switch window manager when logging in in text mode

Question

Suppose I don't start the display manager on boot and login through the terminal. How would I switch my window manager? With gdm or gdm3, you use a scroll box to select it.

Answer 1

startx and xinit take an X client on their command line. This can be the name of a window manager or session manager.

startx awesome

If you don't pass this argument, then they run the script ~/.xinitrc, which is responsible for starting your window manager. In the absence of this file, they use some system default.

Answer 2

The Arch Wiki has an example script that you can include in your .xinitrc to choose a particular window manager when you start X:

# Executed by startx (run your window manager from here)

if [[ $1 == "fluxbox" ]]
then
  exec startfluxbox
elif [[ $1 == "spectrwm" ]]
then
  exec spectrwm
else
  echo "Choose a window manager"
fi

You can then simply issue xinit fluxbox or xinit spectrwm to log into your wm of choice.

If you did want a list of window managers to choose from, you could look at a tool like CDM, the console display manager.

Answer 3

If you want to switch to GNOME, run

xinit

while appending

gnome-session

in ~/.xinitrc file.

If your system supports runlevel 5 then just hit the command

init 5