| Up to WM Report |
|---|
The Comprehensive List of X Window Managers for Unix
See Wayland Compositors Table or Text Window Managers Table for other categories.
This is a list of every freely available Window Manager I'm aware of (roughly 180 in 2011, 279 in 2025-01). X Window Managers are a dying breed in 2025 as most Linux distros are moving to Wayland.
New testing/alpha/beta versions won't be listed when a stable version is available. You can sort the table on a particular field by clicking on the header row (should work in any browser).
Recent adds (that doesn't mean they're new WMs): SxWM (2025-07-07).
Most recent updates: 2026-04-10 09:15
| Name | Display | URLs | Version | Release date | Download Link | Date checked | Authors | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2bwm | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20250928 | https://github.com/venam/2bwm | 20260328 | Patrick "Venam" Louis | "A fast floating WM written over the XCB library and derived from mcwm." |
| 2wm | X11 | [homepage] X | not available | Anselm Garbe |
"Stereo WM." Stripped/simplified version of dwm, same author. Reasonably thorough documentation. The "homepage" given is the suckless.org git repository. 2wm has periodically disappeared in the past. Gone 2018-01. Original homepage. Local archived (2007) copy. |
|||
| 3Dwm | X11 | not available | Niklas Elmqvist, Robert Karlsson. | One of the earliest attempts at 3D appearance in a WM. Site died mid-2010, there had been no development for quite a while. | ||||
| 5Dwm | X11 | Eric Masson | See MaXX Interactive Desktop. | |||||
| 9wm | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
1.4.2 | 20220120 | https://github.com/9wm/9wm | 20260406 | originally David Hogan, now Neale Pickett and others | Imitates the 8-1/2 WM (Plan 9 OS). See also w9wm (which adds virtual desktops) and rio, which claims to be a more exact imitation. Often used as a code base for other WMs. |
| adwm | X11 | [homepage] | 0.7.17 | 20240327 | https://github.com/bbidulock/adwm/tags | 20260306 | Brian Bidulock | "Advanced Dynamic Window Manager." "This was originally a fork of Echinus which in turn was a fork of dwm, and borrows concepts from velox, awesome, spectrwm and wmii." ie. it's a tiling WM. |
| Aegis | X11 | not available | Michael Brailsford | Child of Kahakai, based on aewm++. Code only available through SVN. Vanished summer 2014, former URL http://aegiswm.berlios.de/. | ||||
| aewm | X11 | [homepage] X | not available | Decklin Foster | A very popular code base for many other WMs. 2003 Review. Removed from red-bean.com ~2019-11. Still available pre-compiled in some distros in 2020. | |||
| aewm++ | X11 | not available | Frank Hale | Sapphire and aewm++ are different aspects of a project by Frank Hale. aewm++ is a rewrite of aewm (which is in C) in C++. 20100706 onward: source access at google currently broken. 2003 Review | ||||
| AfterStep | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
2.2.12 | 20130610 | http://www.afterstep.org/ | 20260320 | Sasha Vasko | "Originally based on the look and feel of the NeXTStep interface." |
| AHWM | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20100901 | https://github.com/hioreanu/ahwm | 20260322 | Alex Hioreanu | "Alex Hioreanu's Window Manager." Free but non-GPL license. Astonishing for its comprehensive documentation. His primary motivation for writing this now-abandoned WM was to fix the problems he saw with sloppy focus. Notes |
| ajaxWM | X11 | [homepage] | 0.2.6 | 20080228 | http://ajaxwm.sourceforge.net/ | 20260330 | server: Dennis Felsing, client: Andreas Waidler. | Ajax-based WM that runs entirely in a browser. Currently in alpha state and runs only in Firefox. |
| Alopex | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20190812 | https://github.com/TrilbyWhite/alopex | 20260406 | Jesse "Trilby/TrilbyWhite" McClure | Tiling, cites tinywm, dwm, i3 and monster as inspiration. ArchWiki documentation. GPL3 license. |
| AlloyWM | X11 | not available | Last known address http://www.phatboydesigns.net/alloywm/ is now advertising space. Was a modification of aewm. | |||||
| alpt-wm | X11 | not available | Andrea "AlpT" Lo Pumo | "This is my custom, window manager. It's small, functional and fast. It is based on dwm ..." 2012-12: now subject to a bad domain redirect. 2013-03: author still has web presence, no mention of WM. | ||||
| amaterus | X11 | not available | Hiroyuki Komatsu | GTK-based. Screen shots all show GNOME toolbar. Source (last known version 0.34.1 dated 20021124) is MIA. Website is disintegrating over time. | ||||
| AmiWM | X11 | [homepage] | 0.22pl3 | 20251204 | http://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html | 20260408 | Marcus Comstedt | Imitates the Amiga Workbench. Has its own "Generic amiwm License." Releases in 1998, 2010-07, and 2023-06. This site may be of interest to fans. |
| Anarchy | X11 | not available | Eduardo Cavazos | "CLOS oriented Scheme code. The implementation language is Gauche Scheme." It requires Gauche and gauche-x (probably by the same author). Homepage vanished between 20081229 and 20090212 (http://proteus.freeshell.org/anarchy/). | ||||
| anion3 | X11 | not available | orig. Tuomo Valkonen. Now Sergej Pupykin. | Fork of the dead Ion3. Tiling. Now "deprecated" (~201107) in favour of notion. | ||||
| Antico | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20090525 | https://github.com/GiuseppeCigala/antico | 20260409 | previously listed as "Peppino", repo owner Giuseppe "antico" Cigala (2019-07-20) | Qt4 window manager, trying to avoid other dependencies. Development appears to have ceased in 2009. |
| AntiRight | X11 | [homepage] | 3.10 | 20100903 | https://www.nongnu.org/antiright/download/ | 20260303 | Jeffrey E. Bedard | aka "GUIShell." Based on GTK+ 2.x. Meant to be low resource. It would appear that the actual window manager is the "gtkshell," but its functionality is so heavily tied in with "ACE" (also a part of the package) that a separate listing doesn't make sense. |
| AntiWM | X11 | [homepage] | 0.0.5 | 20090531 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/antiwm/files/ | 20260304 | Nolan Liebert | Written in C, "inspired by" Ratpoison (and inheriting the screen/emacs keys), all windows full screen, MIT license. Same author as TAL/wm and dwemo. Notes |
| Aphelia | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20200130 | https://github.com/vardy/aphelia | 20260304 | Jarred Vardy | Minimalist WM, initially a cutesy joke but author decided it worked pretty well. Written in C, MIT license. |
| Athene Desktop Edition | X11 | not available | Rocklyte Systems | Athene is actually an operating system, but there is a package available that runs on top of a Linux kernel. It's a GUI that doesn't use X11/XOrg. The license is almost certainly not GPL, although this package is "freely available." Site dead 201011. | ||||
| awesome | X11 | [homepage] [Wikipedia] | 4.3 | 20190128 | https://awesomewm.org/download/ | 20260328 | Julien Danjou, Nikos Ntarmos, Aldo Cortesi. | "awesome is a highly configurable, next generation framework window manager for X. It is very fast, extensible and licensed under the GNU GPLv2 license." Tiling, originally based on dwm, includes Xinerama support. Was very active, fell stagnant after 4.3 release in 2019. Notes |
| awm | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
2pl9 | 19951114 | https://github.com/ptribble/awm2pl9 | 20260302 | Jordan Hubbard | "The Ardent Window Manager was for a while a hotbed for hackers and offered some features (dynamic menus) not found on more current window managers [in ~2010]." Based on uwm. "Homepage" link is to a recent (2023) GitHub post of the source. |
| B4Step | X11 | [homepage] | 2.2 | 20010627 | http://www.b4step.com/ | 20260307 | Eric Boucher | Free to use, but not GPL. He supplies only binaries that are now twenty years old. Mash-up of Mac OS 8/9, GNOME, and OPENSTEP? Shaped windows. Version number and date is for Intel/RH 7.1 binary. Website straight outta 2001. |
| BadWM | X11 | [homepage] | 0.1.1 | 20040915 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/badwm/files/ | 20260402 | Robert Annessi | Website: "Not actively maintained." Minimalist, no decorations. |
| Berry | X11 | [homepage] | 0.1.13 | 20250621 | https://github.com/JLErvin/berry/tags | 20260307 | Joshua Ervin | "bite-sized window manager" written in C. "Controlled via a powerful command-line client, allowing users to control windows via a hotkey daemon such as sxhkd or expand functionality via shell scripts." |
| Beryl | X11 | [Wikipedia] | not available | Quinn_Storm, Dennis Kasprzyk, Nicholas Thomas, Robert Carr, Nigel Cunningham, Kristian Lyngstøl | Fork of the graphics-heavy Compiz. Compiz and Beryl have re-merged (started ~200705) to create Compiz Fusion. Now merged back to the Compiz project. | |||
| Blackbox | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
git | 20240309 | https://github.com/bbidulock/blackboxwm | 20260307 | Brad Hughes, then Jeff Raven, now Sean Shaleh Perry. | One of the mainstays of the alternative WM world. Fluxbox, Openbox and many others are based on this. Old page died 2018-03: Arch Linux maintenance branch (linked above) is now the main release. 2003 Review |
| Bluetile | X11 | [homepage] | 0.6 | 20111126 | https://hackage.haskell.org/package/bluetile | 20260402 | Jan Vornberger | Based on XMonad, tiling/stacking WM intended for GNOME. Nice intro screencast, looks surprisingly easy to use - but has XMonad's Haskell requirement, and needs cabal to install. BSD3 license. |
| BrainTop | X11 | not available | Roberto "MadBob" Guido | Part of the "Lobotomy" project. The window manager "BrainTop" is a derivative of, and very similar to, XFCE's WM. Site dead 201308. | ||||
| bspwm | X11 | [homepage] | 0.9.12 | 20251008 | https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm | 20260307 | Bastien "baskerville" Dejean | "Tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning." I haven't had time to figure out what that means ... But it came recommended. |
| catwm | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20230712 | https://github.com/pyknite/catwm | 20260407 | "pyknite" | Tiling WM for Arch Linux, written in C, related to dwm. Discussion at this Arch Linux Forum. After no activity since 2011, updated 2023-07. |
| chamferwm | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20240928 | https://github.com/jaelpark/chamferwm | 20260309 | "jaelpark" | Tiling WM built on Vulkan compositor. Written in C++. BSD-3-clause license. Docs here. |
| Cinnamon | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
6.6.7 | 20260209 | https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/tags | 20260408 | A UI, not a WM, a GNOME Shell variant meant to emulate GNOME 2 for those who don't like GNOME 3. Uses the Muffin WM. | |
| Clementine | X11 | [homepage] | 0.0.7 beta | 20020325 | https://clementine.sourceforge.net/ | 20260309 | Dave Berton | Based on aewm, written in C++. "Clementine is only somewhat functional at the moment. Unless you plan to hack on the source, it is not recommended that you do much with it." |
| clfswm | X11 | [homepage] | 1212 | 20121207 | https://clfswm.common-lisp.dev/ | 20260314 | Philippe Brochard | "Based on TinyWM and Stumpwm." Written entirely in Common Lisp, requires a lisp interpreter, or you can download the self-contained binary pack. |
| Common Desktop Environment | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
2.5.3 | 20251125 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/files/ | 20260410 | CDE was released in 1993. It had a long history, and was often imitated. In 2012, it and the supporting Motif toolkit were open-sourced. As of 2018 it's still build-it-yourself, no packages. | |
| Compiz | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
0.9.14.2 | 20220822 | https://launchpad.net/compiz/+download | 20260314 | Attractive and graphics-intensive. Beryl forked from Compiz, they re-merged 2007 to form Compiz Fusion, became just "Compiz" again early 2011. | |
| Compiz Fusion | X11 |
[homepage] X [Wikipedia] |
not available | "Compiz Fusion is the result of a merge between the well-known Beryl composite window manager and Compiz Extras, a community set of improvements to the Compiz composite window manager." Now merged back to Compiz. | ||||
| Cortile | X11 | [homepage] | 2.5.2 | 20241102 | https://github.com/leukipp/cortile/tags | 20260323 | "leukipp" | "... auto tiling manager with hot corner support for ..." many window managers. This isn't a complete window manager (but it is a WM), it adds dynamic tiling to many floating WMs. Written in Go, MIT License. |
| CTWM | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
4.1.0 | 20230326 | http://www.ctwm.org/download.html | 20260314 | Previously Claude Lecommandeur, now Richard Levitte. | Adds virtual desktops and even more configurability to TWM. One of my main WMs for years, although less so recently. 2003 Review |
| cwm | X11 | [homepage] | 7.4 | 20231016 | https://github.com/leahneukirchen/cwm | 20260309 | Marius Aamodt Eriksen, taken over by Lea Neukirchen | Originally based on evilwm, now written from scratch. Disappeared in 2015, rediscovered (new maintainer) late 2019. OpenBSD had a copy - older than the "homepage" link, but the first linked one is portable. |
| dminiwm | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20141224 | https://github.com/moetunes/dminiwm | 20260302 | "moetunes" |
Based on catwm, itself based on dwm. Minimalist tiling WM. Spawned monsterwm. The author has several variants by different names with slightly different functionality. |
| Deep Space Window Manager | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20161117 | https://github.com/cosmonaut-ok/dswm | 20260310 | Alexander "cosmonaut" Vynnyk | Based on StumpWM (written in Lisp). "Better usability, better integration with Emacs." Project frozen (2016-11) with the intent of merging back to StumpWM. |
| dwemo | X11 | [homepage] | 0.0.2 | 20080517 | http://sourceforge.net/projects/dwemo/ | 20260404 | Nolan Liebert | Trying to be very small. MIT License. Same author as TAL/wm and AntiWM. Author Liebert says it's currently "relatively unstable" (20080803 - my experience included crashing as soon as you ran a terminal) but that he plans to stabilize it enough for production use. Files disappeared ~200909, look for "OldFiles" under Summary. |
| dwm | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
6.8 | 20260130 | http://dl.suckless.org/dwm/ | 20260312 | Anselm Garbe | "Dynamic Window Manager," another keyboard-driven WM from the wmii people. "Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions." Version 5.2 source package 18kb. 4.8 on is supposed to include Xinerama support, I haven't checked. MIT license. |
| dwm-ipc | X11 | [homepage] | 1.5.7 | 20201106 | https://github.com/mihirlad55/dwm-ipc | 20260312 | Mihir "mihirlad55" Lad | "A DWM patch that allows IPC communication through a UNIX socket." |
| E16 | X11 | [homepage] | 1.0.31 | 20250810 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/enlightenment/files/e16/ | 20260324 | The Enlightenment team | "E16 is predecessor of the current ... Enlightenment ..." I don't usually like to keep separate entries on particular revs, but Enlightenment E16 has been particularly popular and well (and separately) maintained. |
| Eagle Mode | X11 | [homepage] | 0.96.4 | 20260109 | https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/download.html | 20260410 | Oliver Hamann | "Eagle Mode is a zoomable user interface (ZUI) with file manager, file viewers, games, and more." GPL3. |
| echinus wm | X11 | [homepage] | 0.4.9 | 20110920 | https://github.com/polachok/echinus | 20260305 | Alexander Polakov | Based on the same author's fwm, which was based on dwm's code base and took some ideas from Plan 9's rio. It's "in the spirit of dwm." The git repo (but not the web page) says it's not maintained anymore and a comment on the page says "I use cwm ..." |
| Eclipse | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Nikos Drakos, Ross Moore, Erik Enge ... | A WM, not the well known IDE. Written in Common Lisp, student programming project. Pointer to CVS snapshot tarball is broken, CVS itself was available, now gone. Abandoned, succumbing to link rot. | |||
| EDE | X11 | [homepage] | 2.1 | 20140621 | https://edeproject.org/wiki/Download | 20260324 | v1: Martin Pekar, Mikko Lahtenaaki, Dejan Lekic, Alexey Parshin. v2: Sanel Zukan, Vedran Ljubovic. | Equinox Desktop Environment. "Familiar look and feel" which means "Windows." |
| Efsane II | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Serdar Özler. | Turkish. Written in C++. Site died 200908. | |||
| eggwm | X11 | [homepage] | 0.2 | 20110212 | https://code.google.com/archive/p/eggwm/downloads | 20260317 | José Expésito |
alt home. Written in C++, Qt4 libraries, GPLv3. freedesktop.org / EWMH / ICCCM compliant. Meant to be lightweight, standards-compliant, and eventually add gesture control. code.google.com is archived, live fork at https://github.com/xiangzhai/eggwm. |
| Elevate | X11 | [homepage] | 0.2.0 | 20071118 | https://elevate.sourceforge.net/ | 20260312 | Kostis Kapelonis | Part of "Project Elevate" to simplify our complex UIs. Has a very long list or requirements, was in development for years, now abandoned? |
| Enlightenment | Wayland/X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
0.27.1 | 20250314 | https://download.enlightenment.org/rel/apps/enlightenment/ | 20260227 | Orig. Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison and Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler. Now a large team. |
Bringing you shaped windows, configurability, and heavy graphics since 2000. Originally based on fvwm 2. Big Samsung funding 2009-11. Version E17 dropped 2012-12 after a decade wait. This is a "Desktop Environment," not just a WM. Forks: E16, Moksha (E17). |
| EPIwm | X11 | [homepage] | 0.5.6 | 20020110 | https://www.nongnu.org/epiwm/download.html | 20260317 | Students at EPITA in France. | "Small, fast, light." School project. Appears fairly themeable. Last developed in the age of the 80386 ... |
| euclid-wm | X11 | [homepage] | 0.4.3 | 20131216 | https://euclid-wm.sourceforge.net/download.php | 20260324 | William Diem | "... minimalist, tiling window manager ... easy-to-learn, vim-like key-bindings ... seeks to ... balance the ease of use common among automatic-layout tiling window manager with the flexibility of manual layout WMs." BSD license. 2025-11-10: 503. |
| EvilPoison | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Clive Crous, Pasi Kallinen | "A non-wimp window manager for X11 based loosely on evilwm and Ratpoison." Used to claim it was "evilwm source code with Ratpoison-like key bindings." Crous' projects vanish frequently (201009, 201011, 201101). 2012-02: Slashdot announced that Crous will be the head of Linux Game Publishing, 2014-10: WM vanished entirely. | |||
| evilwm | X11 | [homepage] | 1.5 | 20251219 | http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/dl/ | 20260318 | Ciaran Anscomb | Minimalistic keyboard driven WM with vi- and nethack-like key bindings. 2003 Review |
| expocity | X11 | not available | Applied Apple Exposé-like behaviour to Metacity. Development discontinued around 2005: "This version is now outdated and the modern X window system nowadays allows for much better effects than what was possible with expocity." Web page deceased: last known address: http://www.pycage.de/#expocity . | |||||
| E2WM | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20241104 | https://github.com/kiwanami/emacs-window-manager | 20260226 | Masashi Sakurai et al | "Equilibrium Emacs Window Manager," tiling (?), GPL3. |
| Emacs X Window Manager (EXWM) | X11 | [homepage] | 0.34 | 20250627 | https://github.com/emacs-exwm/exwm/tags | 20260407 | Original author: Chris (git: "ch11ng") Feng | Makes Emacs your tiling Window Manager. (See also XWEM.) Written in Emacs Lisp. |
| EMWM | X11 | [homepage] | 1.3.1 | 20250802 | http://fastestcode.org/emwm.html | 20260319 | Alexander Pampuchin | "Enhanced Motif Window Manager," based on the original MWM but with modern updates like UTF-8, Xft fonts, and multi-monitor. See also: MWM (Motif), MWM (Lesstif) |
| failsafewm | X11 | Bundled with swm. See swm. | ||||||
| fensterchef | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20250513 | https://github.com/JulianBMW/fensterchef | 20260228 | "JulianBMW", "thepsauce" | Tiling window manager, written in C, MIT license. There's a more active fork by the other contributor at https://github.com/thepsauce/fensterchef. Probably just a work branch? |
| Firebox | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Cyrille Bagard | Written from scratch in C, inspired by Fluxbox, HackedBox, Blackbox, Enlightenment, and WindowLab, but particularly by Openbox and wmii. Site vanished ~201106. Notes | |||
| Fluxbox | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
1.3.7 | 20150208 | http://fluxbox.org/download/ | 20260318 | Henrik Kinnunen | Child of Blackbox (forked at 0.61.1) with built-in keybindings and the tabs from PWM, quite popular. A personal favourite. |
| FLWM | X11 | [homepage] | 1.02 | 20060630 | https://sourceforge.net/p/flwm/flwm/ci/master/tree/ | 20260322 | Bill Spitzak | Vertical titlebars, inspired by (and codebase from) wm2. Requires fltk libraries by the same author. The git repo linked on the page contained a newer version ... but now (2025) appears dead. 2007 review. |
| FpcBol | X11 | [homepage] | 2.0 beta | 20100907 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/fpcbol/files/ | 20260318 | Florence Gestio | Not a WM, a "Desktop User Interface ... for childrens (and others) ... works with pentium 200 minimalist configuration." Requires festival and mbrola to speak. "FPC" indicates it's written for the Free Pascal Compiler. Requires Metacity or Compiz? |
| Framer | X11 | [homepage] | 0.1 | 20030421 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/framer/files/ | 20260322 | Christoph Dietze | Written in old version of Eiffel and requires wxWindows (probably an old version), meant to go with ROX. Appears to be abandoned, ROX has moved on. |
| FrankenWM | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20240603 | https://github.com/sulami/FrankenWM | 20260324 | Robin "sulami" Schroer | Tiling WM forked from monsterwm. Written in C, only configurable on compile. |
| FROG | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20260301 | https://github.com/arthurchoung/FROG | 20260327 | arthurchoung | Originally called HOTDOG. I have no idea if this is prank or a practical project. He appears to have bolted multiple GUIs onto various OSes. No versioning, no separate packaging of the software. "X11 Window Manager with Windows 3.1 Hot Dog Stand, Amiga Workbench, Atari ST GEM, Mac Classic and Aqua UI." GPL3 license. Written in a strange combination of Objective-C and Perl. |
| fswm | X11 | [homepage] | not available | https://github.com/pbizopoulos/fswm | Paschalis Bizopoulos | Basic full screen X11 WM. Written in C, MIT license. *** 2025-02-13 Author Paschalis Bizopoulos seems to have deleted all repos from their Github account? | ||
| fvwm 1 | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
not available | Robert Nation et al. | Version 1 of this venerable WM remained available from their website for 20 years after its release, but is finally gone in mid-2016. See fvwm 2. | |||
| fvwm 2 | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
not available | Robert Nation et al. | Flexible appearance and behaviour, and a very long history. As of 202001 or earlier, this is in "maintenance mode" and version 3 is recommended. And as of 202403, version 2 is no longer supported. 2003 Review | |||
| fvwm 3 | X11 | [homepage] | 1.1.4 | 20251108 | https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/tags | 20260322 | Thomas Adam et al at GitHub | Version 3 is a work-in-progress as I add it 2020-01. As of 2020-09 they're showing 1.0.x, which is promising. |
| fvwm95 | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
2.0.43f | 20030503 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/fvwm95/files/fvwm95/ | 20260322 | Hector Peraza | fvwm 2 modified to look and act like Windows 95. Among the downloads there is also a (older) file called fvwm98. |
| fvwm-crystal | X11 | [homepage] | 3.7.6 | 20241105 | https://github.com/fvwm-crystal/fvwm-crystal | 20260326 | Maciej Delmanowski | fvwm 2 dressed up to look and act even better. Requires a recent version of fvwm2 (which is no longer available). Three different version tags can be seen on the website, GitHub and SourceForge. |
| fwm | X11 | not available | Alexander Polakov | The abandoned predecessor to echinus wm. Based on dwm's source code, partly inspired by Plan 9's rio. Site disappeared ~200810, last known address http://koluthcka.ru/fwm/fwm.html | ||||
| fxwm | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Sander Jansen | "FOX Desktop", built using the FOX toolkit. The homepage listed here is the author's. No download is available - in fact, no mention of it is made at all anymore. | |||
| Gala | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
8.4.1 | 20260210 | https://git.launchpad.net/gala | 20260323 | A variant of Mutter used by Elementary OS. Looks hard to build outside of Elementary, but it's available as a Fedora package! | |
| Glassomium | X11 | [homepage] | 0.3 | 20121216 | https://github.com/pierotofy/glassomium | 20260323 | Piero Toffanin | "... cross-platform web-based TUIO-enabled multi-touch window manager. ... runs everything in texture-mapped web browser windows so that you can focus on creating applications ..." C++, Apache license, large (0.3 src = 137MB - includes the Berkelium library, large parts of Angry Birds Rio, and a Windows Ruby installer). |
| GNOME | Wayland/X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
49.4 | 20260210 | https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/tags | 20260313 | This is a Desktop Environment and NOT a Window Manager. They rely on other WMs, previously Enlightenment, Sawfish and Compiz, now Metacity. | |
| Golem | X11 | [homepage] | 0.0.6 | 20060301 | https://golem.sourceforge.net/ | 20260323 | Orig. Jordan DeLong, now Bruce Ashfield. | Nice looking, once promising project, now apparently abandoned. BSD license. 2003 Review |
| goomwwm | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20250710 | https://github.com/seanpringle/goomwwm | 20260326 | Sean Pringle | "get out of my way, window manager!" Tiling, tagging, keyboard-driven. Same author as xoat. |
| gwm | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Colas Nahaboo (v1?), Anders Holst (v2) | "Generic" WM. v1.8 in 1995 (permissive license), new author with v2.0 in 2005, complete rewrite (GPL). Uses "an interpreted dialect of Lisp with specific window management primitives." Website goes down occasionally. Look further down for a link to v2.1+ downloads. Some (older) documentation here. | |||
| GwML | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Fabrice Le Fessant | Inspired by gwm (Generic Window Manager), written in and configured using Objective CAML (OCAML). "May never get past Alpha," GwML is a side project to go with the editor Efuns. Package vanished 200909, site dead 201111, pointing to author's site (which has broken links). | |||
| HackedBox | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Larry Owen | Modified/simplified Blackbox. Most notably, the toolbar and slit were removed. Site died ~201310. 2003 Review | |||
| Haydar Desktop Environment | X11 | [homepage] | 2.0.3 | 20080322 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/hde/files/ | 20260404 | Haydar Alkaduhimi | HDE closely emulates the appearance of Windows Vista. Depends on QT4. Another sourceforge page with rather different (older?) information. |
| HaZe | X11 | [homepage] | 0.2 | 20010520 | http://www.escomposlinux.org/jes/ | 20260326 | argonaut_@yahoo.com | mlvwm (Macintosh-8/9-alike) modified - very black and white. |
| heliwm | X11 | [homepage] | 1.13 | 20060303 | http://www.cc.rim.or.jp/~hok/heliwm/ | 20260326 | Hidetoshi Ohtomo | Intended to be extremely small and light ("to save electricity consumption"). No virtual desktops. 2003 Review |
| Herbstluftwm | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20260117 | https://herbstluftwm.org/download.html | 20260327 | Thorsten Wißmann | 2011 Tiling WM borrowing ideas from i3, musca, xmonad, and wmii. |
| Hotdog | X11 | [homepage] | 20250806 | 20260327 | Arthur Choung | I have no idea if this is prank or a practical project. He appears to have bolted multiple GUIs onto various OSes. No versioning, no separate packaging of the software. "X11 Window Manager with Windows 3.1 Hot Dog Stand, Amiga Workbench, Atari ST GEM, Mac Classic and Aqua UI." GPL3 license. Written in a strange combination of Objective-C and Perl. Now called FROG. | ||
| howm | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20211007 | https://github.com/HarveyHunt/howm | 20260327 | Harvey Hunt | "A lightweight, tiling X11 window manager that mimics vi by offering operators, motions and modes." |
| i3 | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
4.25.1 | 20260206 | https://i3wm.org/downloads/ | 20260328 | Michael Stapelberg | Developed because the author was unsatisfied with wmii. Tiling WM, revised BSD license. |
| IceWM | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
4.0.0 | 20260101 | https://github.com/ice-wm/icewm/releases/latest | 20260329 | Originally Marko Macek, then Mathias Hasselmann, now Brian Bidulock. | Originally written (in C++) to emulate OS/2 and Windows 95/98, but it's grown. Themeable and has virtual desktops. 2003 Review |
| Integrity | X11 | [homepage] | 1.0 | 20040808 | http://integrity.sourceforge.net/ | 20260329 | Jason Athey | QT-based. As of 20081004 the index.php page is displaying only the entry page and won't show downloads or anything else. For the source: http://sourceforge.net/projects/integrity/. |
| Interface | X11 | [homepage] | 0.2.5 | 20030914 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/interfacewm/files/ | 20260329 | Ian Mondragon | Written in Objective C for GNUstep. |
| Ion | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
not available | https://sites.google.com/site/ion3rpms/ | Tuomo Valkonen | Keyboard-driven framing tabbed WM. Successor to PWM (same author). Custom license based on LGPL. The author, Tuomo Valkonen, ceased development of this in 2009. Continued by notion. Site dead 20230711. | ||
| ittywm | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20180507 | https://github.com/marshallmason/ittywm | 20260319 | Marshall Mason | A reworking of tinywm - adding comments and clarification, and a couple features. Public domain license. |
| JBWM | X11 | [homepage] | 1.63 | 20221216 | https://github.com/alisabedard/jbwm/tags | 20260330 | Jeffrey E. "jefbed" Bedard / Alisa Bedard | Uses the code base of aewm and ideas from evilwm to try to make a fast and lightweight WM. |
| JD4X | X11 | [homepage] | 0.6 | 20060201 | https://jdx.sourceforge.net/ | 20260330 | Tay Hock Keong, Brandon Tay, Joseph Gledhill, Marc Patteet, Christopher R. | Java Desktop for X. Meant for Java programmers. Written in a mix of Java and C. (Probably incredibly hard/impossible to build in 2024.) |
| Jewel | X11 | [homepage] | 0.12.40 | 20020823 | http://mjr.towers.org.uk/xwinman.html | 20260330 | MJ Ray | A spin-off of aewm++/Sapphire (thus the name), this is also written in C++. They started to try to rewrite it in Objective C as well, but that never materialized. |
| JoyWM | X11 |
[homepage] |
not available | mfranke@dulug.de | Was LMMS, "Linux MultiMedia System," Renamed 200709. Intended as a way of accessing photos, audio, video, etc. on a limited screen with a joystick. "... a GUI written in pygame ..." Page had been empty for a couple years, died 2011-10. Slightly more info, references the dead homepage. | |||
| JWM | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
2.4.6 | 20241104 | https://github.com/joewing/jwm/tags | 20260408 | Joe Wingbermuehle | Joe's WM - similar to IceWM and Windows 98. As of v2.3.6, license has switched to MIT. Lightweight, intended for low-power/older computers. |
| Kahakai | X11 | [homepage] | 0.6.2 | 20040207 | https://kahakai.sourceforge.net/download.php | 20260405 | Eugene Pervago, Nick Wesch, Daniel Brown, Michael Brailsford, Alex Earl, Faugn, Hyriand, Jeff Hughes. | Fork of Waimea with scripting added. Discontinued, followed by Aegis. |
| Karmen | X11 | [homepage] | 0.15 | 20081228 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/karmen/files/ | 20260330 | Johan Veenhuizen | "There is no configuration file and no library dependencies other than Xlib. The input focus model is click-to-focus. Karmen aims at ICCCM and EWMH compliance." Same author as the more recent Wind. |
| KDE | Wayland/X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
6.6.3 | 20260317 | https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/ | 20260323 | KDE (unlike its best known competitor) does include a Window Manager, kwin. Famous, big, pretty. | |
| korgwm | X11 | [homepage] | 6.1 | 20260307 | https://github.com/zhmylove/korgwm/tags | 20260319 | Sergey Zhmylove | The description says "Tiling WM written in Perl to meet all Zhmylev's needs" - this is a personal project. It's written in Perl and also supports floating windows. MIT license. |
| larswm | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
7.5.3 | 20040715 | http://porneia.free.fr/larswm/larswm.html | 20260319 | Lars Bernhardsson | Keyboard-driven, minimalist, auto-tiling (the first?). Based on 9wm. Includes Xinerama support. Website died ~200910, this is a pointer to a mirror. |
| LeftWM | X11 | [homepage] | 0.5.4 | 20250207 | https://github.com/leftwm/leftwm/tags | 20260331 | Lex "lex148" Childs | Tiling WM, MIT license, written in Rust. |
| LMMS | X11 | not available | mfranke@dulug.de | "Linux MultiMedia System." "LMMS is a project trying to create a gui for TV that can be used with a gamepad/joystick. In future there shall be various applications for playing audiofiles ... and videofiles ..." As of 200709 this project has been renamed JoyWM. | ||||
| Looking Glass 3D | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
not available | Colin M. Bullock, Christian Ost, David Weizades, Deron Johnson, Van der Haegen Mathieu, Kirk Turner, Giordano Fracasso, Hideya Kawahara, Krishna Gadepalli, Juan González, Paul Byrne, Phil Dowell, Pierre Ducroquet, Radek Kierner. | 3D desktop environment written in Java. Declared "practically dead" 200909. Previously sponsored by Sun. Never passed early beta. Bad security certificate. Site dead 2012-04. | |||
| Liri OS Shell | Wayland/X11 | [homepage] | git | 20240119 | https://github.com/lirios/shell | 20260402 | the Liri team ... but primarily Pier Luigi ("plfiorini") Fiorini | The (graphical) "shell" for Liri OS. May not be buildable without that: requires at least Qt and Wayland. |
| Lucca WM | X11 | [homepage] | 0.1.2 | 20080422 | https://madewokherd.nfshost.com/luccawm/download.htm | 20260405 | Vincent Povirk | MIT license tiling WM intended for GNOME. Written in C, requires GTK and XLib. |
| lwm | X11 | [homepage] | 1.2.4 | 20160212 | http://www.jfc.org.uk/software/lwm.html | 20260405 | Originally Elliott Hughes. Maintenance by James Carter. | "Lightweight" WM, fairly minimal decorations. |
| Luminocity | X11 | [homepage] | ? | 2005? | https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/Luminocity | 20260303 | Modification of Metacity. Discontinued in favour of Compiz/Beryl? I don't think there's any code to be downloaded anymore. 2024-07: "This site has been retired." | |
| Lunchbox | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20151107 | https://github.com/alysander/lunchboxwm | 20260331 | Alysander Stanley | Defaults to tiling mode, with simple resizing. Also does stacking mode. Includes a "title menu" to replace tabs. "Working toward EWMH and ICCCM compliance." University project: will it continue? Written in C. Notes (2010) |
| LXP | X11 | [homepage] | 0.2-1d | 20070208 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/lxp/files/ | 20260331 | Manuel Carrasco | Not a WM. "LXP is a desktop environment identical to Windows XP. LXP is a collection of different pieces of GNU software (IceWM, xfe, idesk, etc) modified in order to look and feel identical to Windows XP." |
| LXDE | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
0.99.3 | 20250321 | https://github.com/lxde/lxde-common/tags | 20260314 | "The LXDE Team" |
202507: Main site hosted at github, unencrypted. The "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment" (this isn't a window manager, it's a DE). A lighter alternative to KDE or GNOME. Uses Openbox as the default WM. Development is at https://github.com/lxde although their website still points to sourceforge. |
| LXQt | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
2.3.0 | 20251105 | https://lxqt-project.org/downloads/ | 20260409 | "The LXQt Team" | The "Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment" (forked from LXDE). A lighter alternative to KDE or GNOME. Uses Openbox as the default WM. Wayland support a work in progress as of 2023-11. |
| maewm | X11 | not available | Hack of aewm. Info and homepage from xwinman.org. URL seems to have died permanently 201008. | |||||
| magpie | Wayland/X11 | [homepage] | 0.9.4 | 20240926 | https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/magpie/tags | 20260310 | "Buddies of Budgie" | "... a softish fork of Mutter for use with Budgie Desktop." |
| Manix | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Magnus Sjöstrand | Mac OS 8/9-alike. Radical change of website ~200903, and went from v0.6 to git only. Needs SCons (and git of course) to build. Activity ceased around 200903? Site blank 201005, dead 201011. | |||
| Marco | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
1.29.1 | 20250922 | https://github.com/mate-desktop/marco/tags | 20260407 | MATE maintainers(?) | Fork of Metacity, window manager for the MATE desktop. Probably not something you'd run on its own. |
| Matchbox | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
not available | Matthew Allum | Intended for handhelds and very small screens. Almost a full desktop (not just WM). Ran on the Nokia Internet Tablets, the OLPC (see also Sugar), and the OpenMoko phone. 202312: Yocto has dropped it? See Matchbox 2. 2003 Review | |||
| Matchbox 2 | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
git | 20231024 | https://git.yoctoproject.org/matchbox-window-manager-2/ | 20260331 | Matthew Allum | Intended for handhelds and very small screens - "complete rewrite of Matchbox. Development appears to have stalled? (Last file change was text only, and not much before that). |
| matwm2 | X11 | [homepage] | 0.1.2 | 20240509 | https://github.com/segin/matwm2 | 20260401 | Mattis Michel | A simplistic overlapping X11 window manager for POSIX systems." "... window frames with titlebar and buttons, configurable key bindings and mouse buttons, support for EWMH and motif hints, focus-follows-mouse and click-to-focus focus models, virtual desktops, Xft fonts and xinerama support." |
| mavosxwm | X11 | [homepage] | 0.2.1 | 20030221 | https://mavosxwm.sourceforge.net/ | 20260408 | Martin Vollrathson | Based on wm2. 200808: download link broken, check sourceforge link . |
| Maxx Interactive Desktop | X11 | [homepage] | 2.2.0 | 20250131 | https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/ | 20260227 | Eric Masson | Similar to the proprietary Silicon Graphics IRIX 4Dwm, previously called 5dwm. Restrictive license with SGI (not open source, although he claims they're opening it). Site has changed and/or vanished in the past. A new alpha version appeared 2024-11. |
| mazewm | X11 | [homepage] | 1.0.1 | 20140121 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/mazewm/files/ | 20260401 | "goingnuts" (Sourceforge name) | "Based on mlvwm with elements from HaZe. Added style for menubar, menus and desktop background. Added sound theme capabilities." Claims a very small memory footprint. |
| mcwm | X11 | [homepage] | git/20181007 | 20181007 | https://hack.org/mc/hacks/mcwm/download.html | 20260401 | Michael "MC" Cardell Widerkrantz | Floating (not tiling) minimalist WM. Built on XCB, doesn't use Xlib. ISC license. Borrows ideas from ctwm, evilwm, vi / nethack, tinywm. Declared "stopped" late 2013. |
| mdtwm | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20260322 | https://github.com/ziutek/mdtwm | 20260401 | Michał "ziutek" Derkacz | mdt = "Mouse Driven Tiling" (virtually all tiling WMs are very keyboard-oriented). Written in Go. Strange mouse choices, using the right mouse button for all actions. |
| Metacity | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
3.58.1 | 20250928 | https://download.gnome.org/sources/metacity/ | 20260409 | "GNOME Team" | "Boring window manager for the adult in you. Many window managers are like Marshmallow Froot Loops; Metacity is like Cheerios." One of the WMs used by GNOME, now used for GNOME Flashback. Doesn't do much without GNOME. See also this not-a-homepage. |
| Metisse | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
not available | Olivier Chapuis, Nicolas Roussel | Very pretty psuedo-3D effects, testbed WM based on FVWM 2.5.x. Brought forward by Mandriva spring 2007. Requires its own modified X server ("nucleo"). A lot of reading and compiling is called for: I was unable to get it (v0.4.0-rc4) to work myself. Active 2009-10, stalled 2011? Site dead 2022-06. | |||
| Mezzo | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
not available | Ryan Quinn | Part of Symphony OS, a modification of fvwm 2 that runs on a modified(?) Ubuntu. Website makes grandiose statements about running all Linux and Windows apps ... but development appears to be at a standstill. Site died approx. 201012. | |||
| MID4Linux | X11 | "Mass Interactive Desktop for Linux," another name for 5Dwm which imitates the Irix Magic Desktop. See MaXX Interactive Desktop, the new name for 5Dwm. | ||||||
| miwm | X11 | [homepage] | 1-1 | 20030709 | https://miwm.sourceforge.net/ | 20260402 | Ben Paul Wise | "Microscopic" WM, written in C++, "incorporating lessons from lwm, awm, wmx, Blackbox, and UDE. Example code was lifted from awm, lwm and wmx, but also rather extensively re-written." |
| mlvwm | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
0.9.1 | 20000627 | http://www2u.biglobe.ne.jp/~y-miyata/mlvwm.html | 20260410 | Takahashi Hasegawa | Macintosh like virtual WM. (The website is so old (2000!) it uses the <blink> tag.) |
| Moksha | X11 | [homepage] | 0.4.1 | 20230827 | https://github.com/JeffHoogland/moksha/tags | 20260409 | Jeff Hoogland et al, notably Štefan "thewaiter" Uram | A fork of X11 Enlightenment DR17 under the auspices of Bodhi Linux. The page recommends Bodhi, go to GitHub to get Moksha itself. |
| Monkey WM | X11 | [homepage] | 0.3 | 20071107 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/monkeywm/files/ | 20260410 | Chris Tillberg | GPL, written in Freepascal. The author took hints from sWM and WindowLab. |
| monsterwm | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20120303 | https://github.com/c00kiemon5ter/monsterwm | 20260404 | Ivan "c00kiemon5ter" Kanakarakis | Lineage: 2wm/dwm -> catwm -> dminiwm -> monsterwm. Tiling, minimalist. Good instructions at archlinux wiki. |
| Mosquito | X11 |
[homepage] |
not available | erth7411 at csd dot uu dot se | C++, garish colours. Website has been significantly stripped ~2008-04. 403 ~2011-04 on, 404 ~2011-10. | |||
| Mousetoxin | X11 |
[homepage] |
not available | Troels "Athas" Henriksen, Martin "dybber" Dybdal | "A reimplementation of Ratpoison in Literate Haskell." Apparently abandoned: "homepage" points to author's "programs" page although this program doesn't appear there. | |||
| Multi-Cursor Window Manager | X11 | [homepage] | 1.0 | 20060310 | https://multicursor-wm.sourceforge.net/ | 20260404 | Grant Wallace et al | Supports multiple simultaneous users. Based on (an old version of) IceWM. |
| MPWM | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
not available | Peter Hutterer | Part of the "Multi-Pointer X Server" project: "As of May 27 2008, MPX is part of the standard X.org X Window System implementation." MPWM was a proof-of-concept WM that he made available. Thank him when you see multi-touch in X. MPWM appears to be gone. | |||
| Muffin | Wayland/X11 | [homepage] | 6.6.3 | 20260125 | https://github.com/linuxmint/muffin/tags | 20260326 | Primary GitHub contributors: Clement Lefebvre, Michael Webster | The WM for Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a GNOME Shell fork, and Muffin a fork of Mutter, the GNOME Shell WM. |
| Musca | X11 | not available | Sean Pringle | Tiling WM, borrows from Ratpoison and dwm, uses dmenu for menuing. Wikipedia says "Musca ... is one of the minor southern constellations." | ||||
| Mutter | Wayland/X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
49.5 | 20260315 | https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/tags | 20260318 | The base WM for GNOME 3, replaced Metacity using the Clutter graphics library (thus the name). Can apparently be used as a stand-alone WM. | |
| MWM (Lesstif) | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
0.95.2 | 20090527 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/lesstif/files/lesstif/ | 20260404 | "Hungry Programmers" | The originally proprietary, now free Motif WM was re-implemented at lesstif.org. That project stopped early 2013 after Motif was open-sourced. See Enhanced MWM for a modern (2023) fix. 2003 Review |
| MWM (Motif) | X11 | [homepage] [Wikipedia] | 2.3.8 | 20171205 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/files/ | 20260401 | Based on the Motif toolkit, appeared in the early 1990s. Originally proprietary (Lesstif was made as a free replacement), now open-source. | |
| NovaWM | X11 | [homepage] | Alpha-0.8.1 | 20080406 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/novawm/files/ | 20260226 | "realmz" | Written in C++. |
| miNimalistic WM | X11 | [homepage] | 2015101600 | 20151016 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/miniwm/files/ | 20260227 | Adam Tlałka | Based on evilwm and aewm, GPL. |
| nextspace | X11 | [homepage] | 0.95 | 20240625 | https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace/tags | 20260404 | Sergii "trunkmaster" Stoian | NeXTSTEP look and feel for Fedora and relatives. May build on other Linuxes, but the developer is concentrating on the RedHat-based distros. |
| NsCDE | X11 | [homepage] | 2.3 | 20230616 | https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE/tags | 20260404 | git handle "Hegel3DReloaded" | "Not so Common Desktop Environment" - similar in look to CDE, based on FVWM and verging on being a "Desktop Environment." |
| nwm | X11 | [homepage] | 1.3.0 | 20150909 | https://github.com/mixu/nwm | 20260227 | Mikito "mixu" Takada | "Tiling window manager for X11 written in Node.js." Requires node.js (of course). Looks like documentation is fairly good. |
| Notion | X11 | [homepage] | 4.0.4 | 20250522 | https://github.com/raboof/notion | 20260406 | orig. Tuomo Valkonen. Now "the Notion team," incl. Arnout Engelen. | Carries on the abandoned Ion3 under a modified LGPL license. Tiling. Scriptable in Lua. See also anion3. |
| olvwm | X11 | [Wikipedia] | not available | was Scott Oaks, now Tomas Konojacki | Emulates Sun olwm with virtual desktops. Last available (that I knew of) in Debian jessie. | |||
| olwm | X11 | [Wikipedia] | not available | Was Sun Microsystems (many patches applied since public release). now Tomas Konojacki. Last available (that I knew of) in Debian jessie. | Sun olwm (or a clone thereof?). Package shown is Debian oldstable (not available in stable or testing, although it continues to lurk in sid). | |||
| OmegaWM | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Hyriand | The author, "Hyriand," also worked on Kahakai. Requires SConstruct, Cairo, ImLib2. | |||
| Openbox | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
3.6.1 | 20150701 | http://openbox.org/wiki/Openbox:Download | 20260305 | Mikael Magnusson, Dana Jansens, Derek Foreman, Tore Anderson, Audun Hove, Marius Nita, et al. | Based on Blackbox, standards-compliant, fast, works with GNOME and KDE. A personal favourite. As it's considered feature-complete, very little development happens. Site "Forbidden" 2024-07-26. |
| Orbitiny Desktop | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20260303 | https://sourceforge.net/p/orbitiny-desktop/code/ci/master/tree/ | 20260328 | Sasko Usinov | Desktop environment and window manager, new in 2025, written from the ground up in C++ with Qt. Includes a ton of unusual features. They intend to add Wayland support ... I'll be very interested to see where this goes. Binary releases only?! |
| Orion | X11 | [homepage] | 0.2 | 20040524 | https://scsh.net/resources/graphics.html | 20260228 | David Frese, Norbert Freudemann. | Written in scsh. Similar behaviour to Ion. Still mentioned at the scsh pages: some or all links to the WM itself are periodically broken. 2026-01: certificate expired. 2025-09: the site security certificate is expired ... fixed 2025-12-03. This pattern repeats roughly yearly. |
| OroboROX | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Guido Schimmels and Jonatan Liljedahl | A modification of Oroborus intended for the ROX Desktop. Stability problems caused 0.9.7.10 and 0.9.8 to be discarded in favour of the older 0.9.7.9. No software available anymore ... and webpage disappeared ~2023-09. | |||
| Oroborus | X11 |
[homepage] X |
not available | orig. Ken Lynch, later Stefan Pfetzing. | Minimalist, includes utilities to bind keys and launch applications. Last release 2010. 2020-08: site changed hands to a VR project. | |||
| Parti | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20170423 | https://github.com/njsmith/partiwm | 20260228 | Nathaniel Smith | 'Parti is a tabbing/tiling (one might say "partitioning") window manager. Its goal is to bring this superior window management interface to modern, mainstream desktop environments. It is written in Python, uses GTK+ ...' Alpha. Also "[defunct]." |
| PAWM | X11 | [homepage] | 2.3.0 | 20100503 | https://www.pleyades.net/david/projects/pawm | 20260305 | David Gómez Espinosa, Raúl Nùñez de Arenas Coronado. | Puto Amo Window Manager. Small. Unmaintained since 2011. |
| PekWM | X11 | [homepage] | 0.4.3 | 20260215 | https://github.com/pekwm/pekwm | 20260319 | Claes Nästén, Andreas "ioerror" | Based on aewm++ with window grouping like PWM and Fluxbox. I rather liked this WM (years ago). There are code commits on the GitHub repo more recent than the version linked at the website. |
| PerlWM | X11 | [homepage] | 0.0.7 | 20040523 | https://perlwm.sourceforge.net/code.html | 20260228 | Rich Williams(?) | Written in Perl. Not very stable or usable (2003). And not updated since 2004. |
| Phluid | X11 | [homepage] | 0.0.3 | 20001113 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/phluid/files/ | 20260305 | Matthew M. Elder | Declared dead by developer 200304. Used Imlib2, aimed for ICCCM compliance. BSD License. |
| piewm | X11 | [homepage] X | not available | tvtwm modified to use pie menus - an early rudimentary implementation of mouse gestures. | ||||
| Pixie | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Johan "Owl" Ceuppens | This isn't quite a window manager. It's a library for creating WMs. Gone 404 ~2012-02. | |||
| PLWM | X11 | [homepage] | 2.6a | 20040409 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/plwm/files/ | 20260228 | Peter Liljenberg | "Pointless Window Manager." Written in Python. "This is not a window manager for non-programmers" (Freshmeat comment). No decorations. It is both a set of classes for implementing a WM, and a WM. Some activity 200911. |
| progman | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20241118 | https://github.com/jcs/progman | 20260409 | Joshua Stein | Looks like Program Manager from Windows 3, based on aewm. Author also wrote sdorfehs. |
| Puppet | X11 | [homepage] | not available | https://sourceforge.net/projects/escher/files/ | Stephen Tse, Roman Kennke | The (minimalist, no decorations) WM for the Escher Java Library for X Windows, downloaded as a part of Escher. Escher project site is still available, but there are no longer any downloads available. | ||
| PWM | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
not available | Tuomo Valkonen | "The first tabbing window manager." The author moved on to Ion, and then left open source entirely - his website is now down. Ion could also be compiled to behave like PWM. 2003 Review | |||
| pwm (2) | X11 | [homepage] | 2.40 | 20241021 | https://lsnl.jp/~ohsaki/software/pwm/pwm | 20260406 | Hiroyuki Ohsaki | "A simple but extensible X11 window manager written in Perl." Run a Makefile that fetches the 'pwm' script and needed software ... if you're on Debian. There's manual installation on other OSes. "Motivated by" perlwm. Tiling, no window decorations. See also same author's xpywm. |
| PycaWM | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Vincent Rasneur, Anaël Verrier. | Written in Python. GPLv3. | |||
| Pyro Desktop | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Alex Graveley | Firefox extension (for 3.0x?) that turns the browser into a WM and web desktop. Their website doesn't make it clear: you need a compositing window manager or this won't work. Worked very poorly on my machine circa 2007. Page had DB errors 2011-01 to 2012-09. | |||
| PyWM | X11 | [homepage] | 0.1-1-a4-1 | 20060417 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/pywm/files/ | 20260302 | orig. David Mcnab, now Elmo Mäntynen. | A modification of FLWM scriptable in Python. Author says it's a very early version. I doubt it would work with any current version of Python. |
| qlwm | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Alexander Linden | Based on Qt, written in C++. Window decorations are Fluxbox-like. Switches readily between traditional, tiling, and full screen modes. I quite like it, but it has heavy memory demands because of its use of Qt (if you use GNOME or KDE already this will hardly be an issue for you). Review of 4.1. | |||
| Qtile | Wayland/X11 | [homepage] | 0.35.1 | 20260320 | https://www.qtile.org/download/ | 20260329 | Aldo Cortesi | Written in Python, tiling, screenshot suggests strong similarities to wmii/dwm. MIT license. |
| quarkwm | X11 | [homepage] | 3_200710022054 | 20071002 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/quarkwm/files/ | 20260302 | FC | Keyboard-driven, some similarities to Ratpoison. The source code appears to be totally uncommented. |
| qvwm | X11 | [homepage] | 30042007 | 20070430 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/qvwm/files/ | 20260310 | orig. Kenichi Kourai. 2007 onward: "ali vardar," Jim "jserv" Huang, Mitch "mjd" Davis. | Windows 95-alike. Written from scratch in C++. Website died ~2012-11, now pointing to a more recently modified version maintained by ... someone else. 2003 Review |
| Ratpoison | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
1.4.9 | 20170404 | https://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ | 20260307 | Shawn Betts | Tiling keyboard-driven minimalist WM with emacs- and screen-like key bindings. 2003 Review |
| rio | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
git | 20260226 | https://github.com/9fans/plan9port | 20260310 | Russ Cox and others on GitHub | Derived from 9wm, and intended to be more like Bell's original Rio. Wikipedia article relates to Bell Lab's Plan 9's original rio, but mentions this one. For source, look for a github link (no branches, no tags ... urgh). |
| ROX Desktop | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
~2018 | https://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/software.html | 20260406 | Not a WM: ROX is a file manager imitating the RISC OS GUI that manages your desktop on top of a WM (currently OroboROX). | ||
| rpx | X11 |
[homepage] X |
not available | Thien-Thi Nguyen |
"[A] port of ratpoison to Guile 1.4.x Scheme," "RatPoison eXhumed." Requires ttn-do (presumably a product of the same author, whose initials are TTN). Site died between 20180825 and 20190112. |
|||
| RTL Siemens Tiled Window Manager | X11 | [homepage] | 5.2-working | 20111219 | http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1112/10398.html | 20260302 | Originally RTL Siemens, now Christoph Lohmann and Paul Onyschuk | One of the first tiling window managers (~1988) cleaned to work with Linux systems ~2011. |
| s3d | X11 | [homepage] | 0.2.2.1 | 20200126 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/s3d/files/ | 20260306 | Simon Wunderlich | s3d "is a 3d network display server which can be used as 3d desktop enviroment." Hard to build at v0.2.1.1 (2009), haven't tried since. 0.2.2.1 released 2020, nine years after 0.2.2. |
| Sapphire | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Frank Hale | "Sapphire" and aewm++ are different variants of the same project by the same author, but development on Sapphire has stopped. The homepage appears deliberately blank since ~200706? 2003 Review | |||
| Sara | X11 | [homepage] | not available | "gitluin" at GitHub | Tiling. "Originally a fork of catwm, now an offspring of dwm" ... "with a bit of bspwm (sockets) for good measure, and some extra UNIX philosophy inspiration from monsterwm." Announcement at Reddit. Archived at GitHub ~2024. "gitluin" account gone from GitHub 2025-10. | |||
| Sawfish | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
1.13.0 | 20211224 | http://download.tuxfamily.org/sawfish/ | 20260303 | Formerly titled "sawmill." Highly scriptable through a LISP derivative. Was for some time the WM of GNOME. Dead 2003-2006, semi-active until 2021. Download links are dead, follow "GIT Repositories" links. | |
| scrotwm | X11 | Marco Peereboom, Ryan Thomas McBride, Darrin Chandler | Former name of spectrwm - see that entry. | |||||
| scwm | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
0.99.6.2 | 20000312 | https://scwm.sourceforge.net/ | 20260319 | Greg J. Badros, Maciej Stachowiak, et al. | "Scheme Constraints" WM. Configurable with a Guile Scheme language. |
| sdorfehs | X11 | [homepage] | 1.6 | 20240724 | https://github.com/jcs/sdorfehs/tags/ | 20260226 | Joshua Stein | By the author of progman. "Pronounced 'starfish.'" Okay ... "A tiling window manager descended from ratpoison." |
| SithWM | X11 | [homepage] | 1.2.3 | 20080425 | https://sithwm.darkside.no/download.html | 20260310 | Øyvind "Darth olr" Røtvold | "Keyboard-driven," "minimalist." Based on evilwm: different (better, in my view) key bindings, new menu, functionality. |
| SkatOSWM | X11 | [homepage] | 1.0 | 20050113 | http://www.giannone.ch/skatoswm/ | 20260226 | Bodo Giannone | "SkatOSWM is a very small window manager which centers all new windows on the screen. This is the only supported feature. Perhaps it is very oversized to even name it a window manager..." |
| SmallWM | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20200228 | https://github.com/adamnew123456/SmallWM | 20260331 | Adam Marchetti | "SmallWM is an extended version of TinyWM, made for actual desktop use." Public Domain. Nick Welsh's TinyWM is something of a classic at 50 lines of code, this is interesting. |
| Nextwm | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20200519 | https://github.com/moetunes/Nextwm | 20260313 | "moetunes" | By the author of dminiwm, this "is dminiwm with a desktop switcher, info bar and reloadable rc file." Previously known as "snapwm." |
| sowm | X11 | [homepage] | 1.6 | 20200221 | https://github.com/dylanaraps/sowm | 20260226 | Dylan Araps | "Shitty Opinionated Window Manager." Written in C, small and simple. Archived 2024-04. |
| spectrwm | X11 |
[homepage] |
3.7.0 | 20250827 | https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm | 20260318 | Marco Peereboom, Ryan Thomas McBride, Darrin Chandler | Formerly "scrotwm." "... largely inspired by xmonad and dwm," borrows code from dwm, written in C. Tiling. ISC license. Source is in git, previously available tarballs seem to have vanished. |
| Spook | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Nick Welch | By the author of TinyWM and whimsy. X/MIT license. Written in C++, based on aewm. Sounded interesting, but: "The thing runs and works with few crashes/etc., but it's not even worthy of calling alpha" and he's declared it abandoned. Code not available. | |||
| sscrotwm | X11 | [homepage] | https://github.com/sporkexec/sscrotwm | Jacob "sporkexec" Courtneay | "Shriveled scrotwm is a minimalist fork of scrotwm/spectrwm." Vanished 2025-12 after 13 years of inactivity. | |||
| Stumpwm | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
24.11 | 20241019 | https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm | 20260407 | Shawn Betts? | Tiling (similarities to Ratpoison) minimalist WM. Requires a lisp environment (which uses as lot of memory), and a strong knowledge of lisp seems to be a pre-requisite. Download from the GitHub page (more recent versions). |
| subtle | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Christoph Kappel | Tiling WM, behaviour based on Wily/ACME. Original code base was aewm, now fully rewritten. Requires Ruby and Rake. Configurable with Ruby (was Lua until about 2008). | |||
| Sugar | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
not available | https://wiki.laptop.org/go/The_OLPC_Wiki | "The OLPC Team" |
Not a WM. The interface for the OLPC, written in Python. Runs on top of Matchbox. As of 2026-01 site is still available but software is not? |
||
| Solbourne WM | X11 |
[source] [Wikipedia] |
? | 19930929 | https://gilesorr.com/wm/archive/swm-Solbourne.tar.Z | 20260306 | Tom LaStrange | Solbourne WM. First WM with a virtual desktop, 1989. Also had some session management. "source" link points to a 1993 tarball originally from xwinman.org. The author, Tom LaStrange, previously wrote TWM. |
| SWM | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Adam Purkrt | "... animating, TeX-like decorating (window, decorations, buttons etc. are treated as vboxes/hboxes) ..." First called "Simple" then "Spartan" (2012-04), then "S Window Manager." Website broken PHP 2013-03 to 08, WM gone 2014-01. | |||
| sWM | X11 | [homepage] | not available | http://www.small-window-manager.de/swm-download.html | Robert Sperling | Small WM. Based on aewm, tries for ICCCM and GNOME compliance. Domain existed but no content 2024-10, domain for sale 2024-12. | ||
| SxWM | X11 | [homepage] | 1.7 | 20251013 | https://github.com/uint23/sxwm/tags | 20260224 | Abhinav "uint" Prasai |
Tiling WM. Borrows some code and behaviour from dwm, other stuff from i3, sowm, and tinywm. License is GPL 3. |
| TabletWM | X11 | [homepage] | 0.29 | 20171002 | https://gitlab.com/rastersoft/tabletwm/-/tags | 20260329 | Sergio Costas Rodríguez | A WM for tablets running X. Maximizes windows, no decorations, small code base. Provides a separate but probably needed launcher. |
| TAL/wm | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Nolan Liebert | Originally based on dwm code. "The goal [was] to be even more minimal and equally as customizable." MIT License. Author (dwemo, AntiWM) says he's not going to maintain TAL/wm "as I really don't think we need more forks of dwm anymore." Source code vanished 200907. | |||
| TDE | X11 | [homepage] | not available | While the site still exists (2013-05), this Brazilian Windows XP imitator has vanished. | ||||
| tekwm | X11 | [source] | 19891122 | 19891122 | https://gilesorr.com/wm/archive/tekwm-X11R4-contrib.mirror.tar.gz | 20260306 | Glenn Widener | Written for Tektronix equipment, based on awm. "source" link above is to a 1989 tarball from X11R4. |
| tfwm | X11 | [homepage] | 0.6 | 20130428 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/tfwm/files/ | 20260306 | "Djay" aka "fennecdjay" | "Tiny Floating manager ... with desktops,keybindings,and rules." GPLv3. Written in C. |
| Theseus' Ship | Wayland/X11 | [homepage] | 6.2.0 | 20241009 | https://github.com/winft/theseus-ship/tags | 20260320 | many | A "reboot" of KDE's KWin, meant as a drop-in replacement. |
| TinyWM | X11 | [homepage] | 1.3 | 20050310 | https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm | 20260313 | Nick Welch | 50 lines of C code, also available in Python. Also the author of Whimsy. Review (2007) |
| Toy'd | X11 | [homepage] | not available | https://code.google.com/archive/p/toyd/source/default/source | Mathieu De Kermadec, Germain Gaudart, Kenfe-Mickael Laventure, Matthieu Martin, Arnaud Vallat, Laurent Malvert, Ting-Ann Lin | "Built on top of Aoof-Wm, an advanced object oriented framework ..." Meant to be portable across OSes. "There is no window manager yet, we are currently re-designing it." Rigor mortis is setting in: the old domain name is dead, files aren't available. | ||
| treewm | X11 | [homepage] | 0.4.5 | 20030915 | http://treewm.sourceforge.net/ | 20260313 | Thomas Jãger | "The user can create desktops which can themselves contain windows and desktops." Not intuitive. |
| Trinity Desktop Environment | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
R14.1.5 | 20251109 | http://trinitydesktop.org/releases.php | 20260313 | Timothy Pearson et al | TDE is a continuation of KDE3, forked from v3.5. Timothy Pearson (the author) was the 3.x coordinator of Kubuntu releases. |
| tritium | X11 | [homepage] | 0.3.5 | 20080613 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/tritium/files/ | 20260318 | Mike O'Connor | "tritium is a tiling/tabbed window manager for the X Window System inspired by the Ion window manager. It was written completely from scratch in python and shares no actual code with Ion." Based on PLWM. |
| TrsWM | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Yaroslav "Yarick" Rastrigin | Based on Ion, manage windows with the keyboard. Source tarball link broken (20080316), but you can download the source rpm and extract the tarball from that. **Gone 404 2016-03. | |||
| True3D*Shell | X11 | not available | Riccardo Pompeo | "True3D*Shell is an open source 3D desktop environment ... experience 3D browsing in a virtual reality universe ..." but does it manage windows? Written in C++ (with Eclipse). Site advertising crapware ~201311. | ||||
| tsubasa | X11 | [homepage] X | not available | Nicolas Centa | "It is written in C++, mostly using safe programming techniques, uses midtalk and gtkmm. ... It is recommanded that you use Xephyr in order to test tsubasa, as it is not very stable at the moment." 403 on 2019-05 to 2019-08. | |||
| tvtwm | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
1.0.1 | 20150322 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/tvtwm7/files/ | 20260320 | John D. Hendrickson, Chris Ross, orig. Tom LaStrange | Tom's Virtual Tab WM (the virtual desktop is a viewport to one large area) version of TWM. The project has recently (2015 ...) been fixed to compile more easily on current systems. |
| Twindy | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Niall Moody | 2021-10: WM removed from site. "Inspired by Tracktion, the multitrack audio editor/sequencer." Version 1.00 was intended to be the "final," last release, but he's continued occasional updates. Language: C++. Review of version 0.45b. Notes | |||
| TWM | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
1.0.13.1 | 20250505 | https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/twm/-/tags | 20260402 | orig. Tom LaStrange, many others since | "Tom's" or "Tab" WM, although not tabbed in the modern sense of grouping. Old, usually very stable. Not developed, just maintained. 2003 Review |
| UDE | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
0.2.11b | 20220605 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/udeproject/files/UWM/ | 20260320 | Christian Ruppert | Unix Desktop Environment. Unusual design. |
| uh-wm | X11 | [homepage] | 0.2.2 | 20220726 | https://rubygems.org/gems/uh-wm | 20260320 | Thibault Jouan | Tiling WM similar to "dwm" and "wmii," but written in Ruby(!). License not stated? |
| ukwm | Wayland/X11 | [homepage] | 1.2.3 | 20240808 | https://github.com/ukui/ukwm | 20260317 | "handsome-feng," "liuyi92", et al | No README file in the git repo, NEWS file says "Fork from GNOME3 mutter for UKUI." "UKUI" is a desktop environment ... and that's about all I know. |
| UnWimp | X11 | not available | Clive Crous | From one of the authors of EvilPoison. He said 'It "steals" concepts/ideas from treewm, Ratpoison and wmii to become what it will be.' Website is frequently broken, project appears abandoned. | ||||
| uwm | X11 | [source] | ? | 19970213 | https://gilesorr.com/wm/archive/uwm.tar.gz | 20260306 | Digital Equipment Corporation, M. Gancarz, Loretta Guarino Reid. | "Universal" WM, or "Ultrix" WM, depending on who you ask. "Very outdated, but is an excellent example of how to do simple window manager functions." Comment and source archive are from xwinman.org. |
| μwm | X11 | [homepage] | 0.30 | 20111109 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/uwm/files/ | 20260322 | "Johns johns98@gmx.net" | Written in C, stacking, very few dependencies, GPL3. Looks like it includes everything most people expect: menu, multiple desktops, themes, toolbar, etc. |
| Velox | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20220210 | https://github.com/michaelforney/velox/ | 20260313 | Michael Forney | Inspired by awesome, xmonad, dwm. Configured with YAML. |
| Vtwm | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
5.5.0 | 20180421 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/vtwm/files/ | 20260226 | Tom LaStrange et al. | Extends TWM with a large (single) virtual desktop - like tvtwm. The snapshot file shows activity 201003. |
| w9wm | X11 | [homepage] | 0.4.2 | 20041223 | http://www.drieu.org/code/w9wm.en.html | 20260322 | Benjamin Drieu. Based on David Hogan's 9wm. | 2025-02-15: site is dead? Adds virtual desktops to 9wm. 2003 Review |
| Waimea | X11 | [homepage] | 0.4.0 | 20021105 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/waimea/files/ | 20260323 | David Reveman | Some code from Blackbox but not a fork, eye candy added. There was some development in 2004, no stable code produced: alt homepage at freedesktop.org. |
| WeeWM | X11 | [homepage] X | not available | flashcode AT flashtux DOT org, xahlexx AT weeland DOT org, bounga AT altern DOT org. | Small, keyboard-oriented. Site died between ~201904. | |||
| Whim | X11 | [homepage] | not available | George Peter Staplin | "Written in Tcl ... utilizes Tk, and optionally Tile." It seems to build it you need to download "megapkg," and version numbers and dates are sometimes from that package, sometimes from a Whim package. Site dead 2014-06 on. Code available here. | |||
| Whimsy | X11 | [homepage] | 0.1a1 | 20080713 | http://incise.org/whimsy.html | 20260324 | Nick Welch | "Whimsy is a highly hackable window manager written in Python. It is currently in a alpha phase and is marginally suitable for use." By the author of TinyWM. Licence is "public domain." |
| wimpwm | X11 | [homepage] X | not available | Martin Grabmüller | Limited decorations, small. Requires Sizzle Scheme interpreter. "... heavily inspired by aewm ... key bindings are taken from evilwm ... style of window resizing came from TWM." Site died ~2018-01. | |||
| Wind | X11 | [homepage] | 1.5 | 20140521 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/windwm/files/ | 20260309 | Johan Veenhuizen | "Overlapping window management ... click-to-...focus ... implements most parts of ICCCM and EWMH/NetWM." MIT/X license. Very basic appearance (as of 1.0). Task bar with pager, menu, clock, window list. Virtual desktops, no minimize. Same author as the older Karmen. |
| Window Manager From Scratch (WMFS) | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20180520 | https://github.com/xorg62/wmfs | 20260404 | Martin Duquesnoy (primary) plus contributors | "The goal of this project is to make a very basic, lightweight and dynamic WM." Tiling, BSD license, not currently stable. Original home wmfs.info vanished late 2014, now an advertising site. WMFS2 (which is what you get at this website(?)) is an incompatible rewrited of WMFS 1. |
| WindowLab | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
git | 20240604 | https://github.com/nick-gravgaard/windowlab | 20260405 | Nick Gravgaard | Based in part on 9wm and partly inspired by the Amiga Workbench. No virtual desktops, apparently not Xinerama-aware. No longer maintained. 2003 Review |
| Window Maker | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
0.96.0 | 20230805 | https://repo.or.cz/w/wmaker-crm.git | 20260407 | Alfredo Kojima, Dan Pascu. | Emulates NeXT's GUI. Abandoned for several years which spawned the Wmaker-crm maintenance fork. They merged 2012-02. 2003 Review |
| wingo | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20201011 | https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo | 20260327 | Andrew "BurntSushi" Gallant | Written in Go. Tiling and stacking multiheaded. Openbox meets xmonad? "In maintenance mode." |
| Wizard Desktop | X11 | [homepage] | 16October2018 | 20181016 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/wizarddesktop/files/ | 20260327 | Andrew Waidler | Tabbed and tiling, based on awesome and Ion, written with Java Swing and LGPL-3.0-licensed. |
| wm2 | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
4 | 19970321 | https://www.all-day-breakfast.com/wm2/ | 20260312 | Chris Cannam | Minimalist but looks great - unusual. With vertical title bars. If you want virtual desktops, see wmx. Last updated in 1997 ... 2003 Review |
| wmG | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Scott "Reeve" Barnes | Intended to work with (a very old version of) GNOME. "This project is abandoned," site now dead. | |||
| WMI | X11 | [homepage] | 11 | 20091127 | http://dl.suckless.org/wmi/ | 20260322 | Anselm R. Garbe | "Window Manager Improved", spawned wmii and dwm. Development has ceased. The "homepage" listed here is a download folder at suckless.org. |
| wmii | X11 | [homepage] | 3.9.2 | 20100610 | https://code.google.com/archive/p/wmii/ | 20260408 | orig. Anselm R. Garbe, Kris Maglione - maintainer. | "Window Manager Improved 2". Primarily keyboard driven, tries to remain small. A personal favourite of mine back around 2010. Until 200711 they adamantly refused to support multi-monitor (Xinerama): not sure where that stands now. 3.6.x is more recent than 3.9.x ... I have no answer to that one. |
| wmonad | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20201108 | https://github.com/nspin/wmonad | 20260303 | Nick Spinale | "wmonad is a tiling window manager based heavily on xmonad." |
| wmx | X11 | [homepage] | 8 | 20141116 | https://www.all-day-breakfast.com/wmx/ | 20260405 | Chris Cannam | Adds virtual desktops to wm2. Averaging one release every five years - he keeps this updated. 2003 Review, Notes |
| Worm | X11 | [homepage] | 0.3.3 | 20240329 | https://github.com/codic12/worm | 20260328 | "codic12" | Small, dynamic, tag-based WM written in Nim language. |
| WTFTW | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20210121 | https://github.com/Kintaro/wtftw | 20260227 | Simon "Kintaro" Wollwage | Tiling. Written in Rust. |
| wwm | X11 | [homepage] | 2.0 | 19990212 | http://www.joerch.org/wwm/ | 20260312 | Jörg Czeranski | Weird WM. Was intended as a OS prototype rather than a WM, and appears abandoned. |
| XD640 | X11 | [homepage] | not available | https://lienher.org/jean-marc/xd640/fr.html | Jean-Marc Lienher | "Lightweight desktop environment and office suite ... Warning: ... early development stage! The development is currently stalled." Aiming at i486 66MHz 16MB, 640x480, BSD license, based on fltk. 2021-08: Redesigned (French) site. No code available at the moment. | ||
| XFast | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
0.9 | 20080707 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/xfast/files/ | 20260410 | "oxygenic" | Incorporates a window server and manager in one, intended for embedded systems. Forked from Xynth. |
| xfwm | Wayland/X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
4.20 | 20241215 | https://archive.xfce.org/src/xfce/xfwm4/ | 20260319 | Olivier Fourdan | WM for the XFCE project. "XFCE" once stood for "XForms Common Environment," as its behaviour was derived from that of Sun's CDE. |
| XIGE | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Juan Jose Medina Olarte | From xwinman.org: "Xilicius Graphical Environment is ... optimized for programmers, laptops and fast users." Based on ideas from lwm and ACME, the Plan 9 editor/environment. The URL has been known to go away for long periods. | |||
| XMonad | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
git | 20260302 | https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad | 20260304 | Spencer Janssen, Don Stewart, Jason Creighton. | Rewrite and extension of dwm in Haskell. Includes Xinerama (which dwm does not). Tiling, keyboard-oriented. Recent versions of xmonad will rebuild themselves if you change the config file. They're trying to port to Wayland (2023-11). |
| xoat | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20160629 | https://github.com/seanpringle/xoat | 20260224 | Sean Pringle | "An obstinate, asymmetric, tiling, window manager for X." Same author as goomwwm. |
| XPde | X11 | [homepage] | not available | José León, Zeljan Rikalo, Jens Kühner, Valery Gabrusev. | XP-alike for Linux. "Desktop environment." Written in Kylix (discontinued proprietary Pascal variant). Domain expired 2011-09. | |||
| xpywm | X11 | [homepage] | 1.16 | 20231221 | https://github.com/h-ohsaki/xpywm | 20260304 | Hiroyuki Ohsaki | "A simple but extensible X11 window manager written in Python." Based on the same author's pwm (2) which was written in Perl, in turn "motivated by" perlwm. Also (more recent?) available through PyPi. |
| XSWM | X11 | [homepage] | 1.1 | 20040826 | https://xswm.sourceforge.net/ | 20260304 | Marco Castelvecchio | "eXtreme Speed WM," based on evilwm, appears to add OSD and not much else. |
| XTags | X11 | [homepage] | 0.5 | 20080420 | https://xtags.sourceforge.net/ | 20260314 | Claudio M. Alessi | Keyboard-driven, "implements tags for X11." Intended to be used with dvtm ... and no other WM. Interesting idea - but long abandoned. |
| XWEM | X11 |
[homepage] |
CVS | ~2005 | http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/xwem/xwem/xwem/ | 20260309 | Evgeny Zajcev (main), Richard Klinda, Alex Ott, Didier Verna, Steve Youngs. | "... XWEM is written entirely in Emacs Lisp and runs in XEmacs." Tiling. Yes, makes XEmacs your window manager. There was an xwem.org domain, but it lapsed: this is an older site. See also the much more active Emacs X Window Manager. 2025-07-15 onward: CVS repo(! and all the code) not available. |
| xwm | X11 | [homepage] | git | 20250402 | https://github.com/mcpcpc/xwm/tags | 20260309 | Michael "mcpcpc" Czigler | "A minimal viable solution that was developed with single-monitor workflows in mind." Requires some suckless tools. |
| Xynth | X11 |
[homepage] [Wikipedia] |
0.10.82 | 20090417 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/xynth/files/ | 20260305 | Alper Akcan | X server replacement and desktop environment for embedded environment. LGPL. XFast is a GPL fork of this. Domain xynth.org dropped unceremoniously 200908. |
| YAWM | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Found at xwinman.org (~2002?): "in an early state of development, [YAWM] aims to be portable, intuitive and fast." yawm.org was for sale at the time. yawm.sourceforge.net was empty and is now dead. | ||||
| YeahWM | X11 | [homepage] | 0.3.5 | 20041125 | http://phrat.de/downloads.html | 20260317 | knorke_at_phrat.de | Based on evilwm and aewm with mildly BeOS-like appearance. |
| ZDE | X11 | [homepage] | not available | Thomas Coppi | "Zeta Desktop Environment." Window manager plus a couple tools. Version number is "zimwm". Objective C and Perl. Author considers it alpha. Died summer 2014. | |||
| ZWM | X11 | [homepage] | 1.0.0 | 20020208 | https://sourceforge.net/projects/zwm/files/ | 20260317 | Nils Gladitz | "First ZWM code release," now quite old. SDL-based. After a decade of nothing, "As of 2013-02-22, this project is no longer under active development." |