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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I would love to see a modern Fluxbox. My only issue with Fluxbox on Ubuntu and similar is other DE's seem to have better visual support for wireless. I have no way of connecting to the internet if I can't even see the Wi-Fi icon anywhere. I don't want to have to install components from another DE. Also they seem to mostly be abandoned. I have the same issue with tiling WM's. I don't want to have to configure my DE / VM it should just work, what I should configure is preferential settings not functional settings.

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> I have the same issue with tiling WM's.

My Manjaro-i3 environment worked out of the box and had all of the things you'd expect (wifi icon, volume icon, battery indicator etc). The only reason I had to configure anything at all is because of personal taste. I find the Manjaro WM packages pretty good, personally.

I tried Manjaro before, didn't have the nicest experience getting it setup on one of my laptops. I try to stick to Ubuntu derived Linux distros cause they usually support my hardware cleanly enough. I wouldn't mind trying it out again though, but i3 is a lot different from Fluxbox.

I mentioned i3 only because you mentioned tiling window managers requiring too much configuration to setup. Manjaro also has a AwesomeWM distribution as an alternative tiling WM.

But aside from tiling window managers, Manjaro also has pre-packaged distributions with Openbox, XFCE, Budgie, Mate and Deepin and a few other less lightweight environments like KDE and Gnome. There's also the "architect edition" which does require a bunch of configuration.

>connecting to the internet if I can't even see the Wi-Fi icon

I usually just run nmtui in a terminal.

This. It uses dialog like interface.

Right, but you get the idea yea? If you sat me down at the machine ten seconds ago and said "turn on the WiFi," would "run a command in terminal that doesn't have the words network, wifi, or internet in it" really be at the top of the list of things I'd try?

Edit: oh, that's some sort of ui opening command?

That's not the point of these fringe desktop environments.

If you sat someone in front of custom configured i3wm, they would not have a clue how to do anything, really. The point is that the owner can have a nice customized and highly effective experience of using a computer.

There's a way to configure wifi easily without an icon, with some text based menus and nmtui is one way to do it if you use NetworkManager. You don't need an icon/GUI. Also there's nm-applet, so you can have a tray icon and GUI even in these DEs.

>they would not have a clue how to do anything, really //

Ha, used a little MacBook for essentially the first time 2 days ago, it was being used to present a slideshow (MS Powerpoint). I tried to advance beyond the end of the slide stack and it closed to the editor [terrible UX for me, IMO it should blank the screen and show a message on the laptop; maybe that's the default, wasn't my machine obvs], I was completely lost trying to scroll the slide chooser (left pane) as there was no scroll bar, and no pgup/pgdn keys, click-scroll [which works in other UI that I use] was rearranging the slides instead of scrolling. It's so easy to get lost in unfamiliar UI.

We can easily adapt if we want to, however.

You probably also want a battery and volume indicator

Personally I get along with nmtui from the command line (as user) but I appreciate the desire for a tray icon of some kind.

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