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Comment by throwaway8879 | Hacker News Reader

My primary dev machine has been running KDE and i3wm for a while. I feel like I get a complete GUI experience while having all the benefits of a tiling window manager.

The author likes Gnome because of it's UI looking like Mac OS, and that's understandable. KDE did look different when I first switched from Macs. But at this point, the only things running in my dev machine is a whole lot of terminals and maybe 1-3 browser instances. So KDE is almost hidden at all tkmes.

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I primarily just use i3, but I used to be a KDE guy. I used it for a while again just recently and I have to say, it's gotten really good. They've made it clean and tidy, while still being powerful and customizable.

The thing that originally got me to switch to i3 was using a serious potato for a few months. 2012 core i3 processor and 8g ram (upgraded) kind of potato. Plenty usable with i3, but had trouble with windows or heavier full desktop environments; i3 was great and snappy and I was able to use the computer just fine.

I use KDE on a ThinkPad X220i, so around the same specs as your potato (with an SSD, though). It absolutely flies, no slowdowns or issues at all.

I'm a recent i3 convert (been using it full time for the better part of a year now). It's one of those little changes that really brought me a lot of satisfaction.

This is on my primary desktop (with a 4k display). I recommend it to anyone who's in a rut with their workflow (learn about all the mods, i3-gaps, etc.) - it takes about a day to properly customize and get used to, time well spent.

I have had a tough time getting my 4k ext display to properly scale with i3. I tried arandr but the fonts are too small. With scaling , Emacs, Firefox and alacritty seem to be ok but things seem sluggish on my x230. How did you do it ?

I'm on a pretty big monitor (~40 inches) for development, so I don't actually do any scaling for this display. I'm spoiled with a pretty good desktop rig, so I haven't had to do any optimization in a while.

Depends on the application for me. .Xresources is where you need the biggest tweak, but email me if you want more specific help.

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