Are you using a bleeding edge distro? I've been using the version of xmonad from apt-get in Ubuntu (usually the latest release) for ~3 years and it's never broken or required me to change my config.

I'm using Arch linux and I've only managed to break XMonad once (or maybe twice) when I removed some packages that my config relied on. Admittedly my config file is probably pretty boring.

For what it's worth my XMonad config broke at some point, so I'm running an executable from october 2013. I've tried fixing it, but too much is broken for it to be an easy fix right now.

I've been considering switching to i3 for similar reasons (plus configuring xmonad in Haskell is a bit of a pain as I'm not great at it). The only thing that is keeping me from doing it is the fact that i3 seems to bind workspaces to screens - I often find myself wanting to bring a particular workspace up on my central monitor.

Any i3 users want to pipe up and enlighten me on how I could go about configuring i3 so that I can switch to any workspace on a particular screen?

I love i3. While I don't use this function, its easily done and can be bound to a key: http://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_moving_containers_works...

For your WM you probably want to use a precompiled binary form your distro. What you're trying is equivalent of trying to get the whole gcc stack and deps to build a c-based WM. Haskell isn't a dynamic language and doesn't require anything Haskell-specific to be installed on the target system to run a binary.

If you really do want to compile your window manager from source, newer versions of cabal, the Haskell package manager, have something called sandboxes which basically remedy the problems you're talking about. I don't recommend compiling from source unless you know what you're doing though and if you're not using sandboxes, you probably don't.

I was using rpms until they broke multi-monitor support, then I switched to using cabal, which worked when I first installed it, but now it broke on it's own. And when trying to fix it several packages where broken again. For no reason. Cabal also doesn't do dependency management. So you have to try to install something, it'll complain it doesn't have X, then you have to install X, then it complains it doesn't have Y and so on.

Configuring XMonad requires you to recompile it.

After 3 years with xmonad I ve moved to i3 which is as a minimalistic WM is itself small and lightweight.

Similar experience but with wmii. I wanted a tiling WM for a tiny hdd, tried wmii, MOD-Enter for term, MOD-<n> for workspace, a few ones to cycle through. Deal. It has some glitches, like MOD being swallowed somehow, maybe i3 doesn't have that. But so far I don't really miss XMonad. I do miss it because it's rock solid, it's Haskell, but wmii/i3 get you going in less than 1MB.