Quite enjoying Ubuntu Budgie. Seems to be a little lighter than stock Ubuntu and with fewer issues? I don't know. I did a full install instead of upgrading in place. Luckily the laptop doesn't hold a lot of files.
I have settled in nicely to Plasma for my work machine. The project has matured a LOT in the last couple of years, and I can't help but shake my imaginary rhetorical pom-poms at their success.
On my home machine, it's almost always tiling window managers. I just love the clean, pseudo sci-fi look and incredible efficiency.
Some of my previous attempts at #ricing#synthwave and #tiling window managers... I have to claim temporary insanity for some of it, but some of my machines still look like this, lol. (But not my work machine anymore! That got TOOO crazy)
@RL_Dane Pretty! I'm a corporate drone so we use Windows 10 and I have zero feelings about it. It's their laptop and I don't care about it except for the fact that I need it working so I can work. They deal with it, and I just keep it safe. And do my work on it, of course.
I'm glad I have the flexibility of setting up my own laptop and putting whatever I want on it (very small company).
I still had to learn to be a bit more cautious in my choices, as I had a couple really not-fun nights where arch-derivatives nuked my grub & luks config and I had to back up, re-install, restore, and re-setup everything.
@RL_Dane Oh my gosh! See, that's the "advantage" of being a corporate drone contractor... they send you a laptop, you plug it into your monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and you're good. They deal with absolutely everything. I use all my own peripherals because I'm a mouse/keeb snob. Ahem.
I think if it's well set-up, then I probably wouldn't care that much, but honestly, Debian and KDE has been rock solid for me the past few months. I've had zero real issues. It's a surprisingly easy-to-use distro for the reputation it has, and the new version's inclusion of optional non-free drivers in the normal installer and base install really helps make it usable to a lot more people who otherwise would lose a lot of hardware like some wifi cards.
@RL_Dane I could never grok tiling window managers. I always seemed to get lost in settings and whatnot. For now, I'm into Budgie. I might try Kubuntu in the next update cycle. I tend to wander back to straight Ubuntu with Gnome. I like the flexibility of #linux
@gamerchick02@RL_Dane I delayed as long as I could and even flirted with the Gnome tiling extension before diving right in. Once you start playing with sway configs you'll never want to go back. Promise.
When @system76's upcoming #COSMIC desktop is released and stable, it's going to be a dangerous gateway drug to tiling window managers -- most of the tiling features plus fairly intuitive and mouse-usable (until you learn the keybinds ;)
@RL_Dane@justdan@system76 I should give Pop another go. I was using it for awhile on here and then I didn't use the laptop for.... awhile and it got behind in updates. Then I had trouble updating it. Then I put Ubuntu on it lol!
Nothing against Pop, but I'd probably wait until they come out with an update. I'm not sure if they're upgrading it to 24.04 or just holding off until the new #COSMIC is ready.
Rome wasn't built in a day. I'll wait to try it out when it's ready ;)
But the current gnome-based Cosmic shell is also pretty good, and has a lot of the same features.
Yeah, the onboarding for tiling wms is not easy. Fortunately for me, my first experience was with the old #i3wm community build of #Manjaro (yes, yes, boo, hiss, arch folks, get it out of your system, lol). It booted you into a very basic screen with just a basic infobar, but they used conky to both give you a small system info panel but also a panel where the basic keybinds are spelled out for you, and they had one that opened up a PDF document with ALL the keybinds.
That really helped me get up and running far more comfortably than if I had just been plopped into a completely empty screen like tiling wms like to do by default.
@RL_Dane Yeah I think that was my problem. I never really got comfortable and spent more time fiddling with settings. Right now? Budgie is "just working" and I'm pleased that I'm up and running with it within a couple hours of install, setup, updates, and installing the programs I need from the software center.
Tiling WMs are crazy great for laptops for two reasons:
A minimum of screen real estate wasted on what you don't need RIGHT NOW
A minimum of aggravation fiddling with the trackpoint, trackpad, or even mouse!
Want to jump to the next window? Boom.
Arrange them all horizontally? Boom.
All windows in tabs like a big browser? Boom.
Send them all to another workspace and start over where you're at right now? Boom, boom, badda-boom. lol
@gamerchick02@RL_Dane on Ubuntu I've recently switched from Gnome to QTile, and I'm loving it. However, it has become apparent how much hand-holding Gnome does, which I'm now missing. Simple things I took for granted like being able to switch which wifi access point I'm connected to. I now do that with a CLI command. And everything in the Gnome settings app, I have to find and install another little app for each item.
@gamerchick02@RL_Dane having said that, I still find the pros of tiling WM outweigh the cons, and wouldn't go back. The pros being:
Filling the screen with exactly what you need to see and nothing more, without obscuring things
Clean modern look
The boom-bada-boom stuff that @RL_Dane mentioned.
But for each person, let them use whatever WM they are most comfortable with (the joy of Linux is that we can choose that sort of thing)
@toby1kenobi@gamerchick02@RL_Dane I use a hybrid approach with Plasma + Tiling Manager plugin. It has some edge cases but allows me to have the best of both worlds. I have it setup so that I can minimize windows into the tray if I want them out of the TM workflow temporarily or i just switch to float and move around. But still have plasma for notifications, tray, etc.
What I basically did was set up shortcuts to mimic some tiling options, but without a full tiling plugin (and I didn't find 5.27's tiling mode particularly useful, but I'm glad they're trying ;)
Meta+HJKL will move the window to snap against other windows' edges and the edges of the screen, I have a binding to go to a desktop, to send a window to a desktop, to maximize, and a couple other window management things. ;)
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