So Ive been using linux for a long time and mostly with gnome. I know about window managers and how using them will reduce the memory usage by system a lot because they are less bloated etc. I want to try a window manager on my nixos machine - this will be my first time trying one, I have good knowledge in programming so technical stuff wont bother me that much. Which window manager do you suggest? Customization is my priority.
Hm? Both bspwm and herbstluftwm have tabbed layouts. It’s been so long since I’ve used i3, but it has them too, right? Sway’s a mostly config-compatible, mostly client compatible i3 clone for Wayland, so I’d expect it to have tabs, too. As well as floating windows, which every tabbing WM I’ve used also supports.
I think I missed your point. What are you saying? Did I say something that made you think I thought tiling WMs could only do tiling?
What I’m opinionated about is configuration files. Technically, even a desktop could be configuration-less, although I’ve never seen one. I have become insistent that my WM have no configuration that isn’t set through a client call. Sway still uses a config file like i3; mostly the same config file, unless it’s drifted significantly. That was Sway’s whole killer feature: i3 users could switch from X11 to Wayland with only minor configuration file changes.
Oh, I refer to that in your post. To me all WMs/compositors are a matter of taste, including stacking ones (on wayland from the stacking ones I only like labwc though it’s xml config is not what I would prefer). And you already clarified, but it gave me the impression that it was implicit that tiling was a matter of taste, when those WMs/compositors also offer tabbed/stacked mode, which to me it’s not tiling at all, and offers something really appealing not so easily to achieve on any stacking WM/compositor.
Regarding config, well yes, if one is looking for no config at all, and still get the WM/compositor to be useful and also to one’s liking, then that’s hard to find. But the config files once achieving what one likes and is productive with, then one barely looks at it again, and they are usually portable (usually not only across PCs, also across distros).
But I got your point, sort of “plug and play” as they said before, just install it and without any config be productive with it… I can’t imagine that. I heard river is pretty close to dwm, but I can’t tell much about it. The river idea of dynamic tiling, which seems to be the default doesn’t really appeal to me, so I would need to do tabbed mode any ways, which doesn’t seem to be the default, so at least for me it wouldn’t be that configless… But maybe it would be to dynamic tiling people.