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comment by rob05c
rob05c  ·  3807 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Looking to try a new Linux distro. Suggestions?

I've been using Arch as my primary desktop for about a year now. I like it. It can be a pain to install, but once you do it's fairly low-maintenance.

I like that it only has what I need. It's like Gentoo: the base installation has pretty much just what you need to boot, and you add the rest.

The biggest reason I looked into it was the incredible support community. It seems like every time I google a Linux issue, the top results are Arch forums.

If you're OS-bored, might I also recommend a tiling window manager? I switched to i3 several years ago, and IMO it's incredible. I can't believe how long I lived with windowing.





user-inactivated  ·  3807 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Why did you decide to use i3 instead of a different tiling wm?

user-inactivated  ·  3806 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'll second i3. I started my tiling WM experience with ion3 years ago. It was miles better than anything I'd ever experienced. Eventually ion3 became obsolete, and I had to migrate to something else. I tried awesome and wmii, and ended up using wmii for about a year because of the scripting capabilities with its plan9 filesystem. Eventually the performance of wmii (most of it is tied together through Bash.. it's nasty) got to me and I had to switch. I tried awesome and i3, and i3 is everything that ion3 was (name is a coincidence, really) and then some. They keep improving it, too, it's not stagnant like any other of the minimalist WMs.

awesome is an option as well, I just personally do not prefer it. dwm isn't bad either, but it serves different purposes.

rob05c  ·  3807 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I tried a number of them when I first started looking, and a couple times since, but i3 seemed the easiest and most intuitive.

I've heard XMonad is fine once you get it configured, but configuration is a pain. i3 configuration is pretty easy. Binding a key looks like "bindsym $mod+Shift+Left move left" (move a window left) or "bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec xbacklight -inc 10" (make laptop brightness keys work, by executing the xbacklight app). It ships with a good default config too, so you don't have to write everything from scratch.

i3 has decent (though not perfect) mouse support, something a lot of tiling WMs are lacking.

i3 uses a tree to store windows internally, which affects how they move. Moving windows around feels very natural to me.

For the uninitiated: windowing managers are just that, not desktop environments. Which means you can use a tiling WM within a DE like Gnome or Xfce, if you want. I actually used i3 within Xfce for a bit, then with only the Xfce menu bar, but I found I just didn't need them.