So for a long time pretty much every computer used the traditional like windows layout with moveable windows that minimized or maximized and had a taskbar and start menu and whatnot. You had some minor changes with Mac and stuff, but now you can really have some radically different ways to use a computer.
Personally I have differing preferences if I’m using a laptop or a desktop.
On my desktop I prefer a dock and to use the mouse to click around. More of the windows style. Then on a laptop (which I use most often) I use a heavily gesture based navigation.
Currently I have Gnome modified so that when I am in a program, like the web browser I’m in typing this, it is full screen. The top bar is hidden, and there’s no dock of any kind. Not even one that pops up when I move the mouse to the edge of the screen. Instead I have everything for navigation hidden inside the task view. I swipe up on the trackpad with 3 fingers to bring it up. That’s how I see time, battery life, and the other topbar stuff too. If switching quickly between two things I put one of them in a 2nd desktop and use a 3 finger side swipe to move back and forth.
I’m curious to know what other unique or highly custom navigation methods people are using on Linux. I know tiling window managers are pretty popular. Is there a general consensus on what’s best these days? Or is everyone doing slightly different things?
I prefer a top bar that contains global menu, system tray, launcher icon and applications at around 30px height. I also remove titlebars on windows because I use keyboard shortcuts for all of those actions.
I actually spent a good amount of time trying to remove title bars from gnome the other day and on the version im currently on it seems impossible. Unless I want to potentially break a bunch of stuff to do it anyway.
Tiling Window Manager, no bar, fullscreen terminal with btop on workspace 1, 40% split ortholinear keyboard, neovim, vimium in librewolf, vim in shell…vim keybindings everywhere.
Ever since I tried tiling window managers, I can’t go back to traditional style of handling windows anymore. Nowadays I’m on KDE, but I use extensions to automatically tile every window I open and close. Single applications are stretched to fullscreen, and every opened up window would then scale the applications to half screen and so on. There are different logics and algorithms (known as layouts) how this can work. Multi virtual desktops are a must with this philosophy, when opening and grouping multiple applications. In general automatic tiling (with manual intervention and rules for specific windows) does have its own problems sometimes.
Recently, and I mean since yesterday, I changed the philosophy to a different philosophy. I’m currently on an endless tiler, where windows are opened up and can be scrolled from left to right on the screen. The most prominent of these type of window managers would be Niri, but I use an extension on KDE to emulate this behavior.
Same here, I started with hyprland and every time I go back to KDE or gnome, I feel like I’ve went back 10 years. I use the base sway package in the fedora spin, and after customizing keybinds it works great.
I liked the concept of Niri, but found some bugs, and now I run Gnome with PaperWM and a couple more customizations. Love my setup.
I feel really lost with all these users talking about window managers, hotkeys and specific terms. I feel like a rookie😅
If someone has a video comparing a lot of different workflows, I’d love to watch it. I feel like my workflow could still be improved.
Currently I use Gnome on my Surface Go (hooked to a big screen) daily driver, Cosmic on my old MacBook Pro and KDE on my Steam Deck (hooked to the same big screen).
I love Gnome and how I’ve configured (with an extension) every program to open on a specific workspace at startup while just using gestures or keyboard to move between workspaces.
I’ve kind of reproduced this with KDE and Cosmic, but it’s not as perfect.
KDE doesn’t follow the window rules I’m setting and Cosmic doesn’t let you automatically start programs on a specific workspace.
You probably know a lot of the stuff just not the terms for it. If you are interested in like tiling or scrolling window managers you can look up videos on those terms and see them. The difference between them and a DE is that they are literally JUST a window manager. They don’t come with the other features of a DE. You basically won’t have a GUI unless you build one out. This gets you into the realm of like Linux ricing. Where people spend tons of effort and time making their computers look and function in a unique way.
Yeah I guess I should do this in order to learn more about window managers and hotkeys.
Still I know that I need a DE for sure for now. Even on a DE, I find the explanations about how to use them kind of lacking.
For instance, Gnome doesn’t tell you that you can spread 7 programs on 7 workspaces if I’m not mistaken.
At the beginning, I was really using a kind of Windows workflow instead of discovering the full power of Gnome…
This applies to the other DEs I use too…
On a laptop, I like tiling and heavy use of workspaces with touchpad/touchscreen gestures. I also like having the fold back over itself tablet mode and stylus input.
On a desktop, I like more standard floating windows across multiple monitors with lighter use of workspaces, controlled by keyboard shortcuts.
Bash is awesome. If I ever go blind I could still use linux comfortably with text-to-speech thanks to the terminal. I love that I learned this.
On laptop, full tiling like i3/sway. I hate inserting a mouse to use a laptop, which tiling lets me avoid.
On desktop, tiling’s good but doesn’t really feel like a requirement. Something like COSMIC where you can choose between both works better.
Back in the days when I used a laptop, I would have really needed tiling window managers. Wish I knew this in 2010 or so.
I’ve tried a window manager once and now can’t go back. It’s to a point where I start using my Linux keybinds on my Windows laptop at work.
I tried KDE and Gnome but those weren’t really for me. I did like the polished end-to-end experience you get with those desktop environments though.
I was tiling window manager user too (mainly qtile), nowadays I’m on KDE using extensions to emulate those tiling features. Krohnkite is pretty good, once setup with all the keys and other optional stuff like removing window titles and so on. Recently even switch to a Niri like extension, called Karousel, but this one doesn’t support multi monitors. So I end up getting the KDE set with a tiling experience.
COSMIC will have a builtin support for tiling too, with a seamless integration. So maybe this could be something you explore too.
KDE for me with floating windows. For certain things, I’ll use s terminal, but most of my navigation is through KDE and some keybinds I set up on a keypad.
I really like the terminal, most of my use is a web browser or terminal with tmux.
I use hot keys like cray, but I haven’t found a tiling window manager I like yet (I don’t like when things shift automaticallly, it breaks my mental model), and I haven’t found a Linux desktop with the keyboard ergonomics of macOS.
But 95% of my time is with full screen terminals, so I’m actually pretty okay. I have customized vim and tmux to the hilt, and I like that.
Do you use the terminal for launching other programs or are you doing things from inside the terminal itself?
No, I doubt really use it for launching apps. On most OSes now you press cmd/windows/super button and it opens a text field to launch apps.
Mostly I use CLIs or TUIs in the terminal for 80% of my computer use, and a many apps that are just browser tabs now.
My vim config has dozens of custom hot keys and functions for all sorts of things. Same with tmux and my dot files or user local script bin, they’re full of utilities and scripts and customizations.
That’s never going to help me organize a photo album or be a good existence for checking my email (I know I can check my email from a tui, but I don’t want to)
I don’t like when things shift automaticallly, it breaks my mental model
What about niri?
I tried this one but I never finished configuring it, I should try again though.
My Linux journey over 1.5 years has been fedora gnome, then cosmic, then KDE, then nix+niri but doing both at one was a mistake. After that I just decided to embrace KDE and learn nix, and that’s where I am many months later.
Using Waybar I have a detailed clock and a sound widget on bottom right corner of my screen, and left of that is space for “systray” icons.
My windows have a title bar, that show the icon and title, and a close button.
No task bar or other navigation elements on the screen or the windows.
I make heavy use of Alt+Drag actions for resizing moving windows around and constantly have windows rolled up so only the title bar is showing. I never minimize windows and rarely use fullscreen.
For accessing applications in a convenient way I use the root menu on desktop rightclick and the client menu on middleclick.
The whole setup is fully customized and built from ground up to be as least annoying and intrusive as possible.
This is basically my setup since ca. 15-20 years now. Started with Openbox on Debian and since 2008 Arch Linux, and around 2-3 years ago I switched over to labwc on Wayland which allowed me to re-create what I used on Openbox.
You seem to have a ton of screen real estate to work with. Is your monitor really big? I feel like using a small laptop influences what I do a lot since I’m trying to maximize my screen space.
My desktop computer monitor is a 28 inch 4K screen, so yes, it is on the upper end of the median screen size, I guess. I ran Hyprland on my laptop (13 inch 1080p) for some time but I like my environment harmonized, so I use the same configuration there, too.
For easier management I make use of labwc’s areas and snapping feature to have windows proportionally the same size on both screens. The areas use percentages by default, which makes it quite easy. I have top, bottom, left, and right, the four corner quarters and two different center regions.
On my laptop I usually only use the center region for the browser.
Manual tiling/placement and focus with a full sized keyboard, giving me one-key-combo focus of any window on the screen, and exact placement/sizing. Unfortunately most window managers and compositors lack support for this. Tiling WMs are stubbornly self-arranging or only support swapping windows, which they’ll later rearrange.
i3 user detected. :D
Actually not… but I’ll have to check it out now!
i3wm https://i3wm.org/ however it’s X11 only, no Wayland support. Sway https://swaywm.org/ is a close replacement for i3, but for Wayland. Almost a drop in replacement. I didn’t use it for long time, because I actually wanted to have automatic tiling and i3 was too much manual work for my taste. But from the way you describe it, it reminded me how a typical i3 user would respond.
I seriously learned how to use computers on Windows XP, so any computer I set up for myself, I set up to be as similar to Windows XP as possible.
I changed my taskbar to be like the one in Haiku OS because I don’t like long taskbar.
Not even one that pops up when I move the mouse to the edge of the screen.
how do you do that?
With Gnome it’s the default to not have one on the desktop view. Then to remove the topbar you just use an extension. Just Perfection gives you a lot of UI tweak options.
thank you.
