I am potentially going to be able to put Linux on my work PC soon, have been using it on my personal PC and laptop quite happily with hyprland ontop of NixOS

Thinking of using NixOS for my work machine as well, however I don’t want to use hyprland or even Wayland as I need this machine to be stable and reliable (Nvidia GPU)

Is I3 still the best option for this or are there better alternatives? (leaning towards I3 ontop of KDE)

I’m also somewhat tempted to just go GNOME with the forge extension as it seems the most reliable, though the tiling on that extension is far from perfect

  • dream_weasel
    1•10 months ago

    Interesting. As a dwm guy I was unaware of ewmh standards. Have you used dwm to be able to compare? I love dwm, but it does behave in some cagey ways at times.

    • www-gem
      1•10 months ago

      I used dwm for few years before moving to bspwm.

        • www-gem
          2•10 months ago

          You know how hard it is to explain personal preferences when we talk about tiling WM but, as I mentioned in my first post, I would say that bspwm offer some further granularity. I didn’t thought that was possible after using dwm but to come back to my example I have bspwm listening to the state of my media player. Everytime it becomes floating, bspwm resize the window, place it on a specific position, and add a border to it. This is just one example. Also, even though you can use it with any tiling WM, sxhkd has been developed with bspwm in mind and offers the best keybindings management I’ve ever tested. Thanks to chords, several commands can be associated to independent keybindings within the same piece of code like so:

          control+{_,shift+}{1-9}
   bspc {desktop -f,node -d} '^{1-9}' --follow

          Control and a number will switch you to a workspace. If you also press Shift the active window will be sent to a given workspace.

          • dream_weasel
            1•10 months ago

            I’m already using sxhkd with dwm but it’s probably underdeveloped. I want something like that above but with an additional hotkey to change send the active window to a workspace and then switch to that workspace but I haven’t worked it up. I debated using a QMK tapdance feature for that but have never switched to my QMK keyboard.

            I guess to get at my real question, dwm (or maybe more accurately some of the applications I run) generate windows in weird ways. Zoom for instance doesn’t generate notifications for things like unstable wifi, but rather tiles a new window for 2 seconds which is REALLY annoying. Also the window swallowing feature is pretty finicky for things like (n)vim+latex in continuous compiling situations.

            It’s all fixable… But it’s just a massive headache since (on my work pc) changing a dwm config means logging out and back in to see the results.

            • www-gem
              2•10 months ago

              I would need to go back to my old dwm config file but I think what you’re looking for is this patch. In bspwm this is achieved with the “follow” option as shown in my example.

              To restart dwm without login out and back in you’ll need this in your .xinitrc:

              while :; do
    ssh-agent dwm
done

              Then whenever you kill dwm with kill -HUP $(pidof -s dwm) it will actually be reloaded. Seems like there’s also 2 patches to do that now (note that they both mention the above method as well).
              https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/restartsig/
              https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/selfrestart/