I’m going to be doing a clean install of Arch Linux on an old ThinkPad tomorrow morning, and I’d like some suggestions for a window manager, desktop environment, or Wayland compositor.

It can have a learning curve, but I would like it to not have too steep a learning curve (I have been using i3 for a while, and I have just come from LeftWM which I configured to have i3 keybinds). Also, in order to make it fairly obvious to my peers that I’m using Linux, I’d like it to look nothing like Windows or macOS.

Preferably something light (at least out of the box). When I was using LeftWM, my RAM usage was often around 200MB. I recently did a system analysis and I have 8GB of RAM, but my CPU will hold me back. It’s an Intel Core 2 Duo of the Penryn microarchitecture (x86_64-v1).

Any suggestions?

  • The Postminimalist
    6•5 months ago

    The information you gave is vague enough that basically any WM or compositor fits the bill.

    Do you have a preference between X or Wayland? Do you want something that looks fancy like Hyprland? Is there something in particular that i3 doesn’t provide that you might want?

    • Hellfire103OP
      1•5 months ago

      I prefer X11, and Hyprland doesn’t have a great community (apparently). However, I was hoping more that Lemmy would just comment their favourite light WMs to make it easier for me to choose.

      • The Postminimalist
        2•5 months ago

        In that case, my favourite so far is River. Honestly what I like the most about it is that the creator seems like a nice guy, and I liked the talks he gave about the process of making a wayland compositor.

        Otherwise, there wasn’t much difference between River and something like Sway. Sway had more documentation, and I could also use i3 documentation when needed. But I felt like sticking through figuring out River’s config file, and then it was just like any other compositor. And I liked it.