I'm mildly bemused at the other comments treating this as a blast from the past. I use icewm today as a super low resource DE for a headless remote desktop system, with a major benefit being that it's all in one with no configuration needed; one unit includes panel, app menu, and window manager that work out of the box.

It can be both. I'm daily driving FVWM, which is even older than IceWM and still under active development. I'm fine with people thinking it's "retro", because it is. But mostly I'm happy I can still use it.

Incidentally, tiling WM:s are even more retro, even if they're all the rage right now. GNU Screen and Oberon are both from 1987.

I use it as my main DE for many of my systems, including my writing laptop. It is really, just as you say, pretty much install-and-use. At one time, I maintained a fairly extensive FVWM configuration, but trying ICEWM a few times freed me.

IceWM is a good DE for xrdp servers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xrdp). This makes it my main window manager on a workstation I access through Remote Desktop. On my old ThinkPad, I had to migrate off IceWM because Xorg on Debian 13 no longer provided video acceleration. I have switched to Wayland and KDE.

With IceWM, you need to take care of the SSH agent that KDE or Cinnamon would start for you. You can do it with something like this in your `.xinitrc`:

  # SSH agent
  mkdir -p "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR"/ssh
  eval "$(ssh-agent -a "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR"/ssh/agent)"
  export SSH_AUTH_SOCK

  # ...

  # WM
  exec icewm

I use it as my main desktop for audio work.

> treating this as a blast from the past.

Well, for most of us it is.

I use it today for a Pinetab 2. I used it then, but I use it now, too.

Why is it bemusing because you happen to have a use case for it? It's a 30 year old piece of software that only supports X11, which is itself rapidly becoming legacy software.