I do not have and addiction problem, you have a problem with my addiction.
Is it too much to ask for the days when my system was nothing but a prompt in which I may or may not type “startx”?
That’s what I’ve got (on Gentoo).
I always ran
startx & exitto prevent someone from VT switching to a logged in console if my screen was locked :)Hah that’s what I always had on Debian on my laptop back in the version 9 days (buster?). Nothing’s stopping you from doing it now with runlevels. I think with systems it’s just
systemctl set-default multiuser.targetYou can then always get the full boot with
systemctl isolate graphical.targetMight not be the exact command but it’s something like that for sure.
Well, one can always uninstall the DE, right?
A fresh install of debian without DE will do that at least
I’m at the point in my Linux journey where I have settled into a stable system, configured 99.9% how I want it. Seeing diminishing returns on effort put into tweaking it. But I just keep looking at window managers. I have people who need me in the world but I just can’t stop looking at them. I don’t know what to do.
Every year or so I fire up a VM, install a window manager on it, realize I have no idea WTF I’m doing, and nuke the VM and go back to my regular KDE desktop.
Do not worry I’m daily driving a window manager and still do not know what I’m doing.
I used to do the same, but recently I’ve found a dustro and window manager that just work for me. The distro is Fedora atomic, and the window manager is sway.
I pretty much just used a floating window manager like a tiling one, almost always snapping them to 1/2 or 1/3 of the screen. Eventually I tried sway, and after learning some of the shortcuts, it seems like the perfect window manager for someone like me.
I’m in the same boat so I started getting my “tweaking” fix by making my own themes. Just got my first cursor theme working and it’s awesome!
Sweet! I’ve experimented with installing a few bits from gnome look but haven’t made any of my own. How difficult is it? I’ve managed to theme my favourite terminal applications though. A big part of my satisfaction is based on feeling, a large part of which is visual. Diehard instrumentalists may look down on me for it but I am unashamed and not alone.
Honestly, it’s way more convoluted and frustrating than it has any right to be. The only tools I found were cursor-toolbox which allows you to convert SVG templates to the correct set of PNGs and xcursorgen which converts the PNGs to actual cursor files. It took me several tries just get a working cursor set. Then I spent much much longer actually drawing and tweaking my theme using inkscape. It was certainly rewarding to get it working though. Now I smile every time I see the little “busy” animation.
You are a true martyr my friend and I feel you!
Don’t forget to switch your wm atleast once a year for no reason.
that is just barbaric, you should do it at least once a month.
I did all of grad school with i3wm. And I spent a very, very long time in grad school…
So true. Sway forever.
I love Sway, but Hyprland’s special workspace thing is just so damn good.
Meh, hyprland devs and community are known for being toxic, specially with minorities. Can’t use because of this :/
I also love sway’s default key bindings, so there one more point keeping me on it
How is it relevant to using the wm in your desktop?
I just don’t want to feel complacent to the devs and the community actions.
I don’t see the toxicness on my desktop
Yeah but Hyprland window groups tend to eat each other with the dwindle layout
what do you mean by eat each other?
If you have two groups, and you accidentally start dragging a window (assuming you use the mouse at all, which I do) Hyprland will drag the entire group and merge it with the one it’s hovering.
Now, imagine someone coming from Sway, who is used to rearranging individual windows by simply dragging them around without having to explicitly move them out of containers…
Hyprland wiki has detailed config options for this
You are a legend. I must’ve not understood what you meant. Thanks for your contribution. I also apologise for not checking before answering.
I just like my keyboard shortcuts and easy configurations. But… Kdewayland and pipewire is just so easy.
My first tiling window manager was Xmonad. There is simply no such thing as going back to a full desktop environment when your first tiling window manager was Xmonad. I haven’t even considered using a full desktop environment in years, and I never will.
customizing dwm to the fullest extent is absolutely addicting!
This meme would work better if that banana didn’t look like it yearned for the sweet release of death in banana bread.
Have you tried niri yet? What about river?
I have tried both of them. They are both powerful on their own respect. Niri is still on its early days so things like floating window are a work in progress (last time I checked), but things like its window management is great if you can set up nice keybinds for the multitude of actions available and its scrolling behaviour works like a charm on laptops. Niri also has a configuration file validator that you can use before restarting Niri which is genius! One thing you might hate or love is the dynamic workspaces, workspaces are moved/renamed so that they are consecutive. So if you had four occupied workspaces ( 1 through 4) and clear workspace 3 now you would have three consecutive workspaces (1 through 3) effectively making workspace 4 now be workspace 3.
River is super fast because of how minimal it is plus it has some nice community layouts available to suit your taste better. Also the tag window management can be the fastest out there but can become hard if not set up properly. It was to cool and all but I feel it is more for power users and it totally overwhelmed me when I tried to set up stuff to set tags for windows and move them around monitors (and that when you move a window to a monitor it does not keep focus on it). The way I use Sway and Hyprland is to set workspaces for different monitors and it just feels easy for me to move windows around focusing(or not) the destined workspace. I think the best feature of River is to toggle any window on your focused tag, it really feels like magic.
Hope that helps.
Niri has a way to have named workspaces now which basically act like persistent workspaces, so you don’t have to use dynamic workspaces system. I really like niri and have it as my daily driver
Yeah, my problem with it is that I have to be conscious of what named workspaces are created to know what keybind to hit to switch to them and that they occupy regular workspaces place. I guess one is meant to scroll through them with your touchpad or keybinds, but when you have 5 + workspaces it become inefficient. I think Niri would be better suited for ultra-wide monitor but then one would not have a touchpad… Most importantly when you want to send windows to a particular workspace (other than neighbor workspaces) it can be a nighmare. Probably its just me no being able to figure it out and/or became to accustomed to a particular workflow, #skill_issue.
I feel like you are missing something because I can directly hop around one of my ten workspaces with a single click, without a need of scrolling through the workspaces between. What I do is to create ten named workspaces in startup (I actually only use like five of them but let’s ignore that). Then I can still navigate them by the index number. I don’t use regular workspaces enitrely in my setup.
Note: I only use a single monitor and never move workspaces up or down so I don’t know the experience there.
Oh, I can’t remeber well but here is my question: when you have set 10 named workspaces and only have active #1, #2 and #4… Does not #4 become #3 even if its named? Meaning you can focus the originally #4 workspace? Anyway when I used it(for 3-4days consecutive) I did not think of naming workspaces just 1 to 10 to fix in them in place lmao.
Sorry I saw it earlier but I forgot to respond. Named workspaces are always active, and they stay in place regardless if there is a window there or not.
Oh, thanks!
