A nice looking WM to replace a DE

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

I strongly recommend against Enlightenment, since it suffers from all the pitfalls all desktop environments suffer from and it’s not maintained by such a huge group of maintainers, as other desktop environments are. Btw. since you like to get a modern look, you unlikely like the decades old clumsy themes available for Enlightenment.
If you want to avoid tiling window managers, but want to get something really small, take a look at JWM, it comes close to Openbox and at least on Linux it is as rock-solid as Openbox is.

However, when I migrated away from Xfce years ago on Linux, I tested a lot of alternatives and ended with JWM and Openbox. After a while openbox became the only WM for me.

You could “dd” NomadBSD to an USB stick, to test the look and feel of openbox running on FreeBSD, https://nomadbsd.org/screenshots/nomadbsd-1.3-ss1.png . It’s a live FreeBSD, that by default does use openbox.

Unfortunately https://nomadbsd.org/ downloads can’t be checked against a signed checksum, but this shouldn’t matter for testing openbox on FreeBSD, if you anyway will install a window manager on you machine.

Depending on the panel/s etc. you chose, you get the menu and features you want to get for Xfce, without gvfs and other Gnome pitfalls.

Regards,
Ralf