I3: Improved Tiling Window Manager

Yeah this always gets overlooked for some reason. Other distros I periodically hit issues with something out-of-date; on Arch, I almost never do. And on the rare occasion that I do, installing the `-git` package from the AUR fixes it.

That's a remarkably off-base take. You're attributing qualities that linux has to things that linux exclusively has. Your entire rant about emulating the functionality of Hazel with scripts is something you can do with either operating system. The fact that hazel exists is because it lets people that have neither the time nor the disposition towards writing their own program for their own use case and still get a lot of the benefits of such. In fact, even those that do have a proclivity towards scripting their own maybe would rather do something else with their time.

> On Linux, you dream up the code in the language of your choice and it will work forever.

...I'm sorry, how is this exclusive to linux, exactly? You can do the exact same thing in MacOS, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. Also, maybe some people just don't want to fucking program every function and application they run on their operating system?

> Your learned skills will transfer one-to-one to programming you do for your job or hobby

While I understand that there exists a much higher population of programmers on HN than on other websites, please stop assuming that 1) everyone here is one and 2) that everyone wants to spend their time writing software in their spare time and 3) even if they do like programming in their spare time, that they want to spend it writing automation scripts.

> instead of being weirdly specific and locked down to this one, overpriced app's clickity click interface.

What is overpriced to you is potentially someone else's pennies. I don't really think the jab at GUI interfaces is appropriate, either.

> Of course scripting is not exclusive to Linux, but it is the only OS that was and is built with it in mind.

Again, this is just plain ignorance.

I've had the exact same amount of major issues using either stable or rolling release distributions. Using one of the other just changes when/why I have to work around the distro.

Arch usually has more small "papercuts" I have to fix myself - often problems around suspend/power management or drivers, in my experience. Ubuntu and the likes I usually struggle either when I encounter some bug OOTB (meaning that won't get fixed in a timely manner because "stable") or once I need some package that's just not there. Having to figure out what are the damn dependency equivalents for some program I'm trying to compile that only has Arch instructions is never fun.

Obviously YMMV.

I used i3 for a while when unity had a really annoying multi-touch bug I could not work around.

The thing is? I never used much more than a simple L/R split that was available in any OS / WM forever. If I wanted to split more, it was usually in the terminal, and done via tmux or the term app.

Add to this, a full desktop environment will handle all sorts of things for you like brightness, volume controls, proper locking on sleep, a easily configurable toolbar, hot plugging an external display, etc. i3 handles none of these! It's left up to the user to google around and find a brightness command that actually works, or why pauctrl is muted on startup, or why the lock screen only locks on resume, not sleep, thus flashing your screen. It's death by a thousand cuts. I know i3 is a window manager, and it's 'not it's job' to handle this stuff, supposedly, but why could they not add the most common way people control brightness, volume, etc to the default config, and let people swap it all out if they wanted? It's a really frustrating experience.

For myself, I've went back to gnome. If someday I get a really massive display that benefits from complex tiling, I'll revisit i3, but I'll probably wind up using that awesome material shell for gnome and calling it a day.

https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/c8le62/gnome_mate...

For me, part of it was a touch of OCD about getting windows positioned just right. Especially terminal windows, I had to line them up, get them the same size, etc. I would spend a lot of time trying to get windows as large as possible, but not overlap, in order to use ALL the space of my monitor(s).

I tried out i3 for a while and generally liked it, but was never wizard-like with manipulating my tile stack. I could split horizontally and vertically, and swap around to a degree. Enough to get by and most importantly, line it all up and use all the space. ;)

These days, all the systems I use support the 98% use case I had for i3: either full screen, or vertical split (by dragging all the way right or left). I further discovered tmux so I can split a terminal window extra as needed. So, I haven't used i3 in a few years.

You mentioned you prefer lots of windows open? I'm 100% the opposite. I only want to see two at a time. At work I have two monitors and one is editor, the other is tmux'ed terminal, both maximized. Browser, maximized on one monitor. Document of some kind (pdf, etc.)? Maximized on the other monitor. At any time I'm selecting which two to see. Chat apps for group communication? I hide those because they are hugely distracting. (I check them now and then when I take a short break). At home I do something similar using virtual desktops, since I only have one monitor: browser in one virtual desktop, ebook or document in another, etc.