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Comment by tener | Hacker News Reader

Cool hack, but I really prefer native Win 10 window management. The only thing superior is IMHO XMonad.

I suppose there's nothing stopping one for doing that tho? I was sitting here and thinking about trying it out with i3. If that works then it is only missing a decent pkg mgmt (in my opinion ofc), at least on the technical level. I sort of enjoy the thought that my current setup (arch) is entirely OSS and hackable though (not on a hw level ofc)... It makes me smile every time I log in :)

I don't think any of Windows 10 window managers is swappable so anything you will run on top will mean significant friction and loss of usability.

I think Cygwin is already using Pacman so perhaps you can get it to work without root on Ubuntu and hence on Windows 10.

From the screenshot, all this seems to be doing is running an X server, so it should be trivial to switch from Unity to i3, Xmonad or whatever.

The next level of integration would be running X11 fullscreen and then launching Windows programs inside that environment. e.g. Word 2016 launched and managed from the Unity launcher.

I've just spent some time experimenting with the state of X-on-windows.

It seems that there are two main options: - Rootless mode (the default install for VcXsrv), in which your windows are managed by the Win10 WM and integrate quite nicely

- Rooted mode, in which you can use your own window manager, but the windows are restricted to living inside a native Windows window. Using this in fullscreen on a virtual desktop provides a near-linux experience, but some remapping is required so you don't conflict with Windows' alt-tab, etc. Other bits of integration like copy&paste still co-exist nicely.

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