I got into computers when there was no GUI.
Then years later I got a Win95 PC and I found the Windows GUI pretty good - although the rest of the OS was not. My personal Linux PC running Slackware 96 came with FVWM95 wich was a good approximation. So I switched to that.
That was just for graphical utilities of course - of which there weren't very many. I spent the rest of my time in the Linux console or in xterm using screen for convenience.
Fast-forward to today: I still do that. I still like the Win95 UI paradigm, so I run Mint / Cinnamon. But most of what I do with it is open a Gnome terminal, blow it up and start tmux - like screen but better.
And, ya know, for almost 3 decades, whether it's Mint or anything else I used, that's pretty much what I've been doing: running screen in a terminal in a Win95-like GUI. And it works fine for me.
I recently ordered a laptop that comes with Debian / Wayland and the Sway window manager installed by default. I learned a long time ago that it's often better to go with whatever is installed by default than try to reinstall everything and fight a system that wasn't designed for it.
The laptop will take a few weeks to get here. So to prepare for when it lands on my porch, I decided to get into Sway on my current machine, to get used to it. I figured even if I don't like it, at least that way I'll be comfortable with it, and I'll know whether it's acceptable as it is or whether I should spend the time installing something more Win95-like.
But my current machine doesn't run Wayland, just plain Xorg. 2 minutes of searching revealed that Sway is in fact i3wm for Wayland.
Great! I promptly installed i3 on my Linux Mint box, switch to it, fucked around with the config file for a few hours and... I love it! That's pretty much exactly what I do with Cinnamon anyway but quicker!
And just like that, I switch to i3. I felt right at home with it from the get-go. The whole Win95-like UI was just a familiarity: in fact, what I've always wanted was a tiling window manager.
And yes, I did spend a few hours - almost half a day really - configuring the thing exactly how I like. But if I'm honest, I probably spent just as much time with Cinnamon way back when I switched to that too. So it's no different really.
So the takeaway here is: even if you have decades-old die-hard habits and you don't want to change, you should expose yourself to change every once in a while: you might just get surprised 🙂
The one thing that I always wanted from i3/sway is to have windows outside to the side of my screen, so that I could have
|- browser@half screen size-||- editor@half screen size -||- PDF viewer@half screen size -|
When I'm writing some math thing. Then I could just scroll to the left or to the right depending on whether I'm looking something up and writing it down, or whether I'm editing what is already written down.
Long story short: PaperWM for GNOME
This really appealed to me too but I also want fixed workspace numbers and workspaces per monitor and paperwm shat itself on the former (Ubuntu, 22.04 and 24.04) and didn't appear to offer the latter as far as I could tell, or anything I could manage to work reasonably with multiple monitors.
Perhaps I really just didn't understand the intended workflow with workspaces and monitors but I couldn't find anything coherent. It seemed like the only option was either only workspaces on one of the monitors, or move workspaces in lockstep across all monitors (more a Gnome failing than a PaperWM failing). Neither of which made sense to me. So I scuttled back to i3 again in the end.
Welcome to the club - after starting to use window managers around 3 years ago at this point, I haven't gone back. Whenever I'm forced to use Windows or a regular DE, I start instinctively abusing virtual desktops feature lol
Hey!
Here's some sway dotfiles of mine incase they help: https://gitlab.com/_j/dotfiles
I have a similar approach but primarily in Emacs rather than a terminal. Tiling WMs — i3/Sway specifically — have definitely become home.
I've been through a bunch of tiling WMs after Ubuntu dropped Unity (where I had enjoyed some light pseudo-tiling but wanted more). I started with i3 but couldn't shake the feeling it was kind of impure and slightly inelegant. But every other one I tried had more annoyances and weirdness and I came back to i3. To me, i3 it is to tiling WMs as Python is to programming languages - nagging feelings of impurity, limitations, and grubby corners, but in the end it is very practical and gets the job done well and has been refined over the years to round off its rough edges.
Recently with things like PaperWM I thought perhaps I could get the benefits of being closer to mainstream, but after trying to get comfortable I just could not and am back on i3 and will switch to Sway eventually.
I3's model of workspaces per monitor, and semi-automatic tiling, semi-manual, and i3-msg, sometimes feels inelegant but is actually highly practical. You can add plugins like
autotilingto automate more, and powerful scripting behavior attainable throughi3-msgand Python bindings (I recommend if you start pipingi3-msgoutput throughjqto get info, just make the full jump to scripting in Python, it's easier in the long run).
