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I realize you're not being serious, but... That is not the same kind of functionality. Way too much stuff on Linux is tied to heavy desktop environments - networking and automatic power management in particular stand out. Getting this stuff working under a standalone WM tends to require extensive configuration or ugly, insecure hacks.

(And in the case of NetworkManager, it doesn't work in a command line environment, period. nmcli is a complete joke.)

Pretty annoying. Especially seeing as laptops, which could theoretically benefit the most from a lightweight environment, are currently left with crippled functionality.

Yes, it was mainly tongue-in-cheek as I understand most people don't like tilers, but I have to disagree with you on the networking and power-management. There's ceni, netcfg and good ol' wpasupplicant for networking and the glorious but little-known Linux-PHC undervolting (in combination with the usual cpufreq) which used to give me more juice than what the manufacturer stated on the box. I say "used to" because the battery is a bit old now, sadly. As far as I know, these work in almost any DE or WM, though not quite automated as what you might find in Gnome or KDE.

The only downside (for some people) is....


.... like you mentioned. You do need to spend a little time editing configs. No security implications that I've noticed (so far) though, but then again, Arch isn't exactly an OpenBSD rival on that front.

Oh, and some tilers come with systray functionality these days, so you can pretty much dock your nm or wicd or cpu-scaling applets there as well.

Apologies for going somewhat off-topic.

Edited 2012-05-14 04:25 UTC

Use a tiler (Xmonad, dwm...etc). You'll get both speed and functionality. "

The funny thing is, I've actually been meaning to swap out LXPanel and Openbox for AwesomeWM for a while now... I just haven't had time to implement the hybrid tiling/floating mouse/keyboard interaction I want in Lua yet.

...and I'm not sure whether the Lua API for AwesomeWM is powerful enough to implement drag handles for adjusting the tile sizes. I might have to expedite my plans to learn Haskell and just de-GNOMEify Bluetile.

(Bluetile is a attempt to make XMonad friendly enough for the average GNOME 2.x user but it's too GNOMEy for me even though it implements more of the features I want in a tiler than any other tiler config I've ever seen)

Not sure what you meant by"drag handles", but if you you want varying sized tiles, than you're probably looking for a dynamic tiler.

No idea about Awesome. I'm not a fan of Lua.

You've basically highlighted the main problem with tilers. They need to fit you like a second skin, or they're bollocks. Probably why you see a lot of people WM hopping until they find one that works for them.

Edited 2012-05-14 04:31 UTC

I don't have enough screen real estate to feel comfortable with a tiling WM.

Windows and KDE both snap windows to the left and right sides of the screen easily enough. That is useful often enough for what I mostly do at the moment. Most of my other tasks would tend to be maximized, even on high-res screens.

I miss having a 1600x1200 display, but my computer now is a laptop with a 1366x768 display.

How about Xfce, then?

http://www.webupd8.org/2012/05/install-xfce-410-in-xubuntu-1204.htm...