dwm VS wingo

dwm

I've been using X11 on my Framework laptop for years. No desktop environment at all. Just my regulard old school window manager[1]. No KDE or GNOME. But also no XFCE.

The only thing I had to do to get scaling working for me was set two environment variables[2].

I was indeed worried about this when I bought the laptop. Prior to this, I avoided anything with resolutions higher than 1920x1200. But it turned out that everything mostly worked with a couple tweaks.

I think the only real issue I've run into is `git gui`. As I understand it, the GUI toolkit it uses doesn't support scaling? Not sure. I ended up working around it by just increasing font sizes. I suppose this exposes the weakness that is probably impacting you: the scaling on my laptop is being done by the GUI toolkits, not the display server or compositor. (I don't always run a compositor, but when I do, I use `picom`. Mostly just to avoid tearing.)

[1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo

[2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/ea3a88e6160f4244...

I used Wingo (https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo) for a while and it did the floating/tiling mix pretty well.

I also used StumpWM (https://stumpwm.github.io/) for years, primarily in purely-tiling mode. The killer feature for me was that you (the user) define frames on the desktop, and then windows are placed into frames rather than resizing and re-jiggering everything whenever a new window opens.

Yeah I remember activities from over a decade ago. I don't recall ever being able to get it to work right.

I ended up writing my own WM instead: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo

That's why I went and wrote my own window manager that breaks this aspect of EWMH so that workspaces can be changed independently on each head: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo/

Wingo

Switching to a desktop environment is a no-go for me. (I wrote my own WM.) So I'm very likely going to be spending quite a bit of time trying to find a configuration that works for my eyes. I don't mind putting in that time, I'm just hoping that I can find something that works. But others might bounce off. This is actually why I have historically not purchased laptops with HiDPI displays, specifically to avoid dealing with this problem. I made an exception this time because there are so many other great aspects of the laptop.