I am potentially going to be able to put Linux on my work PC soon, have been using it on my personal PC and laptop quite happily with hyprland ontop of NixOS

Thinking of using NixOS for my work machine as well, however I don’t want to use hyprland or even Wayland as I need this machine to be stable and reliable (Nvidia GPU)

Is I3 still the best option for this or are there better alternatives? (leaning towards I3 ontop of KDE)

I’m also somewhat tempted to just go GNOME with the forge extension as it seems the most reliable, though the tiling on that extension is far from perfect

  • www-gem@lemmy.ml
    6·
    11 months ago

    As always there’s no such thing as a global “best” application. Building your system is a very personal thing. It all depends on your needs and liking.

    My personal journey in the tiling WM world has started 20 years ago with awesomewm. Then I moved to i3 because it feels lighter to me while offering a configuration approach I preferred. After some times, I felt ready to “really” build my tiling WM and I moved to dwm.

    I couldn’t be happier until I came across bspwm which is as suckless as dwm but EWMH compliant. I also love the nice approach of keybindings offered by sxhkd. What I appreciate the most is the no limit configuration power since you can integrate the very powerful program that writes messages on bspwm 's socket (bspc) in any scripts you can imagine. This let you create some crazy and very personal rules. For example, I designed one where bspwm is listening to my video player state and if not fullscreen it automatically resizes it to a given size and moves it to a specific position. I have another one that will apply borders only to 2 specific windows applications and use a different color for each one.

    This is a very brief overview of what I’ve experimented. Your expectations and the time you want to deserve to your configuration may guide you on another path. Archwiki has a comparison of tiling WM may be a good starting point to help you in your decision.

    • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      11 months ago

      Interesting. As a dwm guy I was unaware of ewmh standards. Have you used dwm to be able to compare? I love dwm, but it does behave in some cagey ways at times.

          • www-gem@lemmy.ml
            2·
            11 months ago

            You know how hard it is to explain personal preferences when we talk about tiling WM but, as I mentioned in my first post, I would say that bspwm offer some further granularity. I didn’t thought that was possible after using dwm but to come back to my example I have bspwm listening to the state of my media player. Everytime it becomes floating, bspwm resize the window, place it on a specific position, and add a border to it. This is just one example. Also, even though you can use it with any tiling WM, sxhkd has been developed with bspwm in mind and offers the best keybindings management I’ve ever tested. Thanks to chords, several commands can be associated to independent keybindings within the same piece of code like so:

            control+{_,shift+}{1-9}
   bspc {desktop -f,node -d} '^{1-9}' --follow

            Control and a number will switch you to a workspace. If you also press Shift the active window will be sent to a given workspace.

            • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
              1·
              11 months ago

              I’m already using sxhkd with dwm but it’s probably underdeveloped. I want something like that above but with an additional hotkey to change send the active window to a workspace and then switch to that workspace but I haven’t worked it up. I debated using a QMK tapdance feature for that but have never switched to my QMK keyboard.

              I guess to get at my real question, dwm (or maybe more accurately some of the applications I run) generate windows in weird ways. Zoom for instance doesn’t generate notifications for things like unstable wifi, but rather tiles a new window for 2 seconds which is REALLY annoying. Also the window swallowing feature is pretty finicky for things like (n)vim+latex in continuous compiling situations.

              It’s all fixable… But it’s just a massive headache since (on my work pc) changing a dwm config means logging out and back in to see the results.

  • BlanK0@lemmy.ml
    2·
    11 months ago

    Some of the X11 WMs are dwm, awesome, qtile, bspwm, etc.

    Gonna leave here a link of a list of X11 WMs if you are interested.

    Like some have said on this thread, there isn’t really a better wm, it all comes down to your own needs.

  • ransomwarelettuce@lemmy.world
    2·
    11 months ago

    I really liked awesomewm back in the day. Though everything was configured by arco Linux (arch fork), so have to idea how easy it is to get your configs up and running like in hyprland.

    • flashgnash@lemm.eeOP
      1·
      11 months ago

      I have tried qtile before, never really got on with it myself, don’t really like using python for config personally

  • Drito@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    11 months ago

    I tried I3 but it seems the new window always appears in a vertical slice, maybe some people like that so windows are set manually. I prefer automatic tiling, I use Bspwm for that. It needs two config files but they are simple, no programming is required. Its way to split screen is almost always good. In the rare exceptions I add a rule in the main config file so the app appears in a floating window.

    • ScottE@lemm.ee
      1·
      11 months ago

      Yes, i3 is not automatic, but you can arrange things however you want - it’s definitely something where you need to read the docs first.

    • flashgnash@lemm.eeOP
      1·
      11 months ago

      I am curious about this as I’ve never heard of it however for this use case I’m looking for as mainstream as possible so it’s least likely to break in a way nobody’s seen before

  • ScottE@lemm.ee
    44·
    11 months ago

    In a word - yes - i3 is incredibly productive and customizable, but it’s not for everyone. I’ve been using i3 with no DE or DM for about a decade. Every time I try to use a full DE like KDE, Gnome, etc, it’s just so slow and bloated, and gets in the way. And there’s 100’s of extra packages that get installed, and be updated, that I don’t use. I don’t need anything but terminals (of which I have about 40 open in 12 different virtual desktops), a browser, and an editor when vim isn’t enough. So for me, it’s perfect and simple. I don’t know what will happen when Wayland finally wins, but that’s 5-10 years away before it really wins.

      • www-gem@lemmy.ml
        1·
        11 months ago

        When Wayland is eventually ready, I will personaly look into river. At least that’s what I would do now but no doubts that by the time everybody move to Wayland there will be way more options to consider. Hopefully one will be a good replacement for bspwm.

    • Secret300@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      11 months ago

      I definitely do feel i3 is the easiest to understand and get into. I remember when I first started using Linux I tried awesomewm and icewm but was so confused. i3 made sense tho