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Window Manager Withdrawl
🕑 Added 2024-06-18 06:13:50 +0000 UTCI'm a window manager guy. I cut my teeth on the likes of i3 and DWM, I even found myself liking Xmonad despite my dislike of Haskell. I adore almost everything about Window Managers. The workflow suits me, the customization and the thrill of building your own environment thrills me, and the community is highly enjoyable.
But for the last month and a half, I've eschewed my true home. I've spent most of my time in Gnome (shudder) with a bit of time spent in the perpetually buggy, yet feature-rich, KDE Plasma.
And I miss WMs. A lot.
But, as I said in a video about a month ago (as I write this), I need stability in my life. And yes, there are WMs that are stable, I tend to tinker with my window managers, and therefore make them unstable. I could stop that and be in a stable place, but that'd remove part of the fun.
I watched a video from [Chris Titus Tech](https://youtu.be/tcQRVOMGXrk?si=FNgPZjoWfMUB0Rnb) where he showed off his very simple setup of DWM, and it looked amazing. The problem is that I couldn't do a setup that simple and be very happy with it. I'd want more and that'd lead to instability, and that's what I am trying to avoid.
But I know myself pretty well. I know that it won't be too long before the call of the WM will bring me crawling back. The question is, how long and which one will I go to?
Wayland seems to be a part of my life now, which is going to seriously limit my choices. Hyprland is really the only option there that I enjoy. Sway has too many quirks that I don't care for, so that's basically out of the running. I could do something like riverwm or dwl, but both seem to be less maintained than Hyprland and I worry about their longevity given that the communities surrounding them are much smaller.
I could go back to Xorg, I suppose, but that'd be a hassle too. I don't know yet. I don't need to make the decision now, but it's something that is percolating in the back of my mind. As I get deeper into this Gnome challenge, for the lack of a better word, I miss my WMs more and more. This DE workflow just doesn't lend itself to productivity. I can't really say I've been less productive since switching, but it all feels less rewarding. I feel more like my computer is just a tool now, instead a tool and something fun to tinker with.
That feeling of enjoyment is one of the reasons why I've been so unhappy with Gnome. There isn't like there is anything wrong with Gnome itself, not really. It is perfectly capable of doing the thing it was designed to do. I can do everything I need to do on this setup easily. But the things I want to do, the things I used to look forward to doing on my computer, those are gone. I'm here only to work, and then I no longer want to be here.
It's sad, if I'm being honest. It feels like I've had to make an adult choice, and despite it being the right choice, it also made me less happy.
To me, that means that eventually something has got to give. Either I'll just stick around on Gnome forever and slowly force it into something that I enjoy using (or maybe do the same with Plasma or XFCE) or - and this is more likely - I will go back to a WM and be happy once again on a slightly less stable system.
This blog post has rambled all over the place, so I will wrap it up. But I think it expresses just how conflicted I've been about this change in my life. I want stability, I have saved time by not tinkering. It hasn't really made me more productive, but there has been time saved. But I've also lost the enjoyment I used to feel when booting up my computer for the day. It's something that I miss, and I kind of want it back.
I hope everyone has a great week,
Matt, signing off from Gnome land.
Comments
Matthew Weber
The funny thing about this, is that I am using Hyprland for a little while, and I find that I miss Gnome more than I thought I would.
Karol
Some food for thought: Where does the instability come from? - in the case of Hyprland and KDE it's probably at least in part that you're running a rolling distro - in the case of a WM, you say it's your tinkering (which I guess means hyprland is double-danger in your case) You probably need to run some LTS, if you really want stability. But you're on this 2 year challenge (unless Leap doesn't count as a change). If you go with a WM, maybe there are a couple of options to create "tinkering protection". Like, keeping everything in a repo, that you can roll back. git commit -m "it's still not broken". That requires some discipline though, unless you can automate somehow. The thing I like with some WMs at least is that they don't always bork 100% and log you out. Often you can reload, and all the applications stay running. So the repo rollback thing might work with a reload. Here's a wacky thought - you're a distrobox fanboy - can you run a whole DE or WM in distrobox that's running and LTS underneath? Maybe the mixture of distrobox, wayland, multiple screens, and podcasting is asking too much. Actually now that I've typed that out fully, I realise you'll be in linux god mode if you manage all that. Anyway, just some ideas. If you do nothing I can only empathise about Gnome. I use it for work a bit because I use a lot of different machines, and it's the default. But it feels like having to use a DOS prompt after using bash. Clunky... I don't know.
