What does the Manjaro i3 Community Edition actually contain?

Hi all!

This is probably a very stupid question, but my Google-Fu seems too weak to answer it.

I use i3 exclusively on my work machines, by way of installing the XFCE edition and then manually switching to i3 and importing my 300-line config file. At home, however, I am basically forced to stick to XFCE (or currently GNOME because who needs their RAM) because getting i3 to work with the various multimedia options (multiple cameras, speakers, bluetooth, display setup, friggin’ function keys) is a pain.

So, my question is: in what way is installing the i3 Community Edition different from installing the official XFCE edition, installing i3, and then deleting XFCE? Would the Community Edition somehow magically solve my multimedia problems by allowing me to use the nice graphical Manjaro settings from the other editions? For example, my current solution for switching audio output devices is a bash script that invokes dark pulseaudio magic to disconnect and reconnect all audio streams. Much as I like working in the command line, the “right click on the speaker icon and select the device from the list” approach is a lot more comfortable.

So I guess my real question is: can I have my tiling cake and eat it too?

PS: This is a completely unrelated question, but maybe some i3 god will read this by chance: my i3 setup closely mirrors vim, with an insert mode and motion chains. However, since the i3 config syntax is pretty much the opposite of Turing complete, I achieve this by running a perl script to generate a “sufficiently deep” tree of possible keystroke combinations that are then written to the actual config file. While that does work flawlessly, it makes it almost impossible to combine with other people’s configuration options. Is there a better way to do this?

Hello,

Out of curiosity, not mine, yours, did you look at what manjaro-i3-settings provides ? :grinning:
More about each profile here: https://gitlab.manjaro.org/profiles-and-settings/desktop-settings

If you install i3 after xfce and want to properly switch to it with manjaro defaults, then you replace manjaro-xfce-settings with the i3 one, mentioned above, and you copy everything from /etc/skel/ to your home.
Once you do that, you might have to re-tweak the xfce desktop …

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I did not but shall now, thank you! I assume the community edition basically does what you describe without the added step of installing manjaro-xfce-settings first?

I sometimes wonder how on earth I can debug customers’ arcane apache problems and still have not an inkling about how my own desktop environment works.

Yes, it has all included and set for use.

Well, IT is a very wide field and with specifics. Like in medicine, a good ophthalmologist will not do as good as dentist … :slight_smile:

Thank you for your very quick help! I think I’ll just install the Community Edition on a test machine and see whether that does what I want. How easily can I merge my existing configs (mostly mode and keybind related stuff) into the provided ones?

Edit: Also, I should figure out how the quote button works. But yes, that’s actually why I love working in IT. I have yet to go a week on the job without facing a puzzle I have never seen before. It only annoys me when all I want to do is to watch a movie on my own computer :wink: