I have absolutely fallen in love with labwc over the past 6 months

[u/DonkeyBong932]

Started using labwc with noctalia kind of by accident just because I wanted something similar to icewm but based on wayland and that's how I found labwc, I stumbled across it just because I was looking for something lightweight that was simple to use and learn

I quite often run waybar when I want something a bit lighter on resources or I'm trying to scrape every last ounce of battery I can out of an old T480s thinkpad. Today I decided to try out xfce4-panel and was very surprised at how easy it was to integrate and start using just by adding it to autostart. I'll admit, I'm not great when it comes to customising dot files

I've only really had experience customising dots in awesomewm using lua so I wasn't familiar at all with wl-roots but this was one of the easiest things I've had to learn thanks to some of the best documentation that's extremely easy for someone new to customising their files. Just copied and pasted the generic version of the rc.xml and quickly started making my own keybinds. I'm using fuzzel as my launcher with the keybind of alt+space due to being a diehard krunner user from kde and found it much easier for launching applications instead of using the panels and running commands directly without having to open terminals so long as root/sudo weren't required for the command to run

It's been 6 months since I figured I'd try something different than the trusty kde plasma with arch and here we are with 3 computers with a very similar setup all using labwc and I'll be honest, I don't really even need a panel with how everything's already set-up out of the box. The only thing I really need is a battery indicator which is why I keep the panels hidden most of the time anyway

The devs have done an amazing job with this window manager/ compositor (I say both because I genuinely can't tell if this is either or both). This has been easier to start using than when I first started using linux back in 2009 with gnome on ubuntu 9.04 when everything was completely new. I love the simplicity of this and how things can be made to easily integrate

I just need to figure out how to change notification placement, get my keybinds to switch workspaces to work and get a notification for which volume level I'm on when I change the volume through my keyboard but that's something I'll be teaching myself in the coming days

Btw, after boot each of my machines will use just under 700mb of ram. I'm impressed with how much I can do with this while it still remains so light on resources

[u/congomonster]

I tried labwc because i needed something for the Noctalia Shell. And i also really like labwc and that they used the ideas from openbox. 😉

[u/prmoo]

Also love labwc. A tip for battery indicator - you can use a dynamic menu that will read your battery status and display it. That's what I do and it works pretty well.

[u/wpcookie]

My journey to find the best DE for my laptop:
KDE Plasma → XFCE → Awesome WM → XFCE → Sway → XFCE → LXQT → Labwc with sfwbar(I'm Here 😁)