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?