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.
Waiting for a tiling window manager with nice animations
I think you have to code those yourself. I heard Niri had some nice animations, despite being a scroller. Hyprland has good animations if you put some time into it.
I do also understand if that was sarcastic. I’ve learned…
Not sarcastic, animations add greatly to the understandability of what’s going on which is helpful anyway and especially if you fat finger something.
But yeah I don’t especially want to put loads of time in either heh