I'm a Sway user and tiling wm evangelist, I absolutely do not want a suite of preinstalled software to come baked into my wm/compositor. I'm happy to install the software that I need.
If someone wants to distribute a complete Linux desktop with a tiling wm as default, that would be interesting, but a generic DE with a tiling wm to me seems like a waste of time.
I'm a Hyprland user and honestly, cobbling together a poor man's DE using half-baked amateur-ish GTK apps and copy-pasting Nerd Font icons no longer spark any joy for me. I'm basically ready to jump at the first sight of a viable alternative. I'm very optimistic about Cosmic DE in this regards.
Do you think that GNOME's web browser (Epiphany?) and KDE's web browser (Konqueror?) are better than Firefox and Chromium?
Do you think that GNOME Text Editor and KDE's text editor (Kate?) are better than Emacs?
The login manager, lock screen, taskbar, notification daemon, launcher, OSD, workspace overview, etc. In WMs (or WM-like compositors), you either have to cobble all of this together yourself or just give up and convince yourself that you're a minimalist.
Doing this kind of stuff was fun for a while, but these days I'm starting to crave for something actually good and polished.
Also Kate is better than Emacs as far as i'm concerned because it doesn't have its own weird UX and doesn't take reading a tutorial to figure out how to have a sidebar with a file browser in it :-P (i've long figure out how that is done on Emacs and use it occasionally because of custom language support elisp i wrote ages ago and don't want to bother rewriting but these days 99% of my plain text editing needs are covered by Kate).
(also FWIW i'm not using KDE/Plasma as my DE, in fact i'm using Window Maker instead of a DE at all, i just like some of KDE's utilities)
Things I miss:
- a scratchpad;
- toggling back and forth between desktops/workspaces with super+number (e.g. super+3 goes to desktop 3, but if I'm already on 3 I want to go back to the previous desktop);
- I also miss a bit the "manual" tiling from i3/sway (where you can choose where the next split will be). Krohnkite is DWM-style with predefined layouts (two columns, spiral, monocle...).
Maybe some of this can be done on Plasma/Krohnkite too (for the third I doubt but it's low priority), I haven't really looked into that.
* Make it work with a graphical login * Make screen sharing work out the box without having to set env vars and faff with xdg-desktop-portal * xdg-desktop-portal generally, the -wlr version doesn’t implement some things which means you have to have a fallback * desktop notifications out of the box.
It takes longer to undo it than to start fresh.
Like yeah I could spend hours of my life trying to configure sway and waybar to my liking while getting some wayland compatible version of redshift going, or, I could just use popOs's gnome and get on with my life.
I used to love to fiddle with all those things when I was younger, and I used to hang out on r/unixporn and appreciate all the cool WMs, but at some point I realized I just wanted a working desktop that got out of my way and let me code.