[silentbicycle]

dwm is good, too. Sure, C isn't the greatest thing for exploratory programming, but configuring it isn't hard. (One of these days I might really learn X programming and do a tiled WM configured with Lua, but I've got too many projects already.)

wmii is also good, and once you get used to using libixp, you can script it in anything. I found wmii's named tabs interfered with muscle memory, though.

I used XMonad for a bit, but GHC is a hell of a dependency, and for a while there were problems getting any version newer than 6.6 to build on FreeBSD and OpenBSD. That's a dealbreaker for me.

[rkowalick]

(One of these days I might really learn X programming and do a tiled WM configured with Lua, but I've got too many projects already.)

This has already been done. It's called awesomeWM and it is exactly as good as its name indicates.

[silentbicycle]

I don't like Awesome. I've been using Lua for a while, and something about the way the Lua stuff is set up doesn't sit right with me. I can't rattle off any examples off the top of my head (it's been a while since I checked it out), but, I tried it, not my thing. (Also, taking a BSD codebase and making it GPL'd and bloated tends to piss me off.)

[mzl]

You could also check out Ion. The development has stopped and the webpages pulled, but there seems to be two forks (notion and anion3) that are in progress.

[silentbicycle]

Tried: 9wm, aewm, awesome, blackbox, dwm, ion, larswm, ratpoison, scrotwm, w9wm, wm2, wmii, xmonad, probably a half dozen others.

I liked aewm, blackbox, dwm, ratpoison, and XMonad the most, FWIW. While I really like the keyboard-centric UI in ion and ratpoison, I think the layout/tile interface style used by dwm, XMonad, etc. gracefully accommodates programs that have too many windows or just blatantly break ICCCM, while ion and ratpoison don't even try.

[mzl]

Sounds like you have it covered.

I use pwm (precursor to ion) since I configured it years ago and it has served me well since then. One benefit of using such an old wm is speed; it does so little that it is blazingly fast on a modern computer. If I were to switch, it would probably be to ion or xmonad.

[jrockway]

Having used OpenBSD as a desktop for a bit, I realized, after waiting 24 hours for Amarok to build, that it is not a desktop OS. It's for your router. Use Linux for your desktop, it's just easier.

[silentbicycle]

First off: Use binary packages. The ports tree is for porters and people running snapshots or CVS head. (Also: Definitely use binary packages if you're installing something that depends on KDE, or you'll be building KDE from source as a dependency.)

My "desktop" is emacs, dwm, tmux, and firefox, so that hasn't really been an issue for me. The OpenBSD minimalism is very much my style. (I use mpd for music, by the way.) It makes a killer router too, though.

I've tried going back to Linux a couple times, just to see what new developments (and ports, etc.) I've been missing since I spend most of my time on BSD. (I used Debian for a couple years, then mainly OpenBSD for the last six or seven.) I've gotten really used to OpenBSD, though, and every Linux distro I've tried hasn't stuck around for more than a day or two.

[jrockway]

My Linux setup is like this, but it's nice to have the "long tail" readily available. Stuff like SBCL and GHC are a pain to manually compile (or get from ports), and this leads to a cycle where since there's no GHC, there's no GHC. Compare to Debian where the latest version is almost always available, and so building $latest + 1 is trivial.

[silentbicycle]

I know where you're coming from - trying to update a common lisp port years ago got me into porting stuff. I'm happiest with OpenBSD, and I've done a fair bit of porting. (Not everything made it into the tree, though.) These days I'm a bit wary of depending too much on anything I can't bootstrap.