Trying out Labwc

I've been using Labwc the past week and I've been pleasantly surprised with it, it is a floating window manager inspired by Openbox but for Wayland.

For context, I used to use a tabbed layout on Sway, making the compositor feel like a web browser. I have a small screen so window tiling is actually disadvantageous.

This isn't my first time using Labwc, it's actually my second. The first time I used it was in december of last year. I let it go the first time just as one would when faced with an unfamiliar and challenging problem. I came back because Sway was giving me trouble with some really nasty bugs related to my dual monitor setup.

I have to admit that I generally dislike the floating paradigm. Without recurring to external tools, floating window managers become wasteful and hard to navigate past a certain number of windows.

Despite my worries, I still wanted to experience the Wayland desktop from another perspective, I had been using Sway for quite a bit of time and it checks every single one of my requirements for a window manager: simple (sometimes a little too simple), efficient, scriptable, well-maintained and enjoys a large community of desktop hackers.

Labwc draws some parallels with Metacity in striving to be simple, Metacity has been described as a "Boring window manager for the adult in you". I think objectives like this are very important especially in a niche that tends to go over the top with customization and bling.

I dislike panels and have no use for widgets, the dmenu-way of doing things is, in my opinion, superior in all the ways. All the fuzzel menus I wrote for Sway I took with me to Labwc, meaning that my primary way of interacting with my system remains through a dmenu-like interface. I refactored some of those scripts of course but switching was straightforward and the whole experience has been delightful.