[xmonad] xmonad, and trends in the tiling wm market

[Don Stewart]

We've not much information on what's happening with tiling wms. One
source of info is the debian package system's popularity contest: if a
package is in debian, we get to see a snapshot of trends.

Here's a little analysis of what's been happening with the tiling wms 
in 2007:

    http://galois.com/~dons/images/tiling-window-managers.png

Summary:
 *  ion continues long term decline
 *  ratpoison was in a place to take advantage of ion controversy
 *  wmii and dwm continue long term growth
 *  in late 07, the two new tiling window managers, xmonad and awesome, begin
    eating away at ion, ratpoison and dwm users
 *  larswm and stumpwm are static

For xmonad my hope is that improved packaging, and the ease of adding
extensions, to appear in this weekend's release of xmonad 0.5 will 
lead to further growth. 

Along with xmonad's technical features over the competition, I hope to
see continued growth in the coming year. We're working hard at ensuring
this is the best tiling wm!

Our challenge is to make the cost of installing a Haskell toolchain
easier, though, so its cheaper to experiment with xmonad. This comes
down to improved ghc packaging on each distro.

-- Don