As a beginner I mainly focused on Cinnamon, XFCE and GNOME but want to try out a windowing DE on a VM to get a feel for things.
What window manager DE would you recommend to a first timer that doesn’t use tiling DEs?
There seems to be pretty popular ones like i3 and hyprland.
I was also hoping if some wm’s still have a task bar as I am comfortable using that to keep a traditional style as I come from a long line use of Windows as well (starting from the XP era)
Thank you if you have any recommendations, it is good to branch your horizons a bit!
Some individual window managers are full-featured enough to be somewhat usable as program launchers all by their lonesome, such as awesome, fluxbox, and openbox. There’s also Enlightenment, which is somewhere between a bare WM and a DE. If you really want to play with standalone WMs, start with something from this paragraph.
Other WMs need a bunch of other things like dmenu and feh piled on top of them to get a useful environment. i3 is one of these. You can find and fit together enough software pieces to get a fairly full-featured environment out of one of these setups, but it’s more work than just installing the core portions of a DE.
Figure out first whether you’re dealing with X or wayland (hyprland is a wayland compositor, which is slightly different from a window manager). Read guides, and especiallly stay away from things that say they’re “lightweight” or “minimalist” until you’ve read the documentation and know exactly what you’re getting into, as they tend to be for advanced users. If you just want to play around and have no particular problem you’re trying to solve, just look for live CD/DVD/USB images you can boot inside a VM and save yourself some work.