Hello --
On 08/12/2007, Don Stewart
We've not much information on what's happening with tiling wms. One source of info is the debian package system's popularity contest: if a package is in debian, we get to see a snapshot of trends.
Be careful with that -- the popularity contest is slightly hit-and-miss and might not accurately reflect xmonad's use. What is it you're after though? A comparison of how many users are *potentially* (that's the operative word here) are using xmonad? How xmonad compares in development to other tiling WMs? Whether or not people use it if the moon is waxing as opposed to it being a Tuesday and the local store run out of meatloaf again? In my mind, tracking something's use is best determined through feedback and nothing else. I've watched xmonad grow for a long time, and it's quite impressive; much quicker than a lot of other WMs that have sprung up. But it's rather late to the party in many respects; what sets it apart from other WMs is not only the language it's written in (something of a triumph I'm sure, but not something I care about frankly), but also its operation of working; it's still fundamentally different from dwm for instance.
Here's a little analysis of what's been happening with the tiling wms in 2007:
http://galois.com/~dons/images/tiling-window-managers.png
Summary: * ion continues long term decline
Yes, understandable.
* ratpoison was in a place to take advantage of ion controversy
Maybe, but then ratpoison's primary goal was to augment GNU screen's way of working to more than just a terminal, and it's done that successfully. It was certainly one of the first WMs AFAIAC to set the trend for the way other tiling window managers operate.
Our challenge is to make the cost of installing a Haskell toolchain easier, though, so its cheaper to experiment with xmonad. This comes down to improved ghc packaging on each distro.
Yes -- there needs to be a more streamlined way of ensuring this, but like the way Ruby has been packaged in Debian for instance, it can end up a mess if not handled correctly. Certainly having Cabal 1.2 in distros for the upcoming 0.5 release is my main concern. -- Thomas Adam