Going rather minimalistic
As time goes by I've been quite comfortable with staying with Arch-Linux as my operating system, but that bug for something that changes is coming over me now and again, so now mostly I've been spending that energy on window manager hopping rather than on distrohopping.
I have a very terminal based workflow, doing most of my stuff out of terminals, so tiling window managers seem to do a very good job for me. So I'm testing out different tiling window managers to have that fresh new system feeling. I thought some thoughts of how I've been faring this far would be nice.
Qtile
Qtile is a really cool tiling wm written in python, and I really enjoy that it can do so many things rather well, I've been living in it for almost a month now and it has been serving me well, but it always has been feeling a tiny bit sluggish and resource heavy, and it has a lot of features that I don't really use and need. It's configured in python, which is a great plus since it's a quite nice language for me to wrap my head around, and the bar is very nice and fully featured, I'm quite sure I could stay happy living in it, but in the end the tiny bit of lag on my system, and it using a bit much ram for me (2-300 Mb) was enough for me to look at greener grass.
I3
i3 is a wm that I've been using for a long time, It was my daily driver for over 4 years, and it's a very nice and comfortable window manager to work in, the configuration files are easy to understand, and working in it just feels, nice, the reason why I kind of went away from it lately is that I have found that I tend to set up my windows exactly like what the automatic tilers usually do, every time, so I don't really use the manual tiling the way it should be, so that was more or less the reason why I decided to check out something else
Awesomewm
Awesomewm is one that I have been seeing around a lot, so I was trying it out not long ago, trying to get it configured to something that I would be happy with using. But it and I don't seem to agree very much, awesome can do a lot, really a lot, more than I need, so basically most of my time working on configuring it was trying to disable features, and it got annoying playing configuration whack a mole, for every thing I disabled some othre function was sticking out as a sore thumb, and in the end the straw that broke my back was that I wasn't able to stop window icons to show up in the bar, and I don't like the messy look that they left there. I should probably give it another honest try some time, but for now I'm just frustrated with it and just thinking about it makes me annoyed, so I'll let it rest for a while and then see if I can bend it in to doing what I want it to instead of what it wants to do
DWM
DWM is the next one on the docket, and one that I've been kind of afraid of starting since it's configured through editing c source code, and it's kind of very bare without having to patch it, but it turned out not being so bad, and all in all I was pretty happy with the result that I managed to get running. And it's one that I'll be coming back to and use more later, since I basically just got it set up before I found one that I like even more, which is
Spectrwm
Spectrwm is just a small, nice quite minimal wm that does more or less exactly the things that I want, and little more, it has nice configuration files, and 3 layout types, it has a small bar that can show text, and that's basically it, it feels really snappy to work with, and when you get through the configuration file it basically just works. It has very sensible defaults, and since it doesn't really do much, my tendency to endlessly tinkering with my setup kind of doesn't act up, it took about 20 minutes to get a decent setup, and I've only revisited the configuration file a couple of times to set up a keybinding and that has been it, it's my current setup.
So what lies in the future.
I still am not quite finished with my hopping, there are a couple of wms that I still want to try out, probably highest on the list right now is bspwm, and I've also installed herbstluftwm, but the latter one of the two has a quite manual way of tiling that I have come to find not really be too useful for me for the way I work, but I'm willing to give it a try to see if it's something I'd be happy with as well. There is probably a glaring hole there for people that knows tilers, and that is xmonad, yeah, I should probably give it a try, but I don't like the huge buildchain of haskell, it's a cool language and I enjoy writing in it, but man, it's over a Gigabyte of dependencies, it's big and bloated, and I don't really feel like having it installed since I don't really use it for anything else, I might give it a looksie again some time, but it's not something that “sparks joy” for me at the moment.
All in all playing and experimenting with different tilers has been a lot of fun so far, and for sure if you're willing to experiment a bit and feel the itch for distro hopping, maybe doing a bit of wm-hopping would be something for you as well :) Give it a try.