Wow … just wow! I’m jelly on ya now! Sweet!
Its more that its feature complete to what the devs wanted than abandoned.
I forgot to mention I spun up Xlibre today and have replaced x11. That seems to save about 7% RAM. Yay, non-redundancy and clean(er) code.
FWIW I run a local AI (mistralai_Ministral-3-3B-Instruct-2512-Q6_K_L.gguf using llama.cpp and it’s native WebUI) on the gear and get ~49 t/s. My point being, use your limited resources where you want/ need them- don’t waste them where you don’t need them. You can make a nice looking WM desktop with dwm, hlwm, i3wm, openbox and others and use your ‘saved’ RAM for important work.
Given the community that uses Openbox daily, I’m not certain what your concerns are. There are a LOT of wms that are functionally stabilized e.g.; openbox, fluxbox, bspwm, among others. They all work just fine. Worry not… if you like it and are worried ask around. Openbox is magnificent, fluxbox is excellent (I don’t like the style and workflow- but that’s me- not the wm); I used to be a great fan of bspwm and hlwm wutli I got dwm into the spot where it suits me nearly perfectly. You don’t need to like what I do, but don’t be drawn to the notion that fixing broken code is anything much more than fixing broken/ brittle code.
Heck, I like xterm and can make it work my way… it never breaks- just as an example. Stable = reliable.
odd questions is always me trying to get the big picture.
Muy intersante.
It’s going alongside of EOS Budgie tonight. If anyone thinks that’s a bad idea I have no problem wiping the drive clean and giving it OpenBox.
I can’t thank you all enough. This was a hell of an enlightening thread.
It’s not perfect, it still has bugs, but I like your perspective.
Your “Library”-background triggers me. Now I want that background, too. 
Please explain. I have been using it for years and never had an issue. While it may not be “Perfect” its pretty damn close and I have never had a bug with it.
I hope this helps. All the backgrounds I use come from https://vlad.studio. They are available there.
Yes, OpenBox can be a daily driver. It uses GTK, but QT apps also run w/o problems. It’s a WM (stack, but can be configured to do tiling). It’s very stable, meaning suitable for daily driving. It uses xml to configure, plus a GUI tool, obconf to customize your system looking. It supports right-click menu on screen. It runs on all distros, but is used most on Debian based because of the famous CrunchBang (I still think it’s the most beautiful and efficient OpenBox distro, even today). Since it’s a X11-based WM, you could use a compositor to add some eye-candy effects. OpenBox has been ported to Wayland as Labwc. OpenBox config can also be used in Labwc.
Like somebody mentioned above, check Bunsenlabs, CB++, Lilidog as examples.
Actually that has changed a little for Arch based systems. Its now in lxappearance-obconf and a lxappearance-obconf-gtk3 for gtk and obconf-qt for qt
EOS Wayland Budgie did install labwc as my WM, even though I didn’t ask for one…but that’s a bonus now. Are you saying I can use an OpenBox config file or dotfile and basically turn labwc into Wayland Openbox?
I like Bunsen and I have Lilidog on an in-case-of-emergency-use laptop…the debian way—heresy alert–never grew on me. I just don’t care for their way of doing things over others I suppose.
am seriously flirting with this as well. With the full Raabe ML4W dotfiles..
I actually do not remember the specifics, it’s been about a year. But I tested it back then, had problems and ended up on i3 instead. It was def a corner case though.
I’m always trying new things that interest me …
Just released couple days ago, Lubuntu 26.04 with Kernal 7.0; LXQt 2.3 and (drum roll) Openbox. This runs really nice and have been enjoying tinkering around. I don’t care for the Snaps, but I’m overlooking it because I wanted to see how well Lubuntu setup LXQt.
Pretty nice. Picom installed by default and the new Qterminal is pretty good. I’m a kitty user, but kitty uses 200M RAM more than the very lean Qterm and I can get it to do everything that Kitty does.
Openbox … it just works.
Ok so you had an issue doesn’t mean its “Buggy” Not sure what issue was but I have had no issues with it in around 10+ years of using it and tt supports my LXQT quite nicely
Yes, that’s Arch way
That’s correct. Check ArchBang(Labwc on Arch) project from @mrgreen3
You can also take a look at ArchBang’s config here
Labwc is fairly new though. I would not recommend it as as a daily driver.