[ken]

A window manager may be only 2000 lines of source code but it implements a host of formal and informal standards and interacts with hundreds of other programs on my computer.

You may need only a day or two to orient yourself to the source code, but that’s on top of months or years of experience with X11R6 and ICCCMv2 and EWMH and such. How much debugging did you first need to do to discover your current issue was even in dwm?

EDIT: I especially love the phrasing in Wikipedia's ICCCM article: dwm "can be configured for compliance". If 'configuration' can include editing source code, I'm sure that's true!

[ryanmjacobs]

I agree to an extent. I'll admit, there is much more under the surface of dwm that 2000 lines of source code. It's all abstractions in the end. But Gnome and KDE are more likely to have bugs because they cover such a wide scope. I've never had dwm fail to do what it claimed to do. But I have had weird Gnome glitches with taskbar hovering and window dragging with workspaces, etc.

Dwm "wins" by just giving up, in a sense. It doesn't try to implement a taskbar, therefore it cannot have a buggy taskbar.

EDIT: I guess it does have a "Taskbar", but in a very, very limited scope.

[RMPR]

iirc Dwm doesn't have a "taskbar", at least by default, there's a patch for that.

[ryanmjacobs]

Yeah, I guess a better word is "statusbar" or "workspace bar". It just displays the currently selected workspaces, the current window's title, and dwmstatus. The point is that it doesn't try to manage buttons and icons for minimize/maximize/multiple-stacked window types etc, like a traditional window manager