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Comment by justaguy88 | Hacker News Reader

What's their strategy here? Do they hope that their window manager will drive hardware sales?

Well, their additions to Gnome in PopOS have been very well received. So..maybe. The "power user" space (especially the non-cli oriented one) is really lacking out-of-the-box solutions rn.

It wouldn't be the first time tailored software drove hardware sales.

I am genuinely wondering how big is the intersection between "non-cli users" and "power users" on Linux

Considering this is a tiling window manager, rather high Id say.

Im a power user, so to say, and Ive been using pop shell for about 6-9 months now. I love not having to write my own scripts to do the most basic tasks in sway anymore.

Things like my calendar works throughout the desktop without me having to wrangle various things.

> I love not having to write my own scripts to do the most basic tasks in sway anymore.

Speaking of it there's now Sway edition of Manjaro and it looks very good

I've been using Pop OS for a bit over a year now and it's perfect. I could totally see whole teams of developers being sold on switching to Linux as primary dev environments. There's zero futzing around with configs and such to get things just right--it's great right out of the box. I haven't had that kind of experience since MacOS X but this is even better since it's just real Linux and stuff like docker containers, etc. run natively without VM overhead.

Yes? The lack of a workable window manager is one of the biggest things that prevents me from using a Linux laptop as a daily driver.

It makes sense that System76 would work toward a serviceable Linux desktop OS. For the same reason it makes sense that Apple develops MacOS but charges no license fees.

Cinnamon is brilliant, it’s been my main choice since I moved from XFCE, it’s a modern version of the classic desktop.

For me it’s more serviceable than anything else but as always ymmv but as a developer desktop that I do all my computing on Fedora Cinnamon is damn close to perfect, there is little I can think of to improve it.

I Use Cinnamon on Fedora as well.

I agree with you serviceable is a good way to describe it. It is no frills and does what I want.

Yep - they've nailed the "Just give me a classic desktop but make it feel modern" the workspace switcher, alt tab behaviour, expose stuff, it's all modern but it also just works and stays out the way.

It's really excellent if you want your desktop to be..a desktop.

"a workable window manager" sounds to me like you just mean "I want a macOS clone and I don't want to learn anything else even if it's more efficient". If I got it wrong, I'd recommend sway or any other tiling wm that adapts perfectly to laptop limitations of 1 screen and no mouse included.

Desktop workflow is a highly personal thing. I've tried to make tiling WMs work numerous times but it never sticks, I always go back to a more traditional floating-first setup with titlebars and the like.

Right but to be fair to the parent - tiling window managers are the only kind that are superior to the Mac, and they are simply not to everyone’s preference.

The benefits of tiling window managers are mostly realized when you use them with a very structured workflow. For example, one project per screen/desktop. I use i3 this way and I dedicate one desktop per patch I am working on, including the editor (vim in my case) and the the command line for the git branch.

Without such rigor, they can end up being more cumbersome and confusing than a traditional window manager. For the same reason, I specifically don't use a tiling wm for less structured tasks (i.e web surfing) because it would be too annoying otherwise. I so still tile all the windows in my traditional wm though.

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