Software Alternatives & Reviews

herbstluftwm VS Wayland

Compare herbstluftwm VS Wayland and see what are their differences

herbstluftwm logo herbstluftwm

herbstluftwm is a manual tiling window manager for X11 using Xlib and Glib.

Wayland logo Wayland

Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain.
  • herbstluftwm Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-11
  • Wayland Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-30

herbstluftwm videos

Window Manager Hopping: Herbstluftwm

More videos:

  • Review - Herbstluftwm overview
  • Review - Obscure Window Manager Project - Herbstluftwm

Wayland videos

WAYLAND: what is it, and is it ready for daily use?

More videos:

  • Review - Testing Wayland & Weston desktop experience in 2020!
  • Review - Wayland vs Xorg | Learn which one to choose

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to herbstluftwm and Wayland)
Window Manager
46 46%
54% 54
Linux
35 35%
65% 65
Utilities
49 49%
51% 51
OS & Utilities
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare herbstluftwm and Wayland

herbstluftwm Reviews

Top 13 Best Tiling Window Managers For Linux In 2022
Tags (workspaces or virtual desktops), a startup setup script, exactly one tag per monitor, and other features are among herbstluftwm’s highlights. Learn more about herbstluftwm in our article.
Source: www.hubtech.org
13 Best Tiling Window Managers for Linux
herbstluftwm’s main features include tags (i.e. workspaces or virtual desktops), a configuration script which runs at startup, exactly one tag per monitor, etc. Learn more from our article on herbstluftwm here.
Source: www.tecmint.com

Wayland Reviews

We have no reviews of Wayland yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Wayland should be more popular than herbstluftwm. It has been mentiond 23 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

herbstluftwm mentions (8)

  • Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers
    It's exactly how it works but only if you have mutliple screens. My comment was that, for this reason, 2 or 3 smaller (ish- ~27") 16:9 4k screens [1] (previously, 4–6 even smaller 4:3 screens) works much better for me because I can switch the spaces on my Macbook and i3/Sway virtual desktops on my Linux machine individually for each screen. If we're talking about having a smaller number of giant screens it would... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • What softwares do you recommend to a daily use BSD system?
    The nicities that I pull would be the file browser from ROX, and a tiling window manager such as herbstluftwm. I could do everything I do today without these, such as with a terminal or OpenBSD's 'cwm', but I really enjoy using them! Source: over 1 year ago
  • Berry is a healthy, byte-sized window manager written in C for Unix systems
    While people are discussing window managers, one of the most overlooked window manager is: hersbtluftwm.[0] If you even work with multiple monitors, give it a try. It uses the monitor swapping feature from xmonad but comes with simplicity of editing the config (one doesn't need to learn new programming language to edit config). It's a pretty cool window manager! [0]: https://herbstluftwm.org/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Looking for a FancyZones-like tiling manager for Linux
    Herbstluftwm (https://herbstluftwm.org/) has two ways to achieve what you want. And it plays nice with XFCE (and probably KDE) so you don't have to give up a traditional DE to use it. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Desktop environments on new operating system. (Debian 11 Bullseye)
    I can forgive not including tiling WMs like i3, notion, and herbstluftwm because tiling WMs are, by nature, not very photogenic. But leaving out KDE Plasma, WindowMaker, amiwm, or Enlightenment too? I want my money back! :). Source: over 2 years ago
View more

Wayland mentions (23)

  • Session manager Anbox
    Waydroid is rebuilding the original idea behind Anbox with explicit focus on modern Wayland powered desktop environments. Source: 11 months ago
  • Asahi Linux To Users: Please Stop Using X.Org
    Checkout out the wayland site.( https://wayland.freedesktop.org/ ) The gist is wayland is a protocol that describes how compositor implementations need to behave for clients to use them and clients need to behave according to the waylaid protocol to use the compositor. There are many different compositors. The wayland contributors have a full usable implementation. Gnome has one and I believe KDE has one. So if... Source: 12 months ago
  • Swingland: Recreating Java Swing for Wayland
    More recently I switched away from X11 & Budgie to pure Wayland for my desktop on the assumption that it's over 10 years old now, and is the default technology underlying current Gnome and KDE desktops.. Everything will be fine right? Kind of.. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • Linux is Making Apple Great Again
    Wayland is not a WM. https://wayland.freedesktop.org Wayland is the thing "underneath" a Window Manager. For example you can run KDE on top of X or Wayland. There are a few blurry boundaries in all this but that largely covers it. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • How do I get emacs29 to work on X11 system?
    I told you it is for Wayland. If you don't want to use X11. Source: about 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing herbstluftwm and Wayland, you can also consider the following products

bspwm - A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

Mir - The purpose of Mir is to enable the development of user interfaces shells.

qtile - Qtile is a full-featured, hackable tiling window manager written in Python.

i3 - A dynamic tiling window manager designed for X11, inspired by wmii, and written in C.

dwm - dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled, monocle and floating layouts. All of the layouts can be applied dynamically, optimising the environment for the application in use and the task performed.

IceWM - icewm home page . Bug Tracking. If you have a patch, a bug report or a feature request to submit, please do so at the icewm project page at SourceForge.