On Mon, Jul 04 2022 14:25, Michael Topp wrote:
if you're asking what distro maintains xmonad packages (the best), I count on Arch.
On the contrary, I think Arch is probably one of the worst options around when talking about using XMonad via distro packages!
They update all official 'xmonad' packages frequently, because their haskell packages themselves also are updated quite often (could be once, twice a week).
XMonad on Arch is still stuck on 0.15 (0.16 for contrib); the new release (0.17.0) has been out for almost a year by now! The reason Haskell packages on Arch update so frequently is because they are rebuilding all of the dependencies of a package when they update it. This could be a random library anywhere in the dependency tree—probably not an update to xmonad or xmonad-contrib itself. The reason for this is that Arch links Haskell binaries dynamically instead of statically (which is the default on pretty much any other distro; for obvious reasons, I think). One of the side effects of this is that people have to recompile their configs with every bump. If they forget to do that then they could get sent straight back to the TTY when logging in. Seemingly, sometimes people also forget to bump some dependencies, leading to lots of broken xmobar's etc. Not a fun experience.
Alternatively you can make your own local xmonad build, independent from the distro. And sure, you also have to decide which compiler to use. I highly recommend consulting the wikis from both Arch Linux and Xmonad.
If you use [our build instructions], then stack will pick which version of GHC to use; you don't need to think about it. It's also much more up-to-date than both wikis. I don't think the distribution matters much when using stack (or even nix), but then we're also not talking about distro packages anymore. Tony [our build instructions]: https://xmonad.org/INSTALL.html -- Tony Zorman | https://tony-zorman.com/