How to install a Window Manager on Linux

What is a Window manager

A window manager is a system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a graphical user interface. It serves as the fundamental component responsible for managing how windows are displayed, manipulated, and organized on your screen. This is a fundamental software if you have only one monitor and have some trouble managing you windows.

I have my own dotfiles with all the configuration for the softwares that we will use in this article, here is the github repo.

I like to use i3 as a window manager and it's what I will use in this article.

What is i3

i3 (i3wm) is a tiling window manager designed for X11 operating systems it represents a minimalist yet powerful approach to window management on Linux.

Let's start! First I need to install the window manager:

Let's install it:

sudo apt install i3

Alright, we already have the window manager installed but he by he self is a little bit raw, we need a few things to increment it!

Now we need a nice font.

Nerdfonts

Nerd Fonts is an open-source project that enhances developer-focused fonts by adding numerous additional glyphs and icons, making them more functional for programming environments, we need a font from them to have the icons displayed in our i3.

• first you need to go to the official nerdfonts site and choose your font
• click in the download button with the right mouse button and copy the link of it
• now you need to run this command:

wget -P ~/.local/share/fonts <url-link-you-copied> \
&& cd ~/.local/share/fonts \
&& unzip <name-of-the-downloaded-zip>.zip \
&& rm <name-of-the-downloaded-zip>.zip \
&& fc-cache -fv

What is Picom

Picom is a lightweight standalone compositor for the X Window System, specifically designed to enhance window managers that lack built-in compositing capabilities
and it have a few enhancements by using picom:

• Eliminates screen tearing and stuttering during video playback
• Provides smooth transitions between windows
• Enables transparency control for both active and inactive windows

Let's install it:

sudo apt install picom

Now we need to install polybar

What is polybar

Polybar is a fast and lightweight status bar tool designed for Linux desktop environments and window managers, particularly useful for minimalist window managers like i3

• Launch applications through a searchable interface

sudo apt install polybar

Now we need to install rofi

What is rofi

Rofi is a customizable status bar for Linux that displays essential system information like time, battery, WiFi, and running programs. Think of it as a smart dashboard that sits at the top or bottom of your screen, showing exactly what you need at a glance. It's particularly popular with minimal window managers like i3 because it's lightweight and doesn't slow down your system. You can easily customize what information to show, where to place it, and how it looks through simple configuration files. Whether you want to monitor system resources, control music, or switch between tasks, Rofi handles it all in a clean, organized way.

sudo apt install rofi

In my case, inside my rofi configuration I have this bash file to make the setup and install everything that it needs to run you will have to run this file with this command

./setup.sh

after that, we need a software to take screenshots here I will use maim for screenshot

sudo apt install maim

What is feh

feh is a software to manage your background image.

sudo apt install feh

What is lxappearance

LXAppearance is a lightweight and versatile GTK+ theme switcher that allows users to customize the visual appearance of their Linux system without requiring a full desktop environment. In our case we will use this to customize the theme and cursor with our i3wm.

sudo apt install lxappearance

if everything works fine your result will be something like this: