I'm mildly bemused at the other comments treating this as a blast from the past. I use icewm today as a super low resource DE for a headless remote desktop system, with a major benefit being that it's all in one with no configuration needed; one unit includes panel, app menu, and window manager that work out of the box.
IceWM is great. I think there are a lot of great deployments you could use it for. If you had old computers to give to kids and teach them linux for example, IceWM would be a really great desktop for that. I use dwm still personally but Ice is Nice, and that's for sure! ;)
I tried tiling managers too but I always found them awkward.
My favourite WM still is fluxbox though it died, so I am using IceWM. I'd wish configuring it would be easier and more logical; it was never a problem to configure fluxbox, but configuring IceWM is a headstopper. Removing all workspaces I have not managed to achieve, for instance; it simply does not work here.
Good memories, but I am glad to see that X11 is now well and thoroughly legacy. Wayland and Pipewire has been thoroughly amazing by just breaking clean with the past. iw has done the same to a large degree. While systemd has its short comings, systemd-networkd, journald, and so on are now providing a cohesive system that is well aligned, even if not perfectly aligned with ones' expectation, I don't have to tinker to make systemd-networkd to work with journactl or the likes.
We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends. Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.
X11 is absolutely NOT legacy.
It's still better in any relevant way than wayland. Freedesktop just wanted to kill it for weird reasons. But Xorg forks like Xlibre are very active and there are even new implementations like YServer.
I still use X11 for every new setup.
> Freedesktop just wanted to kill it for weird reasons.
I wouldn't wish to defend them, but by all accounts the biggest reason is because Xorg's code quality is quite poor, which is (if true) somewhat fair. I wish they tried replacing it without breaking everything and shipping the terrible design that is Wayland, but the goal of replacing Xorg is reasonable.
I'm afraid you vastly underestimate what it takes to produce a competent GUI toolkit. Performance, portability, layout control, theming, keyboard control support, accessibility for things like screen readers, and, of course, a sane API.
And I don't mean the code, I mean the design / architecture / UX expertise.
I'm currently writing an audio service and pipewire is definitely not amazing. Its an improvement to be sure. But audio on Linux is still a shit show compared to basically any other os
I don't think I'll switch to Wayland for a few years, until it's usable. They don't have a portable way to script it yet, like wmctrl or something. Can't get anything to work there.
I don't see wayland ever being really usable. Wayland is now as old as Xorg was when wayland started because X11 is "old and crufty" and still not usable. And the "clean" protocol is simply lacking so again we started stacking whatever shit on top like compositor dependant extensions for screenshots or screensharing, desktop portals etc. and are STILL missing features like control over windows placement....
> We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK
Can you explain why Gnome specifically? Genuine question. I know Gnome is very opinionated, many people don't like it, and these days there are super polished projects like Niri. But in what way is Gnome holding us back?
Gnome has a history of not playing ball with the rest of the ecosystem. They often hold back very simple things hostage (server-side decorations as an example).
I can't count the number of times I've watched people experience Linux for the first time via Gnome, and become convinced that Linux is weird and unworkable. Thankfully, those days have mostly passed, and vastly more friendly, conventional and appealing desktops are now often the first experience someone is likely to have.
I'm not a Gnome hater. I've deliberately chosen to use it at times. But I've been at all of this a while, and I understand what I'm dealing with, so the Gnome papercuts and "opinionated" behavior are things I can cope with. "Coping," being exactly what I feel like I'm doing when using Gnome.
Anyhow, more on theme with regard to lightweight DE's, my current go-to is openbox, which I use on auxiliary displays for game development. It starts faster than I can lift my finger from the enter key and neatly manages windows. That's about all I want from it and it pleases me.
But to explain further, Gnome is run by people who have the attention span of a dead goldfish. They're constantly changing things, a good example is the control centre where it used to be just like other systems but in Gnome 3 they made it into a wall of incoherent text and disorganised categories.
They often tend to ditch things halfway and create new ones, Evince -> Papers, Totem -> showtime, EOG to Loupe, Cheese to snapshot, and so on and so on.
And for decades, they kept removing much used features and configurations and broke things and everytime you search for a fix, there was 10 version and a new one each week because Gnome keeps changing things.
In short, Gnome is what happens when you think you're Apple but have the design knowhow and depth of a paddle you couldn't drown a fruit fly in.
Do you use NetworkManager or systemd-networkd or something else?
What is your login manager? Do you use Gnome for email or anything else?
I am asking this in earnest because I don't believe Gnome has left anything useful beyond GTK as the library (if you consider that useful) and maybe nautilus. Everything else is just bolted on and weird and broken.
I just switched to IceWM after trying so many different versions of tiling window managers. The one that worked best for me was MangoWM, but in the end it also interfered more than helped with my work.
A simple floating wm like IceWM works best for the apps I use: basic tools like terminal and Thunar, Reaper, windows apps via wine.
Really happy I found out about it. It lets me concentrate on the things that matter.
IceWM was amazing: fast, relatively configurable but very usable out of the box. The Motif window decorations looked real cool on screenshots as if I was running CDE. If memory serves, you could roll a window only to its title bar which is an old Mac OS9 feature that didn't carry to OS X.
AmiWM and WindowMaker also saw their usage but at the end of the day I always kept coming back to IceWM.
I worked for a commercial Linux distribution in 2004-2005 (not existing anymore). Our default desktop user IceWM, but if I recall correctly, we used GNOME’s Nautilus to provide the desktop background/folders.
IceWM was really lightweight, so it ran well on a variety of customer machines.
Love how we had fancy glass transparency effects calculated in software (see also - enlightenment ) then shit got slow, and now we're back transparency stuff working again but instead of hand optimized assembly we're throwing a giant ass GPU at the problem.
Though I do have to admit they maybe the resolution increases are to blame for part of that, alpha blending 800x600 is easier than alpha blending a 4k ultra wide with HDR at 120hz...
That's always the excuse for sloppy programming: "Things are bigger now". The truth is: CPU and RAM progressed at a speed not just a bit but much faster than real estate (pixels) growth and refresh rate.
Anyways... IceWM used to be my window manager of choice but since many years now I'm a happy camper with The Awesome WM (a tiling WM, but it can of course also be used in floating mode: one of my virtual desktop is always in "floating" mode).
As you say, purely software rendering was almost certainly infeasible to scale as resolution and refresh rates went up, but we've had at least a decade of having stupidly powerful 2D GPU hardware in all our shit.
Bring back my stupid Compiz effects. They were fun, and sometimes genuinely useful.
Cosmic has sexy transparency effects but God the color schemes are so poorly thought through.
Out of the box their light terminal theme is flat out unreadable. Some of the chosen colors have almost no contrast.
Ugh.
And then if it is dark mode time but I pull up a terminal window that is semi transparent and it is on top of a browser window that has bright colors, again, unreadable.
Which is why transparency effects are mostly limited to cool screenshots.
Gods, what a blast from the past! I used IceWM religiously back in the early 2000s, and it was one of the first projects I submitted patches to (long before PRs were a thing). It was always snappy, even on the lowest-end hardware.
I don't understand why we couldn't just update x11 to address our current concerns, at the very least by deprecating unused stuff and enabling features like variable DPI.
IceWM is quite nice; I am currently using it. Personally I actually preferred fluxbox, but fluxbox kind of died some years ago. It is not 100% dead, as there is still activity on github every now and then, but largely if you know it, you also know that you had a rather sizeable community about it back in the days, and now that is ... gone.
IceWM is in many ways actually more sophisticated than fluxbox; unfortunately on the other hand, IceWM has a few annoyances that I reported, and ... all of these got ignored. Now I understand the problem domain, the lead dev lacks time - fair enough. But it also means that I no longer file issues about features, since they'll just be ignored. Bug reports I may still do, but it kind of is no longer so useful since I have the impression that the lead dev will mostly not care that much.
KDE and GNOME I can not use for various reasons, but also one reason is speed-use. Fluxbox was sooooo snappy compared to KDE and I also dislike the trend of making KDE worse ever since Nate was put in charge (the guy who added a donation-daemon; see a complaint about Nate and him tying his own personal business into KDE as an ad-platform for it, from 2025: https://web.archive.org/web/20250914213714/https://jriddell....).
I had a look at some other WMs, such as awesome WM and so forth. They are all somewhat ok-ish, but always worse than fluxbox. Next step would be some tiling WM but for some reason I found them annoying, requiring my brain to think more. WMs also seem to be significantly less popular these days; there was more variety in the past here. Also, wayland kind of changed the situation a bit, though I can not say if wayland itself reduced variety - not a whole lot of software available on wayland either, I was surprised about that when I tested it some months again. Consider they constantly promote wayland as the successor to xorg, it is in some ways like a dumbed-down path, with fewer features. Very strange. Then you have also the GTK devs who will transition into a wayland-only future for GTK5; that was also one reason why I stopped writing any more ruby-gtk code, since I would here help transition to a wayland-only way and I don't want to abandon xorg merely because the GTK devs have received their corporate order to do so (thankfully https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver exists but it needs a lot more polishing and ideally more developers, but that seems also super-hard, since it requires domain-knowledge, time ... people lack that naturally in the open source world, and the AI slop also seems to have further reduced the number of open source devs in general. Claude is now our uberlord here, see the ruby programming language, where claude writes most of the code now).
Well, for most of us it is.
My favourite WM still is fluxbox though it died, so I am using IceWM. I'd wish configuring it would be easier and more logical; it was never a problem to configure fluxbox, but configuring IceWM is a headstopper. Removing all workspaces I have not managed to achieve, for instance; it simply does not work here.
We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends. Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.
I wouldn't wish to defend them, but by all accounts the biggest reason is because Xorg's code quality is quite poor, which is (if true) somewhat fair. I wish they tried replacing it without breaking everything and shipping the terrible design that is Wayland, but the goal of replacing Xorg is reasonable.
And I don't mean the code, I mean the design / architecture / UX expertise.
> Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those
Those being the GUI toolkits like Qt and KDE one.
But yes, I agree, I have done UIs in low level (Skia) and high level (web, android) and I know it is a lottttt of work.
Can you explain why Gnome specifically? Genuine question. I know Gnome is very opinionated, many people don't like it, and these days there are super polished projects like Niri. But in what way is Gnome holding us back?
I can't count the number of times I've watched people experience Linux for the first time via Gnome, and become convinced that Linux is weird and unworkable. Thankfully, those days have mostly passed, and vastly more friendly, conventional and appealing desktops are now often the first experience someone is likely to have.
I'm not a Gnome hater. I've deliberately chosen to use it at times. But I've been at all of this a while, and I understand what I'm dealing with, so the Gnome papercuts and "opinionated" behavior are things I can cope with. "Coping," being exactly what I feel like I'm doing when using Gnome.
Anyhow, more on theme with regard to lightweight DE's, my current go-to is openbox, which I use on auxiliary displays for game development. It starts faster than I can lift my finger from the enter key and neatly manages windows. That's about all I want from it and it pleases me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49833842
But to explain further, Gnome is run by people who have the attention span of a dead goldfish. They're constantly changing things, a good example is the control centre where it used to be just like other systems but in Gnome 3 they made it into a wall of incoherent text and disorganised categories.
They often tend to ditch things halfway and create new ones, Evince -> Papers, Totem -> showtime, EOG to Loupe, Cheese to snapshot, and so on and so on.
And for decades, they kept removing much used features and configurations and broke things and everytime you search for a fix, there was 10 version and a new one each week because Gnome keeps changing things.
In short, Gnome is what happens when you think you're Apple but have the design knowhow and depth of a paddle you couldn't drown a fruit fly in.
Switched for Unity for a few years when I was erring on Ubuntu side, where I like the minimalism style.
Gnome 3 was a shock but nothing any normal human being can easily overcome. The hardest was to live without a taskbar, but I'm free now.
Would never touch KDE-let-s-make-this-pixel-also-clickable, but that's the power of freedom: you can choose what you like.
Do you use NetworkManager or systemd-networkd or something else? What is your login manager? Do you use Gnome for email or anything else?
I am asking this in earnest because I don't believe Gnome has left anything useful beyond GTK as the library (if you consider that useful) and maybe nautilus. Everything else is just bolted on and weird and broken.
Nothing is forcing you, but you may be surprised.
I like minimalism.
AmiWM and WindowMaker also saw their usage but at the end of the day I always kept coming back to IceWM.
IceWM was really lightweight, so it ran well on a variety of customer machines.
Great times!
Though I do have to admit they maybe the resolution increases are to blame for part of that, alpha blending 800x600 is easier than alpha blending a 4k ultra wide with HDR at 120hz...
Anyways... IceWM used to be my window manager of choice but since many years now I'm a happy camper with The Awesome WM (a tiling WM, but it can of course also be used in floating mode: one of my virtual desktop is always in "floating" mode).
Back of the envelope, for a 4k HDR ultra wide you'd need tens of gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth alone to do rendering all on the CPU.
There is a reason we offloaded to the GPU.
Bring back my stupid Compiz effects. They were fun, and sometimes genuinely useful.
sir, this is not an agentic window
Out of the box their light terminal theme is flat out unreadable. Some of the chosen colors have almost no contrast.
Ugh.
And then if it is dark mode time but I pull up a terminal window that is semi transparent and it is on top of a browser window that has bright colors, again, unreadable.
Which is why transparency effects are mostly limited to cool screenshots.
0. https://xlibre.net/
IceWM is in many ways actually more sophisticated than fluxbox; unfortunately on the other hand, IceWM has a few annoyances that I reported, and ... all of these got ignored. Now I understand the problem domain, the lead dev lacks time - fair enough. But it also means that I no longer file issues about features, since they'll just be ignored. Bug reports I may still do, but it kind of is no longer so useful since I have the impression that the lead dev will mostly not care that much.
KDE and GNOME I can not use for various reasons, but also one reason is speed-use. Fluxbox was sooooo snappy compared to KDE and I also dislike the trend of making KDE worse ever since Nate was put in charge (the guy who added a donation-daemon; see a complaint about Nate and him tying his own personal business into KDE as an ad-platform for it, from 2025: https://web.archive.org/web/20250914213714/https://jriddell....).
I had a look at some other WMs, such as awesome WM and so forth. They are all somewhat ok-ish, but always worse than fluxbox. Next step would be some tiling WM but for some reason I found them annoying, requiring my brain to think more. WMs also seem to be significantly less popular these days; there was more variety in the past here. Also, wayland kind of changed the situation a bit, though I can not say if wayland itself reduced variety - not a whole lot of software available on wayland either, I was surprised about that when I tested it some months again. Consider they constantly promote wayland as the successor to xorg, it is in some ways like a dumbed-down path, with fewer features. Very strange. Then you have also the GTK devs who will transition into a wayland-only future for GTK5; that was also one reason why I stopped writing any more ruby-gtk code, since I would here help transition to a wayland-only way and I don't want to abandon xorg merely because the GTK devs have received their corporate order to do so (thankfully https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver exists but it needs a lot more polishing and ideally more developers, but that seems also super-hard, since it requires domain-knowledge, time ... people lack that naturally in the open source world, and the AI slop also seems to have further reduced the number of open source devs in general. Claude is now our uberlord here, see the ruby programming language, where claude writes most of the code now).