Hacker News Reader

Comment by bombela | Hacker News Reader

I use mate desktop with i3 for the windows management. This means everything just works. Volume keys, brightness, usb storage auto-mounting, complex audio configuration, printers configuration, lock screen, battery management, mouse settings, external displays settings, screenshots and so on and so forth. I get the best of both world. Without Mate, I would have to hack everything together and spend days configuring everything by hand.

If you want to replicate this setup: Start with Ubuntu Mate. Install i3 via apt. Select i3 on the login screen. In your i3 configuration add the following:

   exec --no-startup-id exec mate-settings-daemon
   exec --no-startup-id exec mate-screensaver
   exec --no-startup-id exec mate-power-manager
   exec --no-startup-id exec nm-applet

Welcome to the year of Desktop on Linux.

View on HN

I think an even better approach is to tell MATE to use i3 as its window manager. It's totally seamless and works perfectly.

Here is a blog post I wrote on how to do it: https://www.mattgreer.org/articles/mate-and-i3/

I also created a MATE panel applet so you don't need to have an i3bar.

I did what your article explained on Ubuntu 18.04 and fresh working mate (i3 also worked fine when I booted into it). At first, it looked good - it looked like MATE but the Windows were opening in a WM way! But then I pressed the Super key and it broke - it opened it as a whole new application but one that doesn't work - I couldn't search on click on the broken menu.

Maybe it works if you remove and replace a bunch of settings and applets and whatever? I don't know but given that the second thing I did was already broken I didn't invest more time.

Ubuntu 18.04. Would not recommend to those thinking it will just work as expected.

Interesting. I wrote the article a long time ago, but I still use the approach it describes to this day. I have this setup on Ubuntu MATE 18.04 without issue, running MATE 1.20.1.

When you say super key, do you mean the windows key? And hitting it opens up the main MATE menu? For me, it opens up as expected: https://i.imgur.com/dZzQt1t.png and choosing an item from it does the expected thing.

For the i3 mod key I use alt. Is it possible you have both MATE and i3 set to the same super/mod key?

Thanks, I used your article with MATE 19.10 and it worked nicely. I didn't try your applet but instead heavily customised the i3wm and i3bar configs to my liking, wouldn't go back to a non tiling window manager now.

I love tiling WMs but I do have one gripe (and it's not the fault of the WMs): Every "about" window for every program should have the name of the binary in it so we can call it from the command line. Text editor? You have to know it's gedit. Document Viewer? Evince (say, what?) Want to use a gui for file management on a one-off basis (it happens)? Nautilus wait Nemo no that's not it shit fire up firefox and DDG...

I just tried doing exactly that, with a fully working out of the box mate and i3 and it just made things slower, and somehow most shortkeys stopped working in Sublime Text (I didn't even expect for that to get broken). And yes, all 4 of those are accessible via my terminal so it's not like I didn't have them.

Literally didn't add anything or make it remotely MATE-like. I did not investigate further. Ubuntu 18.04. Would not reccomend if anyone else thinks it works out of the box after reading this comment.

I've tried tiling WMs a few times, maybe 4 years ago last and liked them (inclduing i3) but at least at the time there were too many problems.

If everything works now, Id be willing to try i3 when I install ubuntu 20.04.

Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar with a nice battery/volume/wifi etc. indicator? That work both when I click on them and via keys and with the icons visibly changing based on the current state?

Do all Windows open normally? Do they all fullscreen normally? Which don't?

Do you get any crashes?

Are there any WM-specific settings/fixes you have to tweak more often than once every 6 months?

been using i3 since 2 years now after dwm, blackbox and others. i3 commands have quickly become muscle memory and I don't look back.

> Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar with a nice battery/volume/wifi etc. indicator?

I've been using bumblebee-status for that and it works like a charm. It's very modular too: https://github.com/tobi-wan-kenobi/bumblebee-status

here are a couple of dotfiles:

.config/i3/config: https://pastebin.com/n9rAWNhf

.config/i3/scripts/i3exit https://pastebin.com/CxETEW9H

I highly recommend to use i3-save-tree to dump the json into a file (e.g. workspace_[number].json) to get your terminals (or any other applications) set up when logging in exactly the way you want.

sometimes the json needs editing (here is what it would look like in my setup):

.config/i3/workspace-1.json https://pastebin.com/7VGbQShy

Homestly, nothing changed. It's just (imo) hard to figure out yourself if nobody tells you that it's possible.

The other way around is also possible btw (starting gnome/mate/xfce and starting i3 right at login. I personally preferred the parents way as well though (using xfce though)

You won't be using Wayland with i3 however, and weren't they going to prefer that with Ubuntu 20 and onwards?

I find the i3 documentation excellent.

On Ubuntu Mate, when you install i3, the login manager let you select it. There is nothing special to do.

i3 doesn't work on wayland. I have heard sway is a great alternative. I will have to try it one day!

I have been using this setup since around 2014. At the time I used Gnome 2. And switched to Ubuntu Mate whenever Ubuntu switched to Unity/Gnome 3 (I am not even sure which one it is now). It has always been rock solid. i3 never crashed on me. And you can hot-reload it anyway. I last rebooted my work laptop 103 days ago. It goes to sleep few times per day. And the battery last about 10h (down from 15h when it was brand new).

For starting application I use a launcher called rofi via a shortcut. For status indicators and so on, I have configured the i3 status bar (i3bar) to give me battery status, cpu usage, different timezones of interest etc. The only fancy thing I did, was to use cute unicode glyph to indicate charging status ().

i3bar has a "system tray" section. Where nm-applet will dock its wifi indicator/control icon. And other chat and conference applications will dock theirs little icons.

I have no problem with any windows. You can customize everything either statically in the config or on the fly. For example, my chats applications are always moved to the scratch space area when running. I can summon them with a shortcut at any time from any desktop. I also have a shortcut to mark any floating window as sticky across any virtual desktop. This is useful for video conferencing, to keep the video visible at all time. Etc.

I just started diving into i3 a few weeks ago. This is using a VMWare Fusion VM and Fedora 31. So I'm not fully evaluating things like volume, brightness, but battery/charging indicators work. Most of the instructions I followed were ~4 years old and worked almost out of the box. A few minor things have changed, like most people have switched from Compton to Picom, but the old packages are still there and work (unless you need newer features/bugfixes).

Windows seem to work as expected. Dialogs/pop ups show up as floating windows, but everything else worked well as a tiled window. Fullscreen worked fine. I haven't used a wide variety of apps. Mostly a few browsers and terminals, but I was doing some Qt dev in it, so I was playing a bit with windowing.

> Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar...That work both when I click on them and via keys...

From what I've seen of i3, all of the status bars are text printed from a separate program that gets executed periodically. This makes it very flexible and with things like font-awesome you can have emoji and icons, but afaik you can't click or have pop ups. Other tiling WMs, like AwesomeWM, will do this.

https://regolith-linux.org/ solves much of what you’re asking.

If windows don’t behave, I put them in floating mode with Super-f or Super-shift-f to toggle. As you say, full screen when they shouldn’t be, or vice versa. In practice, the only app I have issues with is Zoom.

The i3bar implementation, includes battery charge, network info, etc. a click takes you to gnome-settings, where you can make changes. One of the few changes I make to i3.conf is to move the bar to the top. Personal preference.

If you tried it and liked tiling before, regolith is worth a shot. It’s pretty well done.

I'll have to give this a try. I do something similar but with gnome[0]. However, I have run into some weird issues when opening the gnome control center which results in it crashing.

[0] https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome

Replying to this so I can find this later.

You can use the "favorite" link at the top, beside the article title.

Thanks! Didn't realize that existed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com