Kinda curious as I am currently using budgie but I want that more “arch” feel yet I still am a beginner. So what is your window manager and is it easy to use/learn? TIA!
KDE Plasma
When I was using Arch, Gnome was still my DE of choice. Windows Manager isn’t really beginner friendly, but if you have the tenacity to learn, I would read up on them to see which will fit your needs and style better.
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In the past I have run sway, (this was a few years ago before hyprland was even a thing). Sway works very well imo and once you find a nix example config you are good to go. Nwg-shell seems pretty solid and have tried it in the past.
Hyprland is also very solid but haven’t tinkered much. Config seems more confusing to me, but possibly lack of experience with it. If you want fancy animations and touch gestures it works well.
I personally would avoid xorg window managers (i3, awesome, dwm) unless you really need xorg. If need be then try i3 and move to sway after, as the configs are designed to be transferable.
These days though running standard desktop environments I’ve found the best as it comes with all the bits like notification daemons etc without having to cobble something together and possibly miss functionality.
Touch gestures work on sway as well, the bindsysm commands just aren’t in the default config. You have to read the manual to find them!
I used bspwm for years but I’ve recently moved to hyprland on all my machines that dont have a Nvidia GPU. Really liking it so far.
on the 7640u pre-bios 3.03 and kernel 6.5.9 i was using sway, with mostly no issues. now that the graphics drivers (and other) issues are solved i moved to hyprland. im loving it
Sway. I was running Manjaro with sway, and switched to Arch a month ago and the config just working was a dream.
Personally I would say Budgie is a Desktop Enviroment… but the qeustion of which window manager? Currently I’m using Hyprland and I would say if you want to something to feel archie for beginner maybe give i3 or sway a try. The choice their depends on your feelings towards Wayland.
I have been using Arch as the main OS for about 15 years since around 2006, for me it was i3 and then sway. But I was primarily doing web development, so needed nothing too fancy, just the console, the browser, and the IDE.