Arch Linux’s pkgstats data provides one of the few large-scale, opt-in snapshots of how real users configure their systems. While not a perfect census (participation is voluntary), the long-running dataset offers a clear picture of how desktop environment and window managers’ preferences have shifted across more than a decade.
At the same time, the data (to some extent) also reflects a broader trend for one key reason: as you know, a default Arch installation gives you only a base system, and you build everything else according to your own needs and tastes. In other words, there’s no predefined desktop environment that users are locked into, unlike most other distributions.
That means these statistics give us a very accurate look at which desktop environments and window managers Arch users actually choose to install and use. But enough talk, let’s move on to the data.
Openbox for me. Going strong since my early days on Ubuntu when one release Unity had a memory leak that wast just too much for my 2GB of RAM. I had already being flirting with Openbox and that was the cue to finally use it for good. When I migrated to archlnux it was a no brainier.
If you ever want to try Wayland, check out LabWC.
I will definetly do at some point. But last time I looked into LabWC they were not implementing some of the actions that I use. I guess I can adapt but even recently I started to use some key chains and is a shame that LabWC has no intention to implement it.
Apart from that It would be nice if they implemented an alternative format for the config files, because that is one drawback of Openbox, the XML config is really rough to do and to read.