Not knowing where to place this query, I thought I’d place it here. Mods. please move or delete as appropriate.
My question is…
are there any herbstluftwm (autumn breeze window manager in English) users here?
By way of full disclosure, I currently run it on Bullseye (Debian- MX). If there are any hlwm users, I’m happy to share notes, learnings and travails. btw. I’m about to try a test of hlwm & bspwm (my favorite) on AL. I think that’s a definite maybe. 
I’m curious about this.
I’m building a bspwm AL install right now. I’ll use pcaman/pamac or similar to get hlwm installed, hopefully.
I have a pile of dotfiles to move and we’ll see what kind of train wreck I achieve.
I’ve used herbstluftwm in the past. Interesting window manager.
I would just rename your thread to something like “Using herbstluftwm” and let a mod move it to the proper category.
Then you and any other users can share configs, tips etc …
& I would also just put this thread into the Basic Help & Support Category.
My old laptop could not get out of its own way, after I built hlwm on it. I can’t get it to run with antiX as a base distro with hlwm either. 
I never would have guessed that hlwm was hard on an old athlon cpu with 4GB. I’ll clean up my dotfiles and make them available here when I get that far. Sorry for the awkward approach.
I thought about giving herbstluftwm a try after seeing your post. I seem to be running into a problem though with the dzen2 panel not working in Archlabs or Arch install. It looks like the same problem as this chap’s post: https://www.reddit.com/r/herbstluftwm/comments/cp609x/herbstluftwm_panel_problems/. I followed the same installed method via package manager as outlined here: https://herbstluftwm.org/tutorial.html Have you encounter such a problem? If so were you able to solve it? Thanks for bringing this interesting wm into my consciousness.
I do not use dzen2 on my install (although I would confirm that it (dzen2), also, does not work for me). Instead I use tint2, rofi and jgmenu.
Thank you for confirming. It turns out for Archlabs it was missing a font which sudo pacman -Syu xorg-fonts-misc solved. For Arch it was sudo pacman -Syu xorg-fonts-misc which. I’ll probably update the Arch wiki later on but I’m a n00b. Frames used by this wm reminded me of Ratpoison.
@manyroads
I have been using hlwm for awhile now in Archlabs. You and I are probably the only 2 on this forum. I could be wrong. I am using v0.8.3. I spotted something which may be a bug but wanted to see if you have seen this before. If I have pcmanfm in a tree frame and start xarchiver from there, it launches xarchiver in a list window. If I switch tags/workspaces and then toggle back, the pcmanfm tree frame gets refreshed/repainted but the xarchiver list window does not. The xarchiver list window just takes the cropped screen image of the last toggled tag/workspace.
@leo00 I actually am not using pcfileman… I use Thunar. I have not seen that error. I’d report the problem though the hlwm dev (perhaps using Thorsten Wißmann
edu at thorsten-wissmann dot de )
Thanks for the additional information. I also tried this with Thunar and experience the same refresh repainting problem of the window when using the extract feature of xarchiver and then toggling the workspace while xarchiver is working. Yes, I should reach out to Thorsten Wißmann. Maybe related to using it with picom perhaps?
FWIW… I did have hlwm compositor issues with picom/compton and now use xcompmgr.
Thanks @manyroads. These inputs are always invaluable to me as I am a late adopter to herbstluftwm. Interesting is that they kept the name despite moving from C to C++ (winterbreeze).
@leo00 I’m actually only a sometimes hlwm wannabee. I have been using dwm most these days. When I get stuck I always go back to xfce. Today I began setting up my office with dual monitors and a mic (Blue Yeti). The two easiest for setup have thus far been xfce & dwm. dwm really surprised me.
Agreed, xfce is a stable rock. My choice if I want to go DE again but not likely given the juice it needs. It was fluxbox that surprised me the most. Despite it written in C++ instead of C, it took less resources and had way less dependencies than openbox and i3. Super easy to config by hand, had more features than I need and works right out of the box. Openbox work right out of the box? No way. Why fluxbox never gets more love beats the hell out of me.
Mrs use fluxbox now as I myself use tilers. Dwm is just that amazing. I use only the base install. It does not have the repaint problem I spotted in hlwm. However, it’s a dynamic tiling manager. I found I really like the hlwm manual tiling features because I can utilize both trees and lists. Place them precisely how I want them. Destroy a window without having the layout rearranging themselves and me spending the time to arrange them back again. One of the primary reasons why I dropped i3 and that annoying shift of the home keys from vim. Yes, you can remap but I’m the type that likes to stick to defaults because it comes in handy when installing on virgin territory. I like muscle memory.
BTW, pekwm is lean and mean … pretty damn good but not enough for me to drop it in place of fluxbox (true and tried).
Enjoy your amazing office setup. I’ve gone to the minimalist route. I gotten rid of dual monitors in favor of one.
If you are a fan of fluxbox (btw. it’s not for me) you might checkout the new release of MXLinux. They have been throwing a ton of effort into their new FB desktop. Could be fun…
That’s what is so great about Linux. Not a one size fits all like Windows. To each their own. Sweet that FB is getting some love.
Turns out all the strange window refreshing/caching/repainting problems on hlwm are picom related. Deactivating picom solves all the problems. Other than the cosmetic problems encountered it’s a great tiler. My very favorite at the moment.