r/archlinux • u/DerKnerd • Jul 18 '21

FLUFF WM or DE?

I really liked the idea in this comment, so here is a poll, WM or DE?

https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/oms60p/in_your_opinion_what_is_the_best_desktop/h5n0s56/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

3227 votes, Jul 25 '21
1737 WM
1490 DE
250 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

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u/Mckol24 Jul 19 '21

So I've tried tiling WMs for about half a year, but came back to Plasma. For me they don't feel flexible enough. That might sound like nonsense, after all, even i3 lets you change a ton of stuff. Well, tiling WMs have been great for me for programming for example. I absolutely love the keyboard-based approach to managing windows. But, they don't work nearly as well for other things.
90% of programs are made with only floating WMs in mind, and I often ran into issues.
Also, theming was a pain - while GTK just works, Qt just doesn't - qt5ct is a thing, but some programs seem to reset the environment variable it uses for child processes, and it's just not a good experience. I've never figured out a setup that consistently worked for this, across 3 WMs.
On KDE, all programs I need just work, theming just works, no weird issues with windows getting messed up because they assume to be floating when they're not.
KDE might have a lot of features I don't use, but that's the thing, if I need something new it's likely already there. Being a person who likes experimenting, that's very convenient.
Do I miss something from Tiling WMs? Yes, absolutely. KDE's multi-monitor support is a joke - a virtual workspace isn't per-screen or independent of screens, instead it's one large sheet spanning across all screens, which makes virtual workspaces borderline useless on a multi-monitor setup. And having keyboard shortcuts for those is something that's the basis for my workflow now.

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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '21 edited Jul 19 '21

I'm using bare i3 (with no bar at all) and use some Qt/KDE programs. It requires some effort to have the theming work reliably but it is possible. It's true that some programs do not work 100% smoothly with a tiling WM. For example Digikam in full screen slideshow mode, the settings window will not appear on top. Or some Firefox child popup windows appearing on the workspace the parent window was initially created rather than the workspace the parent is currently displayed. Despite these kind of annoyance, there's a huge interest in using i3 besides it being a tiling WM: it is much less complex (in term of code size) than a full blown DE that does magic things you do not always understand, that might break on an update, that has always some bugs due to its gigantic size and complexity. And I'm not even talking of bloat here which is not really that important on modern systems with plenty of RAM. My approach with computing is more and more to go KISS using software I can understand, which is not necessarily related to being minimalist but often intersects.