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Comment by gh02t | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 ?

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

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.

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