XMonad – The Automated Tiling WM
I wonder what will happen to XMonad as the Wayland future actually seems to be approaching. I suppose nothing yet.But, I was an i3wm user, and now it’s hard to imagine going back to X11. I run SwayWM on NixOS and using Linux any other way feels archaic now. Yes, I do genuinely understand how that seems absolutely ridiculous, but honestly, it does. Other than the occasional stability issue or bug, it really feels like the future is arriving: smooth rendering, predictable latency, hardly an imperfect frame, heterogeneous DPI with no effort, no need to string along GNOME or KDE services to configure input devices or manage displays, yet to experience any problems with sleep/resume, and with NixOS, a simple, centrally managed configuration for my whole OS (including Sway) and any patches, git-versioned. It isn’t perfect, but it is almost as good as promised. I just recently setup a new desktop by grabbing a recent NixOS USB stick, formatting the drives, git cloning my configs, and running the installer, and one reboot later I was in my environment with Sway, all of my applications, my configuration…I’ve tried versioning my dotfiles before, but this seemed to both be more tedious and still not really accomplish what I wanted. My desktops and laptops are single user, so I can just use NixOS to manage system-wide configs instead and get 99% of what I actually wanted.I’ve digressed a bit into stuff very unrelated to WMs, but the software around your WM is important when dealing with tiling WMs. Nobody wants a bespoke pile of complex configurations that could break on an upgrade without warning, and that has never been more important than with minimal WMs.