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Comment by julian_1 | Hacker News Reader

> Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate.

Completely agree, and as a user of Desktop Linux for a very long time - I always felt that Linux GUI have been inferior to the options available on Mac and Windows.

It's not for everyone, but I found a personal solution with tiling window managers (Xmonad, I3) and related tools (suckless' dmenu). They restore sanity by providing lightweight, shortcut focused GUI systems, that don't intrude but provide enough functionality to get things done.

For anyone searching and testing GUIs like XFCE, don't dismiss tiling window managers as being too complicated or a bridge too far. My experience is that they work wonderfully in practice.

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That's not my experience. I switched fron XP to Ubuntu 8.04 and I remember how the DE felt much better. I could do everything with half the clicks. Windows control panel dialog were so clunky in comparison. Four years later I discovered that KDE shares that clicks problem with Windows and I went back to Gnome after a few months. I'm on Gnome flashback now and specifically a Gnome 3 tweaked to look like Gnome 2 from 10.04 plus Compiz for the 3D desktop transitions (the cube).

I used Windows 8 and 10 on friends' laptops and I'm not impressed. BTW, everybody hated 8 because of the changes in the UI. They tend to be OK with 10, but it looks so old to me, like a window manager for some 16 colors home computer in the 80s (I used them back then) with 1080p resolution. Control Panel's dialogs in most cases are still the same from XP and I can't understand why they didn't redesigned them. They feel more and more out of place in the UI.

Mac's UI is somewhat similar to Gnome (actually the other way around, I think) but I never liked the menu at the top and the top bar. That's why I removed both from my Gnome and I never bought a Mac since the very beginning (I moved everything from the top bar to the bottom one.) Mac's UI feels zippier though, that's the advantage of building both the hw and the sw.

I agree about windows 8 and 10. Around the time of the Gnome versus KDE wars - I felt Windows XP, 7, and Server 2000/2003 were clean simple GUIs. I messed about with Compiz as well and thought it very neat. I was happiest on Linux with the simplicity of fvwm though, and I think modern tiling WMs replicate that experience for me.

But why switch to a tiling window manager when XFCE + dmenu + custom shortcuts is good enough?

I think people often forget: Do what works for you. If XFCE+ is good enough for you, then great! stick with it!

But if you want to try a different experience, or if you think that setup is inefficient (as I do), then try moving to something else!

What works for one person likely won't work for another.

And this is what killed the Linux desktop. 99% of the population does NOT want to try a gazillion desktops (of which the installation is error prone), just to find out what 'works best for you'.

You don't have to if you don't want to. Any sensible desktop distro has a DE configured for you out of the box, if you want to just start using it.

I personally find that movable-window designs are a UI failure, requiring too much user interaction. A tiling WM, OTOH, enables me to do what I want: work with one tool or another, and work with multiple tools when that's what I want (which, frankly, is rarely — other than consulting a browser or info window, it's not often that I need more than one window on my screen at a time.

For me it's because a tiling WM is simpler, more aesthetic and more responsive.

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