herbstluftwm vs Qtile

herbstluftwm is a manual tiling window manager for the X window system. Each virtual desktop, called a tag, has a tiling layer and a floating layer, allowing windows to occupy split frames or be placed freely. Frames can be divided into further subframes or filled with windows, and keyboard controls move, resize, and focus tiled and floating windows. Configuration runs through herbstclient and can be changed while the manager is running without a restart. Screen space can be divided into virtual monitors that need not match physical displays; monitors share a common pool of tags. The project is licensed under the Simplified BSD License and is listed as free at free. The download page lists packages for Linux distributions and Mac OS X via MacPorts, and confirms operation on Cygwin. The project also offers released source tarballs and links to its current development version. Community help is available through IRC, Reddit, GitHub issues, and a mailing list.

Qtile is a free tiling window manager for Linux, written and configured entirely in Python. It runs as a window manager on X11 and as a compositor on Wayland; the Wayland backend uses wlroots. Users can create layouts and widgets, use built-in commands, and define application rules, window groups and virtual desktop controls. Its command shell allows Qtile to be inspected and managed, while remote scripting can configure workspaces, manipulate windows and update status-bar widgets. The stable version can be installed from PyPI with `uv tool install qtile`. The project also provides installation guides for Arch, Fedora, Funtoo, Ubuntu/Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD and NixOS. Qtile is distributed under the MIT license. Its stated runtime aim is to support the last three CPython versions and usually the latest stable PyPy. The official release is positioned for users seeking stability; the development version has newer features but may contain bugs. Support is available through GitHub Discussions, IRC and Discord, with Discord bridged to IRC.