Arch Linux’s pkgstats data provides one of the few large-scale, opt-in snapshots of how real users configure their systems. While not a perfect census (participation is voluntary), the long-running dataset offers a clear picture of how desktop environment and window managers’ preferences have shifted across more than a decade.
At the same time, the data (to some extent) also reflects a broader trend for one key reason: as you know, a default Arch installation gives you only a base system, and you build everything else according to your own needs and tastes. In other words, there’s no predefined desktop environment that users are locked into, unlike most other distributions.
That means these statistics give us a very accurate look at which desktop environments and window managers Arch users actually choose to install and use. But enough talk, let’s move on to the data.
Waiting for a tiling window manager with nice animations
I think you have to code those yourself. I heard Niri had some nice animations, despite being a scroller. Hyprland has good animations if you put some time into it.
I do also understand if that was sarcastic. I’ve learned…
Not sarcastic, animations add greatly to the understandability of what’s going on which is helpful anyway and especially if you fat finger something.
But yeah I don’t especially want to put loads of time in either heh
I’d use Gnome if it had tray application icon support. I just cannot do without my tray icons for Dropbox.
I like gnomes features but not gnome itself. Cinnamon is good, but has its faults. Plasma is better but is missing online features (calendar for example can’t be used to create events or sync with your cloud accounts). Really would like to see how Comic a desktop turns out when it’s ready.
You are in luck. COSMIC launches in 3 days.
I am also interested to see what kind of adoption COSMIC gets. From the comments I have seen, I looks like it may pull-away a fair number of GNOME users.
Nor sure that COSMIC calendar will have all the features you want. COSMIC is a pretty good base for GNOME apps though. It does not have to be either / or.
Sway. Though I graduated from Arch to NixOS, sway remains as one of the core tenets of my personhood.
I use KDE Plasma, btw.
While a CachyOS user, I’m old school (X11 user and maybe XLibre) with i3 as my WM of choice. I know, hate on me all you want because I use antiquated tech. It works, unlike Wayland which is still broken as of right now. I need some features not found in Wayland natively, and that requires I use X11 (thankfully, i3 is customizable with some decent plugins). I know about Sway, SwayFX and other i3-style compositors for Wayland, but they don’t work with NVIDIA as of right now I don’t think.
KDE, beautiful and flexible
Bash
I3. No desktop. Just me and the bash.
Expected it
Openbox for me. Going strong since my early days on Ubuntu when one release Unity had a memory leak that wast just too much for my 2GB of RAM. I had already being flirting with Openbox and that was the cue to finally use it for good. When I migrated to archlnux it was a no brainier.
If you ever want to try Wayland, check out LabWC.
I will definetly do at some point. But last time I looked into LabWC they were not implementing some of the actions that I use. I guess I can adapt but even recently I started to use some key chains and is a shame that LabWC has no intention to implement it.
Apart from that It would be nice if they implemented an alternative format for the config files, because that is one drawback of Openbox, the XML config is really rough to do and to read.
KDE because it was recommended with cachy os, and i don’t really know enough or care enough to use something else 😅
Arch users: “Well now I’m definitely not using KDE”
Did you check the wiki to see which one it says to use??
Niri. I know it’s not a DE, but it’s currently my fav.
from my limited time using it I found niri to be actually so good. will switch over from hyprland eventually i think.
Do you happen to know how it is with a multi-monitor setup?
I finished setting up Hyprland 2years ago, then learned about the shit community literally the day after being “ah, finally done!” and haven’t found the energy to switch since.
I’m not really fussed about the community as long as the tool is good, which Hyprland is there’s no question about that.
Like I said I have very limited usage using niri after seeing a bunch of youtube videos praising it I decided to give it a try but I haven’t had time to fully configure it and move over just yet. On my dual monitor setup it worked fine. Really loved how you can expose all open windows with a simple multi finger swipe and how each monitor has its own space.
I was the opposite. I stopped using hyprland because I found it utterly broken (Ctrl-X rant here). Didn’t find out about the community until after I left. User of i3, sway, and niri. Thanks to Lemmy for first mentioning niri to me. :)
I use Niri on triple screens with different sizes and refresh rates, it’s all seamless. Plus per-monitor scroll up/down left/right. I have an Nvidia GPU, they seem to have worked out all the problems with Wayland support.
yup. I was tempted to give Hyprland a try but noped out for political reasons.
political reasons?
deleted by creator
Most projects have codes of conduct, even if it’s something as simple as Wheaton’s Law.
The original creator of hyprland behaved in a way that made people leave the project (the “political” part comes from the creator’s discrimination). It was basically a good example for why projects should have codes of conduct.
There’s Hypr, which is the X11 version of it (of which I tested a bit on my own time).
I am also loving Niri
KDE works and Arch is easy to install.
If you want to try something fresh, give mangowc a try. It is a tiling wm but also has built-in support for scrolling layouts like Niri (even vertical).
