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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

> I'm able to focus better. I never get unprompted system popups on my screen except during boot.

i3 helped me so much with focus. I can also move around and manage my entire workspace with my keyboard which feels more concise.

It's not really a time efficiency gain so to speak, more like a mental headroom gain that lets me be more productive. I'm not flicking between windows and spaces with alt-tab to try and find what I'm looking for. I'm just going right to what I want with a keyboard shortcut. It feels a lot more like working at a purpose built workstation rather than a consumer OS that I've stuffed software development tools into.

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I tried getting into i3 but having to use the command line for things like selecting wifi, changing screens and battery saver modes is so cumbersome.

I had the same issues running i3 on top of Ubuntu, but Manjaro + i3 (https://manjaro.org/download/community/i3/) ships with a nice GUI for managing this stuff.

You can use the gnome utilities for this kind of stuff, I use gnome's network manager to select wifi and gnome-settings with i3-gnome for other tweaks. https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome

For screen management I use arandr.

The default i3 status bar actually has a tray for all of those things to run in. You just have to make sure to add the programs to your i3 config to be started.

For example, for my network widget I added "exec --no-startup-id nm-applet" to my i3 config file.

There are some taskbar utilities you can install but they are far, far inferior and more buggy compared to what you get with most popular window managers.

I wish someone will just give me GNOME (whichever version or fork) with all standard utilities, as well as settings for enabling tiling behaviour and shorkeys.

For others who are curious about tiling window managers, please also consider Awesome. It's a lua backend and is gpl vs i3's bsd (for those of us who care about that sort of thing).

Also consider Regolith Linux. It's just Ubuntu + pre-configured tiling, and it works perfectly. Excluding the normal amount of Ubuntu install time, I was able to learn it and be tiling in <10 minutes.

By far my favorite desktop environment I've ever had. Super fast, super clean, no distractions.

I tried it on both the distros I've used lately (Fedora & Clear Linux). In both cases it popped up without any scaling on my hdpi laptop screen. Not being able to even see enough to be able to research what to do about this, I gave up and went back to Gnome. Same with i3.

If you run i3 inside a gnome-session [1], you get gnome-settings-daemon running, which will set your dpi according to the preferences set in gnome.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332778

I have no doubt it can be done, but that route pursued for every little issue leads to a nightmare of computer-fiddling that is not how I personally wish to spend my life. For OS hobbyists only.

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