 For the last few months or so I have been a very happy user of the Q-Tile window manager. I think and have thought that Q-Tile is a fantastic window manager and I've gone so far as to say that it's my favorite window manager. I've sung its praises high and low here on the channel, on social media. I've just talked till I'm blue in the face about how awesome Q-Tile is and I truly do believe that Q-Tile is a fantastic window manager but lately it has not been treating me well. There have been some dependency updates that have gone on in the background that broke it on openSUSA. I thought it was an openSUSA problem so I hopped to Fedora. I've had the same problems on Fedora. I have not been able to get them fixed so I have been looking for an alternative to Q-Tile that would make me happy again. I just want to be happy and productive with when it comes to my window manager and I like to be able to tame things and have options and all this stuff so I'm looking for the perfect solution. For the longest time I've thought it was Q-Tile but because I'm having those problems and you know I can't fix them I decided to find something else. So I'm actually returning to an old favorite of mine. Now like I said if you've watched my channel for any amount of time you know that I go through favorites quite often so it's not surprising that I've had many favorites over the course of three years here. I'd like to change things try new things and stuff like that. So I'm actually returning to an old favorite of mine and that is DWM. So I've gone suckless y'all. I've gone suckless and this is my suckless setup as of right now. I've spent literally all day doing this when I should have been working. So first of all let's not talk about my productivity. It was horrendous today but some days are just like that. So I've spent all day and this is as far as I've got. So I know it does not look like much but I've managed to set up many different things. And the thing is is that when you do DWM the thing that takes the longest when you're setting it up is patching. So if I go into my suckless folder these are the patches that I've applied. Yeah that's a lot of freaking patches guys. Now if you've ever used DWM before you know that the more patches that you use the harder it gets to actually patch simply because you're changing line numbers and stuff like that and you're changing lines and all this stuff. The more patches you add the harder it is to continue to patch. This right here is 23 patches. It's by far the most patches I've ever done manually on DWM. Now if you've used DWM FlexiPatch before it's much easier to do more patches but I didn't use FlexiPatch because they didn't have all the patches that I wanted. So I decided to do them all manually because I'm a nerd and I enjoy this kind of thing. So I managed to do 23. I planned on doing 28. Three of them I changed my mind on. Two of them failed completely. So I spent all day doing this and I've had a good time doing it. I chose DWM because well first of all I'm very familiar with it. I've used it for a very long time. C is probably the language that I'm most familiar with outside of HTML and CSS I guess. You know if you consider those languages. You know this is the language that I spent the most time in over the years. I understand more of it than any of the others. So I decided to go with DWM over other options. So I decided I thought about Xmonad for about 30 seconds and realized now I'm not going to Xmonad. Xmonad doesn't like me and I don't like Xmonad so I threw that out the window. I also consider BSPWM and honestly there's still a chance that I might go to BSPWM if I can't get everything that I want working here in DWM. I'll talk about that here in a minute. So that's like that was like my number two option. The third option was going back to I3. There's nothing wrong with I3. I still think I3 is a fantastic window manager but I just kind of got tired of I3 after a while. So I'm not really ready to go back to it yet. Now you'll notice that conspicuously missing out of all of the options that I decided to choose from were any Wayland composters or window managers that use Wayland is the way that I prefer to you know to talk about them. And I've talked about that over and over again on this channel. I'm just not ready to switch to Wayland yet. Maybe someday. Not there yet. So I only considered Xorg based window managers at the point and I settled on DWM. I spent the day patching it and I still have a ways to go. So there are a couple things that I want to do and I might as well talk about them seeing as how I'm making a rambly video about this. The first one is obviously I need to do something with the bar. Now usually I use a plugin called DWM status 2D in order to put the stuff up here in the bar and I had planned on doing it this time but I used a wrong patch earlier. So this is the XRDB patch and I need to have the XRDB patch installed but I can't install that. I don't think because I used the X resources patch. I think those two would conflict with each other. In fact I'm positive that they would. So I can't use status 2D and use the XRDB patch which this requires. So I could just use the regular status 2D without the XRDB stuff but then I would have to put away my plans of using PyWall to do all the theming for me. That's the second thing I plan on doing is setting up setting it up so that I can use PyWall on all of DWM stuff the wallpaper just like I was doing in Qtile. I want to get that far and I haven't got there yet. I've gotten close. As far as I know I have all the pieces in place for me to do so. I'm just missing something I haven't got there yet. I just finished patching and I wanted to make this video before my time ran out for the day. So PyWall is something that I definitely want to do and the thing is is that if I can't get PyWall to work DWM is probably not going to be where I end up completely finally you know for the next few weeks or a few months or however long you know ends it being before I go to something different. You guys know me. So if I can't get PyWall like I said there's a good chance that I'll be going to something else because I know I can get it to work in BSPWM. I know I can get to work in I3 obviously if Qtile would just launch for me I would just continue to use Qtile because it's still my favorite and I'm pretty sure I probably could get to work in Xmonad if Haskell didn't exist but it does exist and we all know how that goes. So there are obviously those things now I didn't consider Awesome Winner Manager or Left WM simply because I don't care for Lua with Awesome Winner Manager and Left WM I'm not that familiar with. There are a few other Xorg based Winner Managers that I just didn't consider so just mostly because I haven't spent enough time in them. I'm assuming that Herp's Lufk would be fairly easy to get PyWall working in but again not that familiar with it so I didn't I didn't consider that maybe I'll give it a try here for a video in the next few days or something like that and just give me something to do. So seeing as how I haven't wasted enough time on Winner Managers I might as well waste some more why not right? So it's not a waste it's not a waste if you're having fun it's not as if I had work to do today I did actually have work to do today but this was more interesting whatever it doesn't matter anyways so I've gone suckless and I haven't gone full suckless of course I've just decided to use DWM I'm not even using Dmenu I do have it installed so I can you know I can use Dmenu up there but I haven't customized it at all I just prefer to use Rofi because it's just better plus you don't have to patch anything and I'm so sick of patching already even though it was fun you know I I'm just sick of patching so I'm not using Dmenu I'm not using Slok I'm not using SL status yet mainly because I don't have a way to theme it really because this is what would control the colors in SL status without status 2d I can't you can't control the colors in SL status which is which is just I mean just if you think about that for a minute it's just really dumb but whatever and I'm not using surf obviously or ST by the way this is kitty I decided to not use ST although if I can't get I may I may end up installing ST and using it for my scratch pads if I can't get kitty to actually show up a specific specific size when it's launched I can't haven't figured that part out yet so I'm still working on it so my setup has changed that's what I wanted to make the video it's just a random video I do these from times to times where I just kind of show you how my setup is transitioning as I change my mind and do little tweaks and stuff like that and I they're throw away videos and if people are interested in them that's great if they're not you know they can just pass it by and watch my next video whatever whatever suits their boat floats they're happy I don't think those are the way that those words are supposed to come out but you guys get the idea right so that is it for this video I have gone kind of suckless I suppose I'm using the wrong title but whatever that doesn't matter either I don't I spent a lot of time patching dwm it would be an awful shame if I can't get pie will actually work so I'm gonna continue to work on that I think that it'll be in an entertaining time so just before I wrap up I want to talk about suckless and dwm in general so this is kind of the meat and potatoes of the video given the but the fact that I'm 12 minutes in or whatever I'm putting the meat and potatoes all the way at the end but it doesn't matter I like dwm a lot and I've talked about this before but it's definitely probably one of the hardest window managers out there now it's not hard as in hard to install it's actually fairly easy to install but out of the box it's unusable I mean it is blatantly unusable now I know there's someone madly in the comment section below you know typing oh I use dwm without any patches well first of all good for you you masochist but for the rest of us we need a few patches right there are a few things in dwm that you have to have in order to make it actually usable one of those things is to be able to move clients between different positions in the stack and you can't do that without the move stack patch right you can't do that or and some people want to have all the same layout on every single tag you can't do that without per tag you get the idea right there are several different patches that you have to have in order to get dwm to actually function as a window manager and then once you've started patching it's kind of hard to stop because there are so many really good ones I could have went way further than 28 I probably could have got up to 35 even 40 different patches because some of some of them are really really cool and I want them but I knew I had to you know just at least try to curtail the number of of patches even though I didn't do a very good job at 28 and I I probably could have gotten those three more that I changed my mind on but I just decided not to go with them and I may end up still doing status 2d if I throw away the pie wall idea or maybe I'll go back a few a few patches in my git repository history and pull out the x resources patch and then use the xrdb patch or whatever it is x yeah xrdb patch maybe that's what I end up doing I don't know yet but it'll be more patching and that's the whole point is that dwm it takes quite a bit of work if you if you want to use it it takes some work and I always kind of forget how much work it takes and every time I come back to use it I'm like oh yeah this is why dwm is such a pain in the ass to set up but it was fun for me but I don't think that it is for everyone so that is it for this video if you have thoughts on my journey to back to dwm you can leave those in the comment section below if you haven't already leave a like on this video I didn't remind you at the beginning so hopefully if you're still watching this you'll leave a like because it really does help the channel I really appreciate it you can follow me on mastodon or odyssey those links will be 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