ctwm on Void Linux

ctwm (Claude's Tab Window Manager) is a window manager from 1992 that is still active and works well. For more than two decades, NetBSD shipped with twm (Tom's Window Manager) but twm feels prehistoric by today's standards. Therefore, NetBSD moved onto ctwm, which is a fork of twm.

And an interesting thing is that the founder and original creator of Void Linux was a prominent former developer and maintainer for NetBSD, so a massive amount of BSD philosophy went into Void Linux and still remains today, like the design of xbps-src was heavily inspired by NetBSD's pkgsrc and FreeBSD's ports tree concept.

If you ask me, this is pretty damn cool. So since Void is like one of the most BSD-adjacent Linux distros, if not the most, why not try ctwm because of its direct relationship with NetBSD?

First, get Xorg

sudo xbps-install xorg

...Or

sudo xbps-install xorg-minimal xinit

If you want to keep your system as barebones as possible you can install just the bare minimum server, the input drivers, and the init tools. I have to admit Xorg is quite bloated, lol. The xorg package even comes with WAYLAND?!?! for some reason.

You may also need to manually install your specific GPU driver, like xf86-video-intel, xf86-video-amdgpu, or the proprietary (or nouveau) NVIDIA drivers.

You need a terminal though btw so maybe xterm's a good choice. It's the default for ctwm.

Install ctwm

sudo xbps-install ctwm

Startup

Just get a minimal display manager like XDM or add it to your ~/.xinitrc as exec ctwm.