Many years ago I used to use light weight window managers. I remember using icewm after I got fed up with enlightenment, but I think it was Fluxbox that I kept for a long time -- up until about 2010.

However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.

> However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.

You don't need to run a full DE to have tray icons. I'm running i3 and the network manager applet + other tray items work just fine.

This is somewhat orthogonal to what window manager you are running though. Most tiling WMs (e.g. xmonad) combine nicely with xfce[1], giving you all the convenience features you mention while still not having to mess around with moving and resizing windows. I've been using that combination for years and wouldn't want to switch back to either plain xmonad or plain xfce.

[1] https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_XFCE

You can have those with a window manager too, but in this case you need to do more fiddling

I use xmonad with stalonetray [1] (which as you may guess from the name is a standalone notification tray) and dzen2 [2] as a notification area for basic information ( battery / cpu / temperature / wifi status ). With them I cover enough of my needs and I don't feel the need to anything more complex.

I think that it would be nice to have some middle ground between a full desktop environment and bare-bone and manually configured window manager though.

[1] http://stalonetray.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://github.com/robm/dzen

Same.

If they did a simple non tiling WM that had those little things in it and wasn't a piece of crap, I'd be there like a shot.

LXDE/LXQt is what I think of when I read your descriptions.

It's Openbox (which is a really capable, lightweight non-tiling window manager) plus a panel plus Xfce Power Manager and similar applications to handle the desktop environment stuff.

Thanks - will definitely take a look at that over the weekend. The lighter the better for me.

I have all those things with spectrwm and dmenu.

I run Xfce on Debian, I have Gnome 3 in reserve. And occasionally try it out. I quite like the notification area/panel under Gnome. Font clarity seems a little different (better). Workspaces are okay, plug-able drives are handled well, network manager is pretty good these days, as it now has a CLI alternative. But I don't like the application launcher. Not a fan of scrolling through loads of icons.

Nautilus has got increasingly shitty. So there's less Gnome now in my Xfce.

I tried Win 10 recently, it was horrible.

In conclusion they all have warts. But Xfce is okay in a Win95 kind of way. It could be better.

Simple UI seems to always elude distros/desktops.

Xubuntu at least has the whisker menu system, which gives you search bar in menu. Without it one can remove system menu and replace it with Xfce app-finder launcher. Then it's best to change a setting to place windows near the mouse pointer.

Note: I'm currently not using Xfce at home, but I use some older version at work.