Why doesn't manjaro ship with popular tiling window managers like xmonad, awesome and dwm?

So as I am learning more and more about the linux world I have been recently worried by the fact that why don’t manjaro developers include window manager options in their calamares installer like some other distrubutions do? I am not saying desktop enviroments like gnome and kde are bad but adhering to the suckless philosophy won’t do any harm in my opinion and by the way I just learned some haskell :))

There have in the past been community editions with tiling window managers — bspwm springs to mind, and I think there might still be a community edition with i3 — but community editions are a different thing to the official editions.

Community editions are put together and maintained by one developer in their spare time. This spare time is not guaranteed, and given that they aren’t official editions, neither is their maintenance.

xmonad and awesome are either way still in the official repositories — as is i3 — and dwm is available from the AUR.

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In addition to the above, and this is just my opinion, I don’t think the tiling window managers are for newbies, kind of thing, and if you want it, you have the knowledge and the know-how to install it.

Buut that’s just my opinion.

:man_shrugging:

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This is a pretty easy question to answer.

There is already a pretty heavy workload - so any additions must be carefully weighed, and omissions (like 32 bit) also considered to lighten the load.

It’s no surprise that people love KDE, and that Gnome is important, and many other folks view Xfce as the best lightweight alternative. Beyond that, sorry - I personally never even tried xmonad, awesome, or dwm. It’s also been a long time since I bothered trying out Gnome…

I think they’re more of a geeky option for minorites. I’ve watched a few youtubers saying how easy it is to drive your desktop from the keyboard, talking for half an hour with a million well remembered shortcuts to do stuff - woah, so many shortcuts!!! Woah, so much messing with difficult config scripts!!! Even starting to play around with Alacritty I learned the hard way that there’s nothing ‘simple’ about the tweaks that those clever youtubers toss off as a doddle.

So beyond the big 3, there are diminishing returns. The big ones are nicely themed and include lots of ‘noob friendly’ bloat (like ‘manjaro-micro’ - which is basically micro with manjaro config files and ‘manjaro-rEFInd’ which is rEFInd with even more bloat and manjaro pictures :stuck_out_tongue: )

So you see where we’re at.

Manjaro is ‘Arch for Morons’.

That’s not a criticism - they aim low, and try to keep other folks happy whilst they’re doing it. Fortunately they haven’t (yet) gone as low as to become the new Ubuntu.

I do believe there was an ‘Architect’ for the slightly less moronic users who wish to build something more personal… but for many (even ex-Arch users) Manjaro is just a brainless ‘Get ISO, install and use’ scenario.

Also (to quote a Ubuntu forum concept) if you’ve got the beans, it’s not a big problem.

This isn’t the realm of Manjaro, that’s the realm of Arch.

For an easier entry, there is EndeavourOS which comes with themed Xfce, but also offering an online choice of seven Desktop Environments Xfce, Mate, LXQt, LXDE, Cinnamon, Plasma, Gnome, Budgie, window manager Openbox and tiling window managers i3-WM, BSPWM, Sway, Qtile and Worm… as well as a whole crowd of very clever boffins in the forum who can help, when they’re not too busy telling jokes.

I’m sorry to say that it appears that xmonad, awesome and dwm do seem a tad less popular than you imagine :wink: but if you manage to work out how to install them, I’m sure you can find lots of friends who also use them (though I’m not sure how many Manjaro users go for that).

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You could just spin your own window manager edition.

Fairly easy to accomplish using the saem tools the developers use

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I think we’ve been doing good at manjaro sway so far. It is a community edition, but looking at downloads it seems there is a steadily growing user base. Would love to hear your opinion!
https://manjaro-sway.download/

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