My i3wm environment
My computer is my virtual workplace and living room. It needs to be functional and cozy. The big desktop environments are too opinionated and restricting in the way how I am supposed to use my computer. i3 helps me to take the power back.
I want to control this ...
mainly with this ...
and i3 is really great for that.
I have been pushing around windows on a screen for literally decades now and it got a little bit tiring at some point. A tiling window manager takes away a lot of that window pushing by always opening applications maximized and giving the user complete control over layout and navigation with the keyboard. After a week of complete agony with that new way of doing stuff on a computer I started to enjoy it and now there is no way back. I like the way I can manipulate windows and navigate between them with the keyboard. The absolute killer feature of i3 is how graceful it lets you handle multi monitor setups.
As i3 is "only" a window manager, there is a lot of stuff that needs to be taken care of that is usually part of a fully fledged desktop environment. All of a sudden things you took for granted are gone. But I want auto mounting, power management, network management, program launchers and a nice panel with lots of little icons and stuff. There are two approaches to deal with that: either add everything yourself by mixing and matching daemons from DEs and self made scripts or use a desktop environment that can use i3 as a window manager.
In my first setup I used the first approach and ended up with a combination of i3 standalone with the gnome-settings-daemon and some self built little scripts. Then I played with XFCE as the host using i3 as the window manager, but now I am back to a more minimalistic setup.
TBD (first stumps are here)