I was using i3 Manjaro for more than 2 years… While I’m completely sold to Manjaro… I want to change from i3 for a couple of reasons.
First, I want to say that there’s nothing wrong about i3 and it did the job wonderfully without any trouble. It just woked!
Here are the reasons I want to change:
The main reason is about the fact that I started to work in different kind of environments/work and I want to have different “desktops” for them… By desktop I mean a set of windows/applications (not the DE itself)… You know the thing we have in Cinnamon or XFCE or any other DE I guess (also on Windows and MacOS) where we can define a set of applications to some “desktops” and then we can switch from one desktop to another.
Unfortunately i3 doesn’t allow that and it became somehow important for my workflow to switch context.
Ideally I want something that enable me to switch desktops and at the same time allowing me to have a windows tilling management system.
However I just happen to noticed that more than having a windows tiling management system what I really need is a DE that allows me to switch from one app/window to another with the keyboard, but also for example moving one window from one monitor to another still with the keyboard while keeping them fullscreen)
Another reason is about the visual feeling. While the default of i3 is great and I never had the need to change anything (because I didn’t want to bother), when I think about it, (and since I want to change anyway) there were some things that was not optimal. For example, the default terminal looks so… 90’. No emoji (and bizarre unicode characters for the prompt) support on terminal like all the screenshots I saw from MacOS users… Had trouble to install fonts (still unable to make FiraCode working on VSCode)…
So basically that’s it… So I can really switch for any other “flavor”…
I’ll be very happy to hear any suggestions!
Thanks!
Hi! Not sure if I’m understanding you well but i3wm also has the workspaces feature. Are you using it? → i3wm workspaces
Anyway, if you are looking for a DE without loosing tiling windows capabilities, then Manjaro Gnome with PopShell enabled is your thing. It’s already integrated and you can enable/disable it whenever you want. → Pop Shell
Hey!
I probably did a bad job explaining my need… But what I’m considering a workspace in regular DE is not the workspace that i3 is referring to.
In my usage (with multiple monitors 3 or 4) all my apps are alone on their own workspace (some stick to a particular monitor), and I’m using i3 shortcuts to manage them (jump, move, close, etc.).
The problem is that I can’t group them and make each group of workspaces (across all the monitors) appear alone. Which is what actual “workspace” of regular DE allows…
So what I want to do now is to use a regular DE (e.g. KDE) and was thinking about using some kind of trick to manage my windows… For example I discovered that https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/afumok/which_kde_tiling_script_to_use/
So I started to look at the presentation video available on the download page of KDE Plasm edition…
And…
Indeed!!!
I said myself I’ll also take a look at other flavors presentation…
And the Gnome features blew my mind!!!