement that they aim to replace Xorg is not the case. They are simply another display server + protocol at the end of the day. And they won't be a full "replacement" feature-wise either, that's why using wayland always feels like a dumbed down variant of xorg-server. Admittedly wayland also has a few new features such as the easy restart, but this may come to the new xserver too eventually. One has to wait and see. (The easy restart variant is something I like in wayland; hopefully xserver will have that too eventually. It would be technically possible. Also, xserver already is different to xorg-server, in many ways better too. Neither wayland nor xserver aim for 100% compatibility with the old, venerable xorg-server anymore.)
poor code quality has something to do with it, but is a bad reason to kill the whole protocol and ecosystem.
And now that whe have LLMs it's easier then ever to clean that up.
(and wayland has still not caught up after all those years)
The protocol was dead about 2-3 decades ago, no one actually did X11 for a longggg time, the only few real X11 apps were xeyes and some weird apps like that. No one did X11. Mutter, KWin, Picom, Compiz and so on did the painting, X11 just provided an insecure input and display protocol.
People who say these things about X11 and anything non-systemd sound like out of touch newcomers unaware of the BSDs or mainline Linux distributions that haven't gone along with Red Hat's directions. There is really no issue with X11 that isn't solved with a few options set to the X executable or using something other than startx to initialize, but I think OpenBSD made the right call just forking it.
Every single thing under the Sun going into systemd is going to cause issues (and probably already has with age verification laws and such) with compliance where a company is a singular target (Red Hat under IBM) to compel to make undesired changes contrary to our interests as users.
Red Hat is probably an even bigger problem than GNOME.
On the topic of WMs, some of these classics are really great. Openbox is a favorite of mine among the floating, but bspwm has been my overall favorite for 11 years.
I don't think I'll switch to Wayland for a few years, until it's usable. They don't have a portable way to script it yet, like wmctrl or something. Can't get anything to work there.
I don't see wayland ever being really usable. Wayland is now as old as Xorg was when wayland started because X11 is "old and crufty" and still not usable. And the "clean" protocol is simply lacking so again we started stacking whatever shit on top like compositor dependant extensions for screenshots or screensharing, desktop portals etc. and are STILL missing features like control over windows placement....
> Wayland is now as old as Xorg was when wayland started because X11 is "old and crufty" and still not usable.
How is this comparison supposed to make any sense? When Xorg started it was a fork of the existing XFree86 codebase (due to XFree86 changing license to one not deemed open source compatible), not starting from a clean sheet of paper. And XFree86 in turn wasn't a clean sheet implementation of the X protocols either, it IIRC started as a bunch of patches on top of the reference X11 codebase which goes back to the 1980'ies.
tbf in reality nobody uses X11 corefonts anymore. Even on X11 all typical toolkits like GTK or Qt have been doing their own client side font rendering for years.
(but X11 still supports server side fonts if you want to make trivial clients)
There's so many irritations with using Wayland that I continue to strip it out of installs. Not being able to correctly use push-to-talk in voice chat apps because of window security is infuriating, and one app crashing still takes down the entire desktop.
I'm afraid you vastly underestimate what it takes to produce a competent GUI toolkit. Performance, portability, layout control, theming, keyboard control support, accessibility for things like screen readers, and, of course, a sane API.
And I don't mean the code, I mean the design / architecture / UX expertise.
I'm currently writing an audio service and pipewire is definitely not amazing. Its an improvement to be sure. But audio on Linux is still a shit show compared to basically any other os
So much emotion here: I'm not sure why Wayland enthusiast have to be so negatively disposed towards X11. I enjoy new ideas as much as anyone, but I also respect what works. Build something better, and people will switch.
As for X11, its network transparency is something I used a lot in the past and relied on. I miss it.
Wayland was developed by people who got sick of X11. No one who actually dealt with X11 is missing it, most people who complain about wayland and yarn for X11 just miss features that took a while to get right.
> We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK
Can you explain why Gnome specifically? Genuine question. I know Gnome is very opinionated, many people don't like it, and these days there are super polished projects like Niri. But in what way is Gnome holding us back?
Gnome has a history of not playing ball with the rest of the ecosystem. They often hold back very simple things hostage (server-side decorations as an example).
I can't count the number of times I've watched people experience Linux for the first time via Gnome, and become convinced that Linux is weird and unworkable. Thankfully, those days have mostly passed, and vastly more friendly, conventional and appealing desktops are now often the first experience someone is likely to have.
I'm not a Gnome hater. I've deliberately chosen to use it at times. But I've been at all of this a while, and I understand what I'm dealing with, so the Gnome papercuts and "opinionated" behavior are things I can cope with. "Coping," being exactly what I feel like I'm doing when using Gnome.
Anyhow, more on theme with regard to lightweight DE's, my current go-to is openbox, which I use on auxiliary displays for game development. It starts faster than I can lift my finger from the enter key and neatly manages windows. That's about all I want from it and it pleases me.
> I can't count the number of times I've watched people experience Linux for the first time via Gnome, and become convinced that Linux is weird and unworkable.
Do you have a suggestion for a modern distro/DE that's still non-surprising to new users?
My wife switched from Windows 10 to Gnome 3 without too much fuss when her computer died witohut warning. She needed a laptop that day, the only one I had available was my spare thinkpad I just created an account, a new luks passphrase and she just started using it. Sure at first she had to learn a few things but nothing that lead to swears. My daughters have been using gnome 3 since they were of age of using a computer and like it much more than the windows at their mother's place.
Grumpy luddites gonna be grumpy luddites but I am pretty sure that Gnome is more approcheable than windows and macOs for the newer generations who are more accustomed to mobile interfaces since they are kids.
But to explain further, Gnome is run by people who have the attention span of a dead goldfish. They're constantly changing things, a good example is the control centre where it used to be just like other systems but in Gnome 3 they made it into a wall of incoherent text and disorganised categories.
They often tend to ditch things halfway and create new ones, Evince -> Papers, Totem -> showtime, EOG to Loupe, Cheese to snapshot, and so on and so on.
And for decades, they kept removing much used features and configurations and broke things and everytime you search for a fix, there was 10 version and a new one each week because Gnome keeps changing things.
In short, Gnome is what happens when you think you're Apple but have the design knowhow and depth of a paddle you couldn't drown a fruit fly in.
It is interesting you make the observation about GNOME and Apple. In 1999, GNOME had the involvement, and financial resources, of some of those Apple people due to Eazel. Andy Hertzfeld, Bud Trimble, Susan Kare, Mike Boich and more all gave improving GNOME and Linux some work.
This wasn’t a hostile takeover attempt; we all tried very hard to be team players, many times to what I think was our detriment. A very nice version of Nautilus was rejected because it was in C++ and we ended up doing all the work in GTK.
We had some very good ideas about distributed objects but they were pushed aside and we ended up using CORBA/ORBit/Bonobo and those distributed object systems ended up being replaced.
The dotcom crash caused a lot of Eazel people to end up at Apple. Nat and Miguel moved onto their dot NET Xamarin effort and many others ended up at Red Hat. There was an experience vacuum and this is one reason why the GNOME UX had so many issues IMHO.
- We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends. Qt and KDE is does not count ...
There's a very good alternative in development - check out V OS - https://v-os.dev/ - it is attempting to port the Be / Haiku GUI and SDK on to Linux, and even though it's still an alpha-beta release, the experience is really good. Unlike GTK's "clunkiness", Be/Haiku GUI feels so buttery smooth, and consumes so little computing resource (compared to GTK or Qt). As they aren't re-inventing anything new, I have high hopes for it. It just needs more support from all of us to thrive.
I am going to sound very ungrateful at sight of anything new given the state of affairs, but I will bite. I think UI kits are as much a matter of taste as it is a technical concern and the screenshots provided does not "do it for me", not in that it is missing what I want but it has things that just won't fly for me, for example those hanging title bar controls, I could probably remove them, but it is not a good start.
I really want to like KDE. Every time I set it up on a system I have non-stop issues. Probably mostly tied to Wayland, but either way it's just not reliable enough for me to use. Even tried KDE Neon to see if being on the latest version would help, and that eventually killed its entire install by itself.
It is exactly the same desktop today. The most visible changes are that the strange floating word "Activities" is now a strange floating pill instead, whose meaning only becomes apparent once you switch virtual desktops a few times, and that the virtual desktop switcher has moved to become horizontal (i.e. worse and less space-efficient on a widescreen) when it was vertical.
I often hear "try it again, it's really changed" but I see no difference. I powerfully disliked it in 2011 and nothing has changed. It's a bit faster, but there are more hamburger menus now, to the extent that apps like Disks has two of them. It's still horrible.
I am all for UI innovation, but it needs to be informed by what's gone before.
I would like the GNOME development team to spend a while learning to use a few pre-Windows desktop environments efficiently and well, to learn how seriously different layouts can work.
Classic MacOS was sublime. 8.1 was a good snapshot.
RISC OS is a great example.
Original Psion System 3MX EPOC is another.
Psion NetBook EPOC32 is another, and very different.
Some Amiga-inspired environment such as AROS or MorphOS.
Do you use NetworkManager or systemd-networkd or something else?
What is your login manager? Do you use Gnome for email or anything else?
I am asking this in earnest because I don't believe Gnome has left anything useful beyond GTK as the library (if you consider that useful) and maybe nautilus. Everything else is just bolted on and weird and broken.
I tend to compile everything from source on Linux. I don't want to be
tied down to any distribution. So from my point of view I'd agree - I
understand why curl/sh is used, it is super convenient, I also use it
for installing Rust. But I also dislike it. (Naturally for Rust I need
rust for the bootstrapping, so I understand that solution. But I still
dislike it too.)
Also I don't understand why you write that pipewire broke with the
past. That's also totally incorrect.
Wayland I agree with your statement but that's a corporate-controlled project by the GNOMEy overlords, so this is not a surprise (GTK5 will support wayland only; that was one reason why I stopped writing more GTK code).
As for your systemd comment: again I have no idea what you write. It does not make any sense. And the word "cohesive" is odd: all the systemd components, of course, form a cohesive unit WITHIN ITSELF from the get go - that was the whole point for the systemd developers to make themselves more important. systemd was never a "replace init only" attempt, they deliberately took over the ecosystem here to leverage more control. And that also, kind of, makes sense for those controlling many computers in a, say, university campus or so; administrators find that some jobs were made easier by that. For me, and many others, systemd brought nothing to the table that was needed. They always built strawmen such as "you may abandon your legacy shell scripts booting your system" - I don't use shell scripts in general. All logic I have is done via ruby + yaml files mostly (or, data files that describe the logic in a DSL like manner), so I never had any use case for systemd. As for your claim that you do not have to tinker with systemd: again, I have no idea why you write this. It sounds like a very poor and one-sided attempt to promote systemd. You never had an issue? I had numerous issues whenever I would use systemd, starting from smaller to larger issues. For instance, I remember that my local clock was not well-aligned so I changed it. Then I tested again and noticed the clock did not change. It took me a while to figure out that systemd inserted itself here and ignored my attempt to fix the local clock. Past that point I treated systemd as an invasive virus that attempts to ignore my commands, so off it went. That's just one example of many more issues with systemd. The philosophy the systemd devs use is mega-aggressive and incompatible with many other things, including the old UNIX pipe idea as well as "everything is a file".
> We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends.
I would not use the term cancer, but I would agree that we could need more flexibility. We simply lack viable options here. Corporations de-facto control
most of the code here. Or AI. Not a good future really.
> Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.
Again, no clue what you write here, but let's also be realistic: which alternatives to GTK or QT do you see coming up here? Plus, we then have more code for a toolkit. What we need is a meta-toolkit, that can be used in its own right (e. g. without qt and KDE) but also be used in way to allow people to create applications in qt and kde at the same time. One toolkit to rule them all. And it must be as flexible as possible. In many ways it is kind of HTML/CSS/JavaScript, de-facto really; would be nice to have a way to have something that could target all of the above, but I think the boat has sailed. HTML/CSS/JavaScript kind of won, and perhaps via webassembly we could at the least use something else other than JavaScript.
With IceWM, you need to take care of ssh-agent yourself that KDE or Cinnamon would start for you. You can do it with something like this in your `.xinitrc`:
https://fluxbox.org/
I've been running a whole band (16in, 8out) with Ardour, 3x Guitarix and "standard effects" (EQ, Compression, Barry's Satan Maximizer, etc) for some years now on a 10th gen i7.
That's with -rt patches and running live.
I considered switching to Xfwm, but even with Gnome3 I never had issues with performance.
Well, for most of us it is.
I don’t know if it’s the case of me being old-ish, but you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ve been using i3 with pretty much the same dot files for well over a decade, simply because it stays the hell away from the work I am doing.
My favourite WM still is fluxbox though it died, so I am using IceWM. I'd wish configuring it would be easier and more logical; it was never a problem to configure fluxbox, but configuring IceWM is a headstopper. Removing all workspaces I have not managed to achieve, for instance; it simply does not work here.
1. https://github.com/fluxbox/fluxbox/commits/master/
2. https://github.com/ecliptik/fluxland
The only thing I don't understand is why minimal WMs need to (intentionally?) reject basic usability and visual design principles.
- Main menu = nested dropdown - No padding anywhere - Terrible box shadows
etc.
Try it.
That's a feature
[1] https://ice-wm.org/screenshots/
IceWM was really lightweight, so it ran well on a variety of customer machines.
Great times!
I like minimalism.
The latest released version is 4.1.0 (2026-08-06).
It is always a good idea to read the link before commenting.
The Real Story Behind Wayland and X - Daniel Stone (linux.conf.au 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
It clarifies, from the people who actually get their hands dirty with X, why it's not such a good idea to keep evolving X11, why most of the things you think is handled by X are actually handled by many different components that are also used by Wayland environments and why so much of X11's design has fallen into disuse, and why X actually got "better" for a while (hint: it's because desktop environments depends on it less).
It is a shame that wayland took this long and had to deal with so much technical debt, and maybe didn't take the best approach for everything, but as someone who has been using linux desktop since 2006 and always thought it was very flaky and unprofessional... I say good riddance to X11 and am happy to how much more stable and polished modern linux desktop is, mainly on wayland but even including how much better it is to use modern environments under X11.
When I first connected it, I set a multiplier for the portrait monitor and I haven't thought about it since. It holds a chat system, status bar, notifications and background music.
Though I do have to admit they maybe the resolution increases are to blame for part of that, alpha blending 800x600 is easier than alpha blending a 4k ultra wide with HDR at 120hz...
Anyways... IceWM used to be my window manager of choice but since many years now I'm a happy camper with The Awesome WM (a tiling WM, but it can of course also be used in floating mode: one of my virtual desktop is always in "floating" mode).
Back of the envelope, for a 4k HDR ultra wide you'd need tens of gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth alone to do rendering all on the CPU.
There is a reason we offloaded to the GPU.
Desktop images are generally large blobs of pixels next to each other. I haven't verified but I would be surprised if 10x compression is not possible. So maybe 2-5GB/s? Also it's not like the GPU doesn't use up energy itself while doing this.
Now wobbly windows is something I can get behind.
Bring back my stupid Compiz effects. They were fun, and sometimes genuinely useful.
Out of the box their light terminal theme is flat out unreadable. Some of the chosen colors have almost no contrast.
Ugh.
And then if it is dark mode time but I pull up a terminal window that is semi transparent and it is on top of a browser window that has bright colors, again, unreadable.
Which is why transparency effects are mostly limited to cool screenshots.
COSMIC is great and I like it, which is odd as it violates a lot of my personal preferences... but pretty it is not.
sir, this is not an agentic window
AmiWM and WindowMaker also saw their usage but at the end of the day I always kept coming back to IceWM.
This behavior still exists with the “Stickies” application, itself an import from the pre OS X days!
Why not have the actual Windows XP Explorer as your DE?
Thanks to our man in Japan, you can!
https://github.com/mikuta0407/win4wine
https://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?p=706242#p706242
I also had Wayland refuse to run at all on an ARM device and this seems to be common too. I had to switch to X11 until the bug was fixed.
IceWM is in many ways actually more sophisticated than fluxbox; unfortunately on the other hand, IceWM has a few annoyances that I reported, and ... all of these got ignored. Now I understand the problem domain, the lead dev lacks time - fair enough. But it also means that I no longer file issues about features, since they'll just be ignored. Bug reports I may still do, but it kind of is no longer so useful since I have the impression that the lead dev will mostly not care that much.
KDE and GNOME I can not use for various reasons, but also one reason is speed-use. Fluxbox was sooooo snappy compared to KDE and I also dislike the trend of making KDE worse ever since Nate was put in charge (the guy who added a donation-daemon; see a complaint about Nate and him tying his own personal business into KDE as an ad-platform for it, from 2025: https://web.archive.org/web/20250914213714/https://jriddell....).
I had a look at some other WMs, such as awesome WM and so forth. They are all somewhat ok-ish, but always worse than fluxbox. Next step would be some tiling WM but for some reason I found them annoying, requiring my brain to think more. WMs also seem to be significantly less popular these days; there was more variety in the past here. Also, wayland kind of changed the situation a bit, though I can not say if wayland itself reduced variety - not a whole lot of software available on wayland either, I was surprised about that when I tested it some months again. Consider they constantly promote wayland as the successor to xorg, it is in some ways like a dumbed-down path, with fewer features. Very strange. Then you have also the GTK devs who will transition into a wayland-only future for GTK5; that was also one reason why I stopped writing any more ruby-gtk code, since I would here help transition to a wayland-only way and I don't want to abandon xorg merely because the GTK devs have received their corporate order to do so (thankfully https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver exists but it needs a lot more polishing and ideally more developers, but that seems also super-hard, since it requires domain-knowledge, time ... people lack that naturally in the open source world, and the AI slop also seems to have further reduced the number of open source devs in general. Claude is now our uberlord here, see the ruby programming language, where claude writes most of the code now).
I tried it some time ago because it was selected as default WM in NetBSD and I was positively surprised how configurable it is.
Any example?
So, I'm curious if there are any rough edges in it.
0. https://xlibre.net/
We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends. Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.
The Wayland ecosystem just runs on top of standard kernel interfaces and that's a really huge win for any future protocols.
I wouldn't wish to defend them, but by all accounts the biggest reason is because Xorg's code quality is quite poor, which is (if true) somewhat fair. I wish they tried replacing it without breaking everything and shipping the terrible design that is Wayland, but the goal of replacing Xorg is reasonable.
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
The reality is much simpler. The parent corporations, mostly Red Hat really back in the days, wanted to have more control. And, in some ways, wayland is indeed simpler as a protocol.
Also, you write "replacing Xorg is reasonable". First, I don't think it is, but even more importantly than that, wayland is NOT a replacement. It is another display server and protocol. They do not have as goal to be compatible to Xorg at all, so "replacing" is the wrong term here. They indeed broke a ton of things, or rather, required of downstream applications to be rewritten - but the statement that they aim to replace Xorg is not the case. They are simply another display server + protocol at the end of the day. And they won't be a full "replacement" feature-wise either, that's why using wayland always feels like a dumbed down variant of xorg-server. Admittedly wayland also has a few new features such as the easy restart, but this may come to the new xserver too eventually. One has to wait and see. (The easy restart variant is something I like in wayland; hopefully xserver will have that too eventually. It would be technically possible. Also, xserver already is different to xorg-server, in many ways better too. Neither wayland nor xserver aim for 100% compatibility with the old, venerable xorg-server anymore.)
Every single thing under the Sun going into systemd is going to cause issues (and probably already has with age verification laws and such) with compliance where a company is a singular target (Red Hat under IBM) to compel to make undesired changes contrary to our interests as users.
Red Hat is probably an even bigger problem than GNOME.
On the topic of WMs, some of these classics are really great. Openbox is a favorite of mine among the floating, but bspwm has been my overall favorite for 11 years.
How is this comparison supposed to make any sense? When Xorg started it was a fork of the existing XFree86 codebase (due to XFree86 changing license to one not deemed open source compatible), not starting from a clean sheet of paper. And XFree86 in turn wasn't a clean sheet implementation of the X protocols either, it IIRC started as a bunch of patches on top of the reference X11 codebase which goes back to the 1980'ies.
(I'm 100% not a fan of using a single process for all terminals).
And I don't mean the code, I mean the design / architecture / UX expertise.
> Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those
Those being the GUI toolkits like Qt and KDE one.
But yes, I agree, I have done UIs in low level (Skia) and high level (web, android) and I know it is a lottttt of work.
As for X11, its network transparency is something I used a lot in the past and relied on. I miss it.
Wayland was developed by people who got sick of X11. No one who actually dealt with X11 is missing it, most people who complain about wayland and yarn for X11 just miss features that took a while to get right.
Can you explain why Gnome specifically? Genuine question. I know Gnome is very opinionated, many people don't like it, and these days there are super polished projects like Niri. But in what way is Gnome holding us back?
I can't count the number of times I've watched people experience Linux for the first time via Gnome, and become convinced that Linux is weird and unworkable. Thankfully, those days have mostly passed, and vastly more friendly, conventional and appealing desktops are now often the first experience someone is likely to have.
I'm not a Gnome hater. I've deliberately chosen to use it at times. But I've been at all of this a while, and I understand what I'm dealing with, so the Gnome papercuts and "opinionated" behavior are things I can cope with. "Coping," being exactly what I feel like I'm doing when using Gnome.
Anyhow, more on theme with regard to lightweight DE's, my current go-to is openbox, which I use on auxiliary displays for game development. It starts faster than I can lift my finger from the enter key and neatly manages windows. That's about all I want from it and it pleases me.
Do you have a suggestion for a modern distro/DE that's still non-surprising to new users?
Grumpy luddites gonna be grumpy luddites but I am pretty sure that Gnome is more approcheable than windows and macOs for the newer generations who are more accustomed to mobile interfaces since they are kids.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49833842
But to explain further, Gnome is run by people who have the attention span of a dead goldfish. They're constantly changing things, a good example is the control centre where it used to be just like other systems but in Gnome 3 they made it into a wall of incoherent text and disorganised categories.
They often tend to ditch things halfway and create new ones, Evince -> Papers, Totem -> showtime, EOG to Loupe, Cheese to snapshot, and so on and so on.
And for decades, they kept removing much used features and configurations and broke things and everytime you search for a fix, there was 10 version and a new one each week because Gnome keeps changing things.
In short, Gnome is what happens when you think you're Apple but have the design knowhow and depth of a paddle you couldn't drown a fruit fly in.
This wasn’t a hostile takeover attempt; we all tried very hard to be team players, many times to what I think was our detriment. A very nice version of Nautilus was rejected because it was in C++ and we ended up doing all the work in GTK.
We had some very good ideas about distributed objects but they were pushed aside and we ended up using CORBA/ORBit/Bonobo and those distributed object systems ended up being replaced.
The dotcom crash caused a lot of Eazel people to end up at Apple. Nat and Miguel moved onto their dot NET Xamarin effort and many others ended up at Red Hat. There was an experience vacuum and this is one reason why the GNOME UX had so many issues IMHO.
There's a very good alternative in development - check out V OS - https://v-os.dev/ - it is attempting to port the Be / Haiku GUI and SDK on to Linux, and even though it's still an alpha-beta release, the experience is really good. Unlike GTK's "clunkiness", Be/Haiku GUI feels so buttery smooth, and consumes so little computing resource (compared to GTK or Qt). As they aren't re-inventing anything new, I have high hopes for it. It just needs more support from all of us to thrive.
Switched for Unity for a few years when I was erring on Ubuntu side, where I like the minimalism style.
Gnome 3 was a shock but nothing any normal human being can easily overcome. The hardest was to live without a taskbar, but I'm free now.
Would never touch KDE-let-s-make-this-pixel-also-clickable, but that's the power of freedom: you can choose what you like.
Nothing is forcing you, but you may be surprised.
GNOME 3.0 was released 15 years ago last April.
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2011-Apr...
It is exactly the same desktop today. The most visible changes are that the strange floating word "Activities" is now a strange floating pill instead, whose meaning only becomes apparent once you switch virtual desktops a few times, and that the virtual desktop switcher has moved to become horizontal (i.e. worse and less space-efficient on a widescreen) when it was vertical.
I often hear "try it again, it's really changed" but I see no difference. I powerfully disliked it in 2011 and nothing has changed. It's a bit faster, but there are more hamburger menus now, to the extent that apps like Disks has two of them. It's still horrible.
I am all for UI innovation, but it needs to be informed by what's gone before.
I would like the GNOME development team to spend a while learning to use a few pre-Windows desktop environments efficiently and well, to learn how seriously different layouts can work.
Classic MacOS was sublime. 8.1 was a good snapshot.
RISC OS is a great example.
Original Psion System 3MX EPOC is another.
Psion NetBook EPOC32 is another, and very different.
Some Amiga-inspired environment such as AROS or MorphOS.
Do you use NetworkManager or systemd-networkd or something else? What is your login manager? Do you use Gnome for email or anything else?
I am asking this in earnest because I don't believe Gnome has left anything useful beyond GTK as the library (if you consider that useful) and maybe nautilus. Everything else is just bolted on and weird and broken.
I tend to compile everything from source on Linux. I don't want to be tied down to any distribution. So from my point of view I'd agree - I understand why curl/sh is used, it is super convenient, I also use it for installing Rust. But I also dislike it. (Naturally for Rust I need rust for the bootstrapping, so I understand that solution. But I still dislike it too.)
See: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
Also I don't understand why you write that pipewire broke with the past. That's also totally incorrect.
Wayland I agree with your statement but that's a corporate-controlled project by the GNOMEy overlords, so this is not a surprise (GTK5 will support wayland only; that was one reason why I stopped writing more GTK code).
As for your systemd comment: again I have no idea what you write. It does not make any sense. And the word "cohesive" is odd: all the systemd components, of course, form a cohesive unit WITHIN ITSELF from the get go - that was the whole point for the systemd developers to make themselves more important. systemd was never a "replace init only" attempt, they deliberately took over the ecosystem here to leverage more control. And that also, kind of, makes sense for those controlling many computers in a, say, university campus or so; administrators find that some jobs were made easier by that. For me, and many others, systemd brought nothing to the table that was needed. They always built strawmen such as "you may abandon your legacy shell scripts booting your system" - I don't use shell scripts in general. All logic I have is done via ruby + yaml files mostly (or, data files that describe the logic in a DSL like manner), so I never had any use case for systemd. As for your claim that you do not have to tinker with systemd: again, I have no idea why you write this. It sounds like a very poor and one-sided attempt to promote systemd. You never had an issue? I had numerous issues whenever I would use systemd, starting from smaller to larger issues. For instance, I remember that my local clock was not well-aligned so I changed it. Then I tested again and noticed the clock did not change. It took me a while to figure out that systemd inserted itself here and ignored my attempt to fix the local clock. Past that point I treated systemd as an invasive virus that attempts to ignore my commands, so off it went. That's just one example of many more issues with systemd. The philosophy the systemd devs use is mega-aggressive and incompatible with many other things, including the old UNIX pipe idea as well as "everything is a file".
> We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends.
I would not use the term cancer, but I would agree that we could need more flexibility. We simply lack viable options here. Corporations de-facto control most of the code here. Or AI. Not a good future really.
> Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.
Again, no clue what you write here, but let's also be realistic: which alternatives to GTK or QT do you see coming up here? Plus, we then have more code for a toolkit. What we need is a meta-toolkit, that can be used in its own right (e. g. without qt and KDE) but also be used in way to allow people to create applications in qt and kde at the same time. One toolkit to rule them all. And it must be as flexible as possible. In many ways it is kind of HTML/CSS/JavaScript, de-facto really; would be nice to have a way to have something that could target all of the above, but I think the boat has sailed. HTML/CSS/JavaScript kind of won, and perhaps via webassembly we could at the least use something else other than JavaScript.