IceWM
ice-wm.org
ice-wm.org
I've been running a whole band (16in, 8out) with Ardour, 3x Guitarix and "standard effects" (EQ, Compression, Barry's Satan Maximizer, etc) for some years now on a 10th gen i7.
That's with -rt patches and running live.
I considered switching to Xfwm, but even with Gnome3 I never had issues with performance.
Well, for most of us it is.
I don’t know if it’s the case of me being old-ish, but you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ve been using i3 with pretty much the same dot files for well over a decade, simply because it stays the hell away from the work I am doing.
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.
The only thing I don't understand is why minimal WMs need to (intentionally?) reject basic usability and visual design principles.
- Main menu = nested dropdown - No padding anywhere - Terrible box shadows
etc.
That's a feature
Try it.
IceWM was really lightweight, so it ran well on a variety of customer machines.
Great times!
I like minimalism.
The latest released version is 4.1.0 (2026-08-06).
It is always a good idea to read the link before commenting.
When I first connected it, I set a multiplier for the portrait monitor and I haven't thought about it since. It holds a chat system, status bar, notifications and background music.
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.
Desktop images are generally large blobs of pixels next to each other. I haven't verified but I would be surprised if 10x compression is not possible. So maybe 2-5GB/s? Also it's not like the GPU doesn't use up energy itself while doing this.
Now wobbly windows is something I can get behind.
Bring back my stupid Compiz effects. They were fun, and sometimes genuinely useful.
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.
COSMIC is great and I like it, which is odd as it violates a lot of my personal preferences... but pretty it is not.
sir, this is not an agentic window
AmiWM and WindowMaker also saw their usage but at the end of the day I always kept coming back to IceWM.
This behavior still exists with the “Stickies” application, itself an import from the pre OS X days!
Why not have the actual Windows XP Explorer as your DE?
Thanks to our man in Japan, you can!
https://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?p=706242#p706242
I also had Wayland refuse to run at all on an ARM device and this seems to be common too. I had to switch to X11 until the bug was fixed.
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).
Any example?
So, I'm curious if there are any rough edges in it.
I tried it some time ago because it was selected as default WM in NetBSD and I was positively surprised how configurable it is.
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.
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?
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.
This wasn’t a hostile takeover attempt; we all tried very hard to be team players, many times to what I think was our detriment. A very nice version of Nautilus was rejected because it was in C++ and we ended up doing all the work in GTK.
We had some very good ideas about distributed objects but they were pushed aside and we ended up using CORBA/ORBit/Bonobo and those distributed object systems ended up being replaced.
The dotcom crash caused a lot of Eazel people to end up at Apple. Nat and Miguel moved onto their dot NET Xamarin effort and many others ended up at Red Hat. There was an experience vacuum and this is one reason why the GNOME UX had so many issues IMHO.
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.
Do you have a suggestion for a modern distro/DE that's still non-surprising to new users?
Grumpy luddites gonna be grumpy luddites but I am pretty sure that Gnome is more approcheable than windows and macOs for the newer generations who are more accustomed to mobile interfaces since they are kids.
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.
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.
Nothing is forcing you, but you may be surprised.
GNOME 3.0 was released 15 years ago last April.
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2011-Apr...
It is exactly the same desktop today. The most visible changes are that the strange floating word "Activities" is now a strange floating pill instead, whose meaning only becomes apparent once you switch virtual desktops a few times, and that the virtual desktop switcher has moved to become horizontal (i.e. worse and less space-efficient on a widescreen) when it was vertical.
I often hear "try it again, it's really changed" but I see no difference. I powerfully disliked it in 2011 and nothing has changed. It's a bit faster, but there are more hamburger menus now, to the extent that apps like Disks has two of them. It's still horrible.
I am all for UI innovation, but it needs to be informed by what's gone before.
I would like the GNOME development team to spend a while learning to use a few pre-Windows desktop environments efficiently and well, to learn how seriously different layouts can work.
Classic MacOS was sublime. 8.1 was a good snapshot.
RISC OS is a great example.
Original Psion System 3MX EPOC is another.
Psion NetBook EPOC32 is another, and very different.
Some Amiga-inspired environment such as AROS or MorphOS.
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'm 100% not a fan of using a single process for all terminals).
How is this comparison supposed to make any sense? When Xorg started it was a fork of the existing XFree86 codebase (due to XFree86 changing license to one not deemed open source compatible), not starting from a clean sheet of paper. And XFree86 in turn wasn't a clean sheet implementation of the X protocols either, it IIRC started as a bunch of patches on top of the reference X11 codebase which goes back to the 1980'ies.
I tend to compile everything from source on Linux. I don't want to be tied down to any distribution. So from my point of view I'd agree - I understand why curl/sh is used, it is super convenient, I also use it for installing Rust. But I also dislike it. (Naturally for Rust I need rust for the bootstrapping, so I understand that solution. But I still dislike it too.)
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.
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
The reality is much simpler. The parent corporations, mostly Red Hat really back in the days, wanted to have more control. And, in some ways, wayland is indeed simpler as a protocol.
Also, you write "replacing Xorg is reasonable". First, I don't think it is, but even more importantly than that, wayland is NOT a replacement. It is another display server and protocol. They do not have as goal to be compatible to Xorg at all, so "replacing" is the wrong term here. They indeed broke a ton of things, or rather, required of downstream applications to be rewritten - but the statement that they aim to replace Xorg is not the case. They are simply another display server + protocol at the end of the day. And they won't be a full "replacement" feature-wise either, that's why using wayland always feels like a dumbed down variant of xorg-server. Admittedly wayland also has a few new features such as the easy restart, but this may come to the new xserver too eventually. One has to wait and see. (The easy restart variant is something I like in wayland; hopefully xserver will have that too eventually. It would be technically possible. Also, xserver already is different to xorg-server, in many ways better too. Neither wayland nor xserver aim for 100% compatibility with the old, venerable xorg-server anymore.)
The Wayland ecosystem just runs on top of standard kernel interfaces and that's a really huge win for any future protocols.
See: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
Also I don't understand why you write that pipewire broke with the past. That's also totally incorrect.
Wayland I agree with your statement but that's a corporate-controlled project by the GNOMEy overlords, so this is not a surprise (GTK5 will support wayland only; that was one reason why I stopped writing more GTK code).
As for your systemd comment: again I have no idea what you write. It does not make any sense. And the word "cohesive" is odd: all the systemd components, of course, form a cohesive unit WITHIN ITSELF from the get go - that was the whole point for the systemd developers to make themselves more important. systemd was never a "replace init only" attempt, they deliberately took over the ecosystem here to leverage more control. And that also, kind of, makes sense for those controlling many computers in a, say, university campus or so; administrators find that some jobs were made easier by that. For me, and many others, systemd brought nothing to the table that was needed. They always built strawmen such as "you may abandon your legacy shell scripts booting your system" - I don't use shell scripts in general. All logic I have is done via ruby + yaml files mostly (or, data files that describe the logic in a DSL like manner), so I never had any use case for systemd. As for your claim that you do not have to tinker with systemd: again, I have no idea why you write this. It sounds like a very poor and one-sided attempt to promote systemd. You never had an issue? I had numerous issues whenever I would use systemd, starting from smaller to larger issues. For instance, I remember that my local clock was not well-aligned so I changed it. Then I tested again and noticed the clock did not change. It took me a while to figure out that systemd inserted itself here and ignored my attempt to fix the local clock. Past that point I treated systemd as an invasive virus that attempts to ignore my commands, so off it went. That's just one example of many more issues with systemd. The philosophy the systemd devs use is mega-aggressive and incompatible with many other things, including the old UNIX pipe idea as well as "everything is a file".
> We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends.
I would not use the term cancer, but I would agree that we could need more flexibility. We simply lack viable options here. Corporations de-facto control most of the code here. Or AI. Not a good future really.
> 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.
Again, no clue what you write here, but let's also be realistic: which alternatives to GTK or QT do you see coming up here? Plus, we then have more code for a toolkit. What we need is a meta-toolkit, that can be used in its own right (e. g. without qt and KDE) but also be used in way to allow people to create applications in qt and kde at the same time. One toolkit to rule them all. And it must be as flexible as possible. In many ways it is kind of HTML/CSS/JavaScript, de-facto really; would be nice to have a way to have something that could target all of the above, but I think the boat has sailed. HTML/CSS/JavaScript kind of won, and perhaps via webassembly we could at the least use something else other than JavaScript.
Every single thing under the Sun going into systemd is going to cause issues (and probably already has with age verification laws and such) with compliance where a company is a singular target (Red Hat under IBM) to compel to make undesired changes contrary to our interests as users.
Red Hat is probably an even bigger problem than GNOME.
On the topic of WMs, some of these classics are really great. Openbox is a favorite of mine among the floating, but bspwm has been my overall favorite for 11 years.
There's a very good alternative in development - check out V OS - https://v-os.dev/ - it is attempting to port the Be / Haiku GUI and SDK on to Linux, and even though it's still an alpha-beta release, the experience is really good. Unlike GTK's "clunkiness", Be/Haiku GUI feels so buttery smooth, and consumes so little computing resource (compared to GTK or Qt). As they aren't re-inventing anything new, I have high hopes for it. It just needs more support from all of us to thrive.
As for X11, its network transparency is something I used a lot in the past and relied on. I miss it.
Wayland was developed by people who got sick of X11. No one who actually dealt with X11 is missing it, most people who complain about wayland and yarn for X11 just miss features that took a while to get right.