Linux Desktop Setup

But when I started working, I switched to Debian, maintaining a Gentoo was a bit costly, and when I wanted to try out something, compiling everything was really slow (you frequently have to wait a few hours).

I still use a minimal setup (dwm with some customization and helper scripts: https://github.com/kakwa/dwm-desktop), and frankly, once it's done, you barely have to touch it, I've not touched my setup in years.

Setups such as in the article aren't the result of "nerd times" and spending hours configuring just for fashion. They grow slowly over the years out of necessity and annoyance with your current setup.

> it's an OS, a GUI, it's the basis for getting real work done.

The basis for "getting real work done" is workflow. There is no need to be 100% efficient to be productive, but some people, like probably the writer of the article, like to push it to the upper limits, because they might be extra sensitive to "mouse lag" or some other reason.

There is also the extra perk of consistency. Due to their nature, xfce, GNOME, KDE change and consequently break things. Setups like in the article hardly ever change, even after major upgrades.

P.S. Also, as the writer mentions, Thinkpad x200: one of the finest GNU laptops ever. Real keyboard, all Fn keys work. It at a point where if software is too heavy to run on it, it's simply not worth running at this time. Any potential software advantages do not outweigh the superior compatibility and haptic of the hardware.

1) You can control it from the shell (and hence scripts and hotkeys). For example, `i3 "move to workspace prev"` moves the window to the previous workspace.

2) You can obtain a lot of information of the window manager state (all windows, their sizes, their tree structure, the marks, etc) from i3-msg in JSON format.

1 and 2 mean that the WM is very highly programmable via the programming language of your choice.

3) Workspaces are not fixed. Empty workspaces don't exist unless you're currently in them. You can move a window to a workspace of any name and it will get created. Empty a workspace and when you move away from it, it will be destroyed. This makes it very convenient to work with temporary workspaces.

4) Windows are arranged in a tree structure. Normal windows are leaves. Containers are the branches that take you to those leaves. Containers can be in 4 modes: vertical, horizontal, stacked, or tabbed. That last one means you can tab any set of windows. Why do so many applications implement tabbing when it should be the window manager's job? Stacked is very cool in that it's like tabbing, but the window title doesn't shrink with each added window you have in them. Anyway, this point means that you get a lot of flexibility in how you organize your windows.

5) The configuration gives you a lot of control. These are many small things, so I won't list them all, but as an example, I can put a colored prefix on window and container titles to remind me what they're about without having to focus on them and see their content. I can also match new windows by some criteria and have them appear in a container I tagged without them gaining focus. This is very useful for when I'm doing something in the shell that will cause a window (or multiple) to repeatedly appear but I don't want to lose focus from the shell and I don't want the new window(s) to appear on top of it. As an example of this, I may be running selenium tests which could cause a browser window to appear to show how the tests run. I may also be doing some ad-hoc statistics in octave (cli) and have graph windows appear.

Linux did lag in performance, but features like virtual desktops, notifications, transparency, and other things were easily a decade ahead of OSX and Windows.

I remember in 2008 in class, playing World of Warcraft via Wine in a window, while also taking notes, tailing logs, streaming music, and writing code, on a pentium III with 2G of ram. If I wanted full attention for WoW, I could go fullscreen, while xchat would still display my IRC messages along the top of the screen.

This simply was not possible on a Windows machine.

I loved to see people's faces light up and have them say "How did you do that??". Oh, I'm using Linux. Sliding windows, multiple terminals bound to hotkeys, and graphics that were not bound by some UX gatekeepers that are afraid to overwhelm people's senses.

I think it is good to play to your strengths. Linux will never be Windows or OSX.