Hi!

Martin Steigerwald <martin@???> writes:

> Hi!
>
> As it popped up repeatedly in the KDE thread: Quite some of you use
> something different as KDE's Plasma. For various, I am sure, good reasons.
>
> I am curious: What do you use… and why? What are your practical
> experiences with what you use? Are there any challenges?
>
> [...]

Currently using sway after a while of using i3. The only reason that I
switched is to give Wayland the benefit of the doubt for a bit to see
how that goes. Quite okay so far as long as you also use xwayland for
applications that still require X11.

I think I have been using i3/sway for about three years now.

Major challenge is training (muscle) memory on the key bindings. These
are fully (re)configurable by the way.

I start it from .zlogin/.bashrc with something like

test "$(tty)" == "/dev/tty1" && exec sway

meaning that I only get a GUI when logging in on VT1. Other VTs give me
plain console for when I don't need the GUI overhead. No, I don't run a
display manager like slim, gdm, kdm, whatever.

After using Xfce for, oh, what?, some fifteen years or more, I wanted
something that made the most of display real estate so started looking
for a tiling window manager and arrived at i3. Before Xfce, I used KDE
for a couple of years, having become dissatisfied with GNOME's bloat.
However, after a while of KDE, its bloat, both memory and storage wise,
made me look for something lighter and Xfce was it.

I should say that these "bloat" observations are based on experiences
from some twenty years ago. Things may have changed. Another thing
that I changed myself is no longer installing recommended packages.
That takes out quite a bit of bloat storage-wise at the cost of a wee
bit steeper learning curve as you have to figure out why certain things
no longer work, chase down the (recommended) package that fixes it and
install it manually. That said, I kinda like the way this forces you to
have a look what under the hood. But then again that's not everyone's
cup of tea.

Going even further back in time, before GNOME I think I used plain X11
on my first Debian install (hamm), coming from AIX' CDE after using
Silicon Graphics' Irix plain X11 (for molecular modelling research).
Awesome molecular graphic with real cool stereo glasses, way back in
1990 :-)

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen