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I just switched to IceWM after trying so many different versions of tiling window managers. The one that worked best for me was MangoWM, but in the end it also interfered more than helped with my work. A simple floating wm like IceWM works best for the apps I use: basic tools like terminal and Thunar, Reaper, windows apps via wine. Really happy I found out about it. It lets me concentrate on the things that matter.
I use IceWM *today* in my remote machines via RustDesk (another massive project!).
The only thing I don't understand is why minimal WMs need to (intentionally?) reject basic usability and visual design principles.
- Main menu = nested dropdown - No padding anywhere - Terrible box shadows
etc.
IceWM is great. I think there are a lot of great deployments you could use it for. If you had old computers to give to kids and teach them linux for example, IceWM would be a really great desktop for that. I use dwm still personally but Ice is Nice, and that's for sure! ;)
Some of the screenshots look a lot more modern than I remember when I played around with it, but then I guess that was 20+ years ago. It was one of the first WMs I looked at when I considered moving away from KDE/GNOME. I found its minimalism and low resource usage compared to those environments exciting but never actually liked the UI, I found it too clunky. I eventually settled on AwesomeWM. It seems that for the last decade or so all of the momentum in the minimalist WM space has been with tiling WMs.
The screenshots page[1] has a nice collection of different skins. It gives Winamp skin vibes from the 1990s.
Good memories, but I am glad to see that X11 is now well and thoroughly legacy. Wayland and Pipewire has been thoroughly amazing by just breaking clean with the past. iw has done the same to a large degree. While systemd has its short comings, systemd-networkd, journald, and so on are now providing a cohesive system that is well aligned, even if not perfectly aligned with ones' expectation, I don't have to tinker to make systemd-networkd to work with journactl or the likes.
We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends. Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.
I've been working the last 8 years making a new WM and I never heard about IceWM, sometime you don't know your classics
I have fond memories of IceWM. Happy that it is still there.
I worked for a commercial Linux distribution in 2004-2005 (not existing anymore). Our default desktop user IceWM, but if I recall correctly, we used GNOME’s Nautilus to provide the desktop background/folders.
IceWM was really lightweight, so it ran well on a variety of customer machines.
Great times!
I still use IceWM whenever I need to use a proper X session. The only thing that always trips me up is the lack of an Aero-Snap like mechanism, which I have gotten very used to.
Gods, what a blast from the past! I used IceWM religiously back in the early 2000s, and it was one of the first projects I submitted patches to (long before PRs were a thing). It was always snappy, even on the lowest-end hardware.
Is it still alive? I used it in the early '10 on my Linux laptop, but I was not aware it was still maintened
IceWM was amazing: fast, relatively configurable but very usable out of the box. The Motif window decorations looked real cool on screenshots as if I was running CDE. If memory serves, you could roll a window only to its title bar which is an old Mac OS9 feature that didn't carry to OS X.
AmiWM and WindowMaker also saw their usage but at the end of the day I always kept coming back to IceWM.
Love how we had fancy glass transparency effects calculated in software (see also - enlightenment ) then shit got slow, and now we're back transparency stuff working again but instead of hand optimized assembly we're throwing a giant ass GPU at the problem.
Though I do have to admit they maybe the resolution increases are to blame for part of that, alpha blending 800x600 is easier than alpha blending a 4k ultra wide with HDR at 120hz...
love it, just missing any screenshot on the home page (:
Honestly I'm not gonna miss X Windows. I currently main a tablet with just 4 GiB of RAM (even though it's a machine from before RAM prices went up, heh) with an equivalent of Compiz (wayfire) running at full framerate, with really smooth multitasking for both FDO- and Android-based apps. In my experience, this simply would've not been possible with all of the bloat needed to support X Windows (not even with a bare-bones WM like IceWM [oh nostalgia]), but fortunately, I don't even need Xwayland installed, as basically all big and small apps run natively on Wayland now.
On a day to day use, how does icewm compare with xfce?
Xmonad is my daily use manager.
I like minimalism.
Crazy to think they had Windows XP theming back in IceWM days. A good Windows XP DE is still something I'm looking for.
I went from icewm to gnome 2 to mate, what a trip. I loved how icewm had all those themes.
oclock without xshape?!
I don't understand why we couldn't just update x11 to address our current concerns, at the very least by deprecating unused stuff and enabling features like variable DPI.
We use this on some graphical Debian servers at work. I hate it. The servers are beefy and the displays have high resolitions. There is no technical reason for having to use IceWM. Our 63-year-old veteran colleague simply likes it and blocks suggestions to move to a modern minimal WM. There are better options in big 2026. I cannot wait until he retires, so that we can retire IceWM.
IceWM is quite nice; I am currently using it. Personally I actually preferred fluxbox, but fluxbox kind of died some years ago. It is not 100% dead, as there is still activity on github every now and then, but largely if you know it, you also know that you had a rather sizeable community about it back in the days, and now that is ... gone.
IceWM is in many ways actually more sophisticated than fluxbox; unfortunately on the other hand, IceWM has a few annoyances that I reported, and ... all of these got ignored. Now I understand the problem domain, the lead dev lacks time - fair enough. But it also means that I no longer file issues about features, since they'll just be ignored. Bug reports I may still do, but it kind of is no longer so useful since I have the impression that the lead dev will mostly not care that much.
KDE and GNOME I can not use for various reasons, but also one reason is speed-use. Fluxbox was sooooo snappy compared to KDE and I also dislike the trend of making KDE worse ever since Nate was put in charge (the guy who added a donation-daemon; see a complaint about Nate and him tying his own personal business into KDE as an ad-platform for it, from 2025: https://web.archive.org/web/20250914213714/https://jriddell....).
I had a look at some other WMs, such as awesome WM and so forth. They are all somewhat ok-ish, but always worse than fluxbox. Next step would be some tiling WM but for some reason I found them annoying, requiring my brain to think more. WMs also seem to be significantly less popular these days; there was more variety in the past here. Also, wayland kind of changed the situation a bit, though I can not say if wayland itself reduced variety - not a whole lot of software available on wayland either, I was surprised about that when I tested it some months again. Consider they constantly promote wayland as the successor to xorg, it is in some ways like a dumbed-down path, with fewer features. Very strange. Then you have also the GTK devs who will transition into a wayland-only future for GTK5; that was also one reason why I stopped writing any more ruby-gtk code, since I would here help transition to a wayland-only way and I don't want to abandon xorg merely because the GTK devs have received their corporate order to do so (thankfully https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver exists but it needs a lot more polishing and ideally more developers, but that seems also super-hard, since it requires domain-knowledge, time ... people lack that naturally in the open source world, and the AI slop also seems to have further reduced the number of open source devs in general. Claude is now our uberlord here, see the ruby programming language, where claude writes most of the code now).
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I'm mildly bemused at the other comments treating this as a blast from the past. I use icewm today as a super low resource DE for a headless remote desktop system, with a major benefit being that it's all in one with no configuration needed; one unit includes panel, app menu, and window manager that work out of the box.