This might sound a bit heretical, but you could carefully pick and match a variety of software and configuration to your individual needs, turning your tiling wm into a fully functional desktop environment, or you could just install a tiling wm into an existing desktop environment and get something useful with like ten percent of the work.
I know that I have done the former multiple times, only to fall back to existing desktop environments again because it’s just a lot less work and often works better, since you don’t have to take care of getting things like screen sharing or media buttons to function.
Especially LXQt and Xfce make it very easy to run a tiling window manager, but you can also find extensions/plugins for KDE or Gnome to make them tile. I’m personally running Gnome with the Pop Shell extension right now

TWMs can give you an extremely customized setup and potentially increase the speed of your workflow once you get into the groove of using them.

A couple suggestions:

• Get familiar with the command line if you aren’t already. Know how to adjust volume settings, connect to local wifi, etc. All from command line tools. You can of course use GUI tools that do the same, but knowing how to launch essential necessities from the CLI comes in handy if something in your configs break.

• Create keyboard shortcuts for your most commonly used applications. The workflows of TWMs are usually similar to Vim in that mouse use is discouraged. On that note:

• Consider purchasing an Ortholinear Keyboard if you can afford one. This was a gamechanger for me. As I no longer had to reach across an 80 key keyboard to reach for certain keys. Every key instead is solely a matter of moving my fingertips instead. A good beginner one is the Preonic, or the Planck.

• Install and learn to use the Vimium browser extension. I’ll not try and convert you to using Vim, but Vimium allows easy browsing of the web without use of the mouse (or excessively tabbing through a web page’s links). This comes in handy when using a TWM. Obviously this works incredibly well with Vim/Neovim as well, but again, that’s for you to decide.

• Install an application launcher. I personally like dmenu, but rofi, wofi, etc. all work just as well as the others for the most part. They especially become useful when you start scripting custom features for them. Eventually you’ll want to run an application neither from a terminal nor a keyboard shortcut. An application launcher is a must when working with a TWM.

• I recommend using a window swallower for applications where you have a “useless terminal output” window. I have used devour and gulp on X11. I have yet to find one that works on Wayland (if anyone knows of any, please let me know). This is particularly nice when viewing videos using mpv.

Obviously this is all my humble opinion, but I have a love of Tiling Window Managers and this is what has worked for me. Lastly, I do apologize for no recommendations on bars, I simply don’t use one, and instead rely on a constantly running btop for system monitoring. So can’t speak to that subject.

A bar, like waybar

Why not waybar? 😆

If you want to go all in, check out Eww - it’s a lovely over-engineered and super customizable widgets framework that you can use to build a fully custom desktop bar, too. (and needs a lot of more work than waybar to initially set up)

Wallpaper switcher

Depending on your compositor there already might be something implemented that handles wallpaper switching. Maybe check out the super simple wbg application, or have a look at swww if you want a bit a lot tons of more features.

General usage tips for someone who only used full fletched DEs until now?

If you’re on Hyprland or interested in using it, maybe check out My Linux For Work’s Hyprland setup if you want something ready to use.

From my personal experience, Tiling WM managers are a lot of work to setup. It’s not difficult to configure them, but they just come with REALLY barebones and honestly unusable defaults. There’s a lot to configure, which means a lot of documentation to learn. It doesn’t “just works”, you have to spend several hours to find out what works for you and figure how to make it work. That said, I had never tried a tiling WM before and managed to make it work just fine. It’s not hard, it’s just work.

The easiest and fastest way to do this is start with someone else’s configuration. I started with Zaney’s dotfiles as they provided some good and USABLE defaults.

Packages that I’m using:

• Hyprland - my WM of choice, mostly because it’s pretty and very easy to configure

• Waybar - You mentioned “like waybar”, I’m not sure you have anything against it or not. I really like waybar because configuration is a basic json file and styling is a basic CSS file. It’s very easy to work with, very easy to create your own customization. A few waybar “modules” that I recommend

  • nm_applet - A “system tray” network applet which integrates very easily and nicely to waybar. It allows you to configure your wi-fi/network without the command line.

  • swaync - Hyprland does not have a notification system, you need to install one. swaync is very nice and integrates perfectly into waybar

• For a KRunner like tool, I use Tofi. Zaney recommended it, I don’t know many alternatives. Like many of these applications, the default aesthetics are really bad. Tofi in particular has atrocious defaults. Absolutely awful. The software itself runs quite well, it’s fast and can have a lot more useful applications than just running tools. Not sure why they don’t have a decent theme out of the box, it’s not that hard.

• I have wl-clipboard installed. Not really a clipboard manager but sometimes I have troubles where some xwayland apps don’t have access to my clipboard. It’s weird. wl-paste | xclip -selection clipboard solves it.

• For managing wallpapers I use swww. I don’t look at my wallpaper all that much, so I don’t have anything too fancy. I don’t change them often, this tool is more than enough for me. An overkill for my use-case.

• I suggest you use nerd-fonts, whatever one you like. Personally I really like the JetBrains Mono Nerd Font.

the i3/sway scratchpad feature is handy. extra esp at beginner stage.

waybar is good

scrcpy for android connectivity; syncthing to get files to and fro android (and any other linux system)

clipman for clipboard manager

wallpaper - whatever for? with a TWM you rarely see the background

emacs - because it’s life (I jest)

for global search i would recommend rofi-wayland !

overall, my best advice is to steal, mix n match others configs (make sure to keep track and source them tho !) and find what u like best, if ur only starting dont try and do everything from scratch !!

if u want a notification system, i use dunst :3

Interesting topic, this was also relevant to me some years ago when I started dabbling in twm, esp. i3wm in that time. To this day I am using i3 because its “easy” to set up for me and I started using a repository on codeberg.org for version control of my dotfiles (https://www.chezmoi.io/).

I am also torn on the subject of using twm nowadays, at work I am using i3, but at home I am still in the woes of a fully fledged KDE. I love to work on the terminal and prefer most applications to be cli based instead of having a full gui. But recently I finally took the plunge on trying a multiplexer (https://zellij.dev/) which actually makes me think, twm are not really that necessary once you start using a terminal multiplexer.

Because what you will notice is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to tile ALL of your windows all the time, mostly its for cli applications, which is handled by the multiplexer in a perfectly fine way. Also when it comes to eye candy…with twm you will mostly never see your wallpaper, apart from some artificially created layouts which you can post on various *unixporn sites.

While you want a lot of windows as fullscreen, depending on your screen size. (most videos, browser etc.) So maybe you don’t really need a twm and can instead work with any lightweight window manager, the beauty of going non-fully-DE is that you can mix and match all your favorite programs however you like! Take a look at and check out some of those git pages maybe you find something which suits more to your needs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#Tiling

Just my experience as I started from a similar background. Some weeks ago I had the urge to try TWM myself for the first time. Long time DE user, mostly Ubuntu and switched to fedora some weeks prior. The way I did it was to install sway on top of my fedora installation (with gnome). This way I could and still can choose which session to start at login. And it gave me the opportunity to work out some things using gnome until I grasped what is going on and needed in sway. Over time I was able to build up my sway settings/apps that now I would feel relatively safe use it without a DE installed parallel. Next fresh install I will probably skip the DE and just use a TWM.

I’ll keep my answer focused on KDE Connect as I no longer use a TWM. You can most definitely use KDE Connect in non-Plasma environments. For non-Plasma (and non-Gnome ^* ) environments you can just install the kdeconnectd package. Then, to start the KDE Connect daemon manually, execute /usr/lib/kdeconnectd. You can schedule this to autostart as a systemd unit, or in the config for your TWM (I know in sway/i3 you could start it, I’m assuming it is similar for many other options)

If you use a firewall, you need to open UDP and TCP ports 1714 through 1764. If you use firewalld specifically, there’s an option to enable KDE Connect rather than manually specifying it. This also let’s you have it only work on private networks and not public if you so chose.

See Arch wiki for more details

*For gnome I would recommend using gs-connect even if you have a tiling extension

£ KDE-Connect: does that work on TWMs? Is there a good implementation? Can I use GSConnect elsewhere too?

I use dmenu for global search and Nitrogen for wallpaper. In some WM you don’t need additional programs for those two things so I recommend you to first check that for WM you use.

For general tips I recommend looking at configs of other people.

Personally I use xmonad with xfce in no-desktop mode. And I configure almost nothing.

Xfce gives me multi monitor setup/positioning, a shutdown dialog, and other niceties like mouse config. I have dmenu for starting GUI programs. Only thing that bothers me is nextcloud sync demands a taskbar in which to put its icon. Since there isn’t one, I have to cope with its login BS each time I boot up.

For pretty much anything else I go to the terminal. What time is it? type ‘date’ and press enter. Wireless? ‘sudo nmtui’. Etc. I started doing this as a way to brush up on terminal knowledge, and now I see no reason to change.

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Swaybg works pretty well for me. I just configured it load ~/wallpaper.jpg and have never touched it since (if I want to change I just swap out the bg file)

Waybar is awesome, being able to use CSS for it is great and it’s pretty easy to make your own modules for it if you know your way around a shell script

As far as I’m aware for clipboard management I only installed wl-copy and wl-paste, though that’s because I use them in scripts and some software depends on them

Search tool I’m using rofi but might switch soon because a hyprland update broke the theme I was using

For most of the tiling WMs out there they are by nature very technical because the only people willing to completely change the way they use their computer are people who are already very comfortable with them

That said, I think there are all in one tilers out there that do a lot for you by default, and I believe you can install a tiling WM over KDE as well and just use its stuff

Some thoughts, never used a TWM

• I would love to try, but never got used to workspaces and on a 14in laptop you never tile more than once horizontally, everything else is unusable with apps that have menus etc.
• also forced tiling breaks many apps that open in their perfect size. A mix between tiling and floating is needed.
• learning a nice minimal UI editor is key, I am still using Kate and suppose I should switch
• there are really little Terminals with tabs outside of DEs. Alacritty is damn fast but will never get tabs. Using tmux is strange and feels overcomplicated for that, also has no tab bar.
• I prefer many KDE apps, use all GNOME apps as Flatpaks, but Dolphin & Kate would pull in tons of dependencies. TWM users have shitty file managers in my experience, pcmanfm-qt was the second best after Dolphin but also not really great.
• you need app systray icons, and I would also not want to live without the basic KDE systray features like volume, bluetooth, wifi. Those will just have way less features on TWMs I think.

Fedora has some Hyprland packages packaged, many more in a COPR. There is [github.com/secureblue/secureblue](secureblue with some TWMs) or the regular base github.com/wayblueorg/wayblue which has River, Hyprland, Sway and Wayfire images.

Here people can work together to create a good experience out of the box.

Regular Fedora Sway too of course, but my experience with it was very broken, and aestetically bad.