I personally prefer KDE because I like easy customizablility and it can look really pretty with some programs like kvantum.
I prefer Sway due to the “not holding your hand, but not difficult” customization while still using a tiling window manager and wayland
i3-gaps all the way, no status bar (except for a tmux one I have set up to show weather, brightness, volume, etc). Its simple, never have to use the mouse, can watch things behind or beside my text editor, etc.
I like having my status bar aha. I do find myself rarely using the mouse though, which is always nice.
Personally I haven’t jumped to i3-gaps, I’m happy with vanilla i3. And I like a minimal status bar, although plenty of virtual desktops have something full screen living in them.
I love this idea - I’m using i3status-rust but now I’m wondering if I really need it. How do you deal with workspaces? (like knowing which workspace you’re on)
Do you use the qtbrowser?
I don’t use qutebrowser cause I need my FF plugins to live 😉, but I do use vim vixen which has vim like navigation for FF.
That’s nice, I’ll go check that out
It’s functional. That’s the most important part.
I really like Xfce because, for me, it sits in the right spot between customizability and simplicity. And it’s pretty light, which is a bonus in my old laptop :D
I’ve seen xfce a lot but stock is really ugly to me, what is your favorite setup?
Arc Dark theme + Numix Circle icons + bottom panel + Whisker menu. Here’s how my setup looks:
which is basically how Linux Mint Xfce looks, but with a different theme (though I’m on Fedora).I love arc themes, also it’s very compact which is nice. Thats a cool desktop
Thanks a lot! I like it very much :D
I went from Windows to a tiling window manager, so I don’t have any experience with desktop environments, but for me I really liked:
- Being able to do everything with keyboard
- Not having features I never use in my face all the time
- Customisability, if I think of something (which I almost never do), then I can probably add it.
I love KDE, for the exact same reason. I also like lxde /lxqt, as thise are very lughtweight for full desktop environments. I like lxde better because even though the default theme looks pretty dated in comparison to lxqt, it can be themed to look so much better
Im using i3gaps right now and i love how keyboard driven it is, and its my first tiling window manager. It feels so nice and added compton tryone and lostd of terminal blur to make it look as good as possiblr
I use compton-tryone too, for some reason it doesn’t crash whereas picom crashes a good amount.
cool
did you know lua prior to migrating to awesome?
A little bit, but not that much. I’m learning, though!
As long as you have a basic understanding of how code works, you should be fine. For the most part, you’ll just copy-paste sections that are already in your rc.lua and modify them a little bit, or do the same with a config that you’ve found on the web.
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PopOS looks really good. If I wasn’t so into KDE I’d probably be using that. Also in my time using gnome plugins were my favorite feature. Being able to add elements just by clicking a button on a website.
I like Gnome Shell’s phone-ish UI. It really combines the streamlined UI of a smartphone application bar/drawer but with the good parts of a traditional desktop UI.
i love hitting the super key and typing the first few letters of whatever app you want and it finds it. the search feature works really well.
Non-search based desktop environments haven’t been acceptable for at least a decade.
KDE, but wish that stock KDE had better integration with wayland. X11 is bad for security. Would be nice to have the DE be written in rust, because would have a smaller code base and harder to privilege escalate on. In reality though, easy to use and doesn’t reinvent the wheel.
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If by better you mean legacy code which is hard to refactor and cannot be adapted to a modern environment without breaking everything. Might as well start fresh, that’s what mac os did and for good reason. Go ask a pen tester whats easier to break into. In the modern day of surveillance, security for the common user becomes important. If it was that easy it would have been done a long time ago. Apple has a vested interest in it, Red Hat does, Suse does, Canonical does. Why hasn’t it been done? Just like systemd there was a need for it. Is it perfect? no. Does it have to be? no. x11 was written with main frames in mind. Does any one own a mainframe anymore? didn’t think so. It’s a different time, different solution.
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I use to use Awesome, but I got tied of having to fix Lua scripts during major updates. I have since switched to using herbstluftwm, which I like due to it being lightweight, easily customizable via a shell script or be done on the fly with
herbstclient.And if that description sounds great to you, but herbstluftwm seems a bit too unusual, then I can recommend bspwm.
(I don’t think they’re forks of each other, but they’re really similar in a lot of ways…)I have not tested bspwm, but I have seen it come up on occasion under various unixporn communities. I take it you use it, or just know of it?
I don’t know if herbstluftwm is really a fork of anyone WM but it does heavely borrow from i3, musca, xmonad, and wmii. So it wouldn’t suprise me that there are other WMs out there that is similar.
The FAQ of herbstluftwm says it’s not a fork of anything. And the first commits of bspwm look like that was written from scratch, too. (Yep, I actually spent a fair amount researching that, because it really bothers me how similar they are without being forks.)
And I have used bspwm in the past. It’s been a major contributor to my current workflow, by being so limited that I didn’t believe it: You couldn’t minimize windows in bspwm. It just didn’t have that feature. So, when I looked up what the heck that’s about, it said to just move the window to a different workspace instead.
That was when I stopped treating workspaces as individual compartments for different topics and instead started grouping multiple workspaces together with 1 or 2 windows per workspace, which just works a lot better for me. In a way, it takes out one layer of complexity by never minimizing windows.
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The FAQ of herbstluftwm says it’s not a fork of anything. And the first commits of bspwm look like that was written from scratch, too. (Yep, I actually spent a fair amount researching that, because it really bothers me how similar they are without being forks.)
Yeah after making that post I checked the FAQ as well as I thought there was something there about it and was too tired to update my comment. I have no issues with FLOSS projects borrowing ideas from other FLOSS projects, IMO within the FLOSS world imitation is the best form of flattery :winking face:
And I have used bspwm in the past. It’s been a major contributor to my current workflow, by being so limited that I didn’t believe it: You couldn’t minimize windows in bspwm. It just didn’t have that feature. So, when I looked up what the heck that’s about, it said to just move the window to a different workspace instead.
Yeah herbstluftwm has a similar limitation, it actually seems pretty common for the tiling WMs that I have seen. Although there is a script for herbstluftwm that adds a hacky way to do this by creating a virtual monitor that you can put appliacions on then show and hide it. I don’t use that but it exists.
That was when I stopped treating workspaces as individual compartments for different topics and instead started grouping multiple workspaces together with 1 or 2 windows per workspace, which just works a lot better for me. In a way, it takes out one layer of complexity by never minimizing windows.
That is similar to how I work, but I have a few dedicated tags (workspaces) for web browsing, IM+Chat apps, Email that has predefined layouts. Everything else is kind of fair game use.
do you miss any functioality from
awesomeafter switching toherbstluftwm? Stuff like widgets etc?Not really, I didn’t really use a whole lot of widgets. I usually like to keep my workspaces minimal. My setup is mainly a panel, (Lemonbar) on the top part of my screen and a wallpaper. I also use pywal to adjust the color scheme used by Herbstluftwm, Lemonbar, and my terminal based on my current wallpaper.
(Yes I did put that tag in floating mode for that screenshot, but normally I have them in tiling mode, usually with 1-2 frames so I can have different tiling rules in effect so some windows will tile horizontally while others tile vertically etc…)
Dang that’s pretty.
Thanks!
KDE for its customizability, extensibility and features. My workflow is rather exotic and I haven’t found another DE or WM yet which has all the puzzle pieces to replicate it.
The customizability is mindboggling to me. I can look at literally anything and there’s probably a way to change it.
I’m on the KDE train, it is snappy, I don’t use a lot of the features, but it snaps windows to corners well and renders well. Dolphin and other KDE browsers are pretty good. I use the KDE Connect app on my Android phone so I can copy/paste between my phone and my desktop, get phone notifications in the corner of the screen, and even use the phone as a trackpad/keyboard. I tried to see if the gnome equivalent app was ready for use but it really wasn’t.
I’m using my hackintosh at the moment. I initially used the stock DE (Aqua), which is pretty nice: everything is very smooth, animations are nice, window decorations are neat, it comes with tons of handy features which is a huge reason why it is praised, making it a pleasure to use. Except for window management - it sucks. All you can do is resize and move window manually, which sucks a lot. This is partly mitigated by a surprising amount of things you can do with a keyboard in Aqua. Things like
spotlightare super powerful!I migrated to yabai briefly, it entirely solves the issue of window management on macOS, however, it messes with window decorations sometimes, you lose some neat features of Aqua and also it requires you to disable
System Integrity Protection, which is syboptimal. So you’re either stuck with disabling it or using the outdated chunkwm window manager, which is no longer developer iirc.
