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Comment by glesica | Hacker News Reader

You can switch away from it, you just can't do it with "apt-get install <new window manager>". Try a distro that is designed for the WM you want to use.

I agree that in an ideal world installing a new WM would "Just Work", but we don't live in that world. Try installing a new WM on OS X or Windows and see how well things go. Not trashing those operating systems, just pointing out that GNU/Linux does, indeed, offer more choice. The fact that the choices are not ideally convenient to switch between is really a fairly minor issue.

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You have to be joking me. "A distro that is designed for the WM you want to use"?

What does that even mean? That I have to have a special twm distro? Or an fvwm2 distribution? tvtwm was always my favorite window manager, but I seem to recall it needed some patches to really be perfect. Do I have to find somebody to build me my own distribution that has those patches?

A Window Manager manages windows, like the name suggests; it doesn't manage networking or sound. And if it does, then the whole system has failed to produce decent engineering boundaries and we should revert a few releases to when things had the correct levels of abstraction.

You have to either get comfortable living in someone elses reality or accept the burden/freedom of creating your own reality.

I think part of the problem here is that window managers and desktop environments are being conflated.

Desktop environments are sometimes set up to handle sound or networking.

I agree that it's not a good design, but I don't think it's as ridiculous for a desktop environment to handle these things as it is for a window manager to do so.

I think GP's point was that you either 'deal with it' or find someone else (a packager for a distribution) to deal with it on your behalf, if you are having issues then a distribution is a possible solution.

> What does that even mean?

I think it means 'use Slackware'.

Apologies, I was very much conflating WM and DE. However, you mentioned Unity, which is really both (Unity itself is a DE but it brings its own WM to the table and assumes that you will use it). My point was that if you insist on extensive customization, you should be prepared to do some work. If you don't want to spend a lot of time fiddling (I know I don't) then you find a distro that does things the way you want them done and you use it. Things are the same in the Windows and Mac world, for better or worse.

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