Playing with I3WM

Introduction

I have used Gnome as my desktop environment on Linux for ages. I have been using it so long, I don't even remember when I started. I like the clean, minimal look of Gnome as a whole, and prefer to the way GTK apps look (as opposed to what is an assault on my eyeballs that is KDE and most QT-based apps.)

I do some customization of Gnome, and within the past couple years, I have been using Material-Shell which completely changes the gnome interface to a spatial, tile-based layout. I really like having dedicated desktops for specific apps, or a particular task.

Having been accustomed to the tile interface, I thought I would give I3WM another shot, since I tried it very briefly before, but just didn't understand the workflow all that well. I like all the stuff that "just works" with gnome, but I also like to mess with things and tweak things to my very specific liking.

First Glance

Initially, thanks to Material Shell, I felt pretty close to home in i3. There were different key bindings for some things than I was used to, but the user guide pretty clearly explains how to do things and it was pretty easy to change them. So this looked like something I wanted to pursue and see how it played out. It has now been 4 weeks since I tried it out. I'm still not totally sure I'm going to stay here, but I am enjoying the customization and have gotten pretty used to it.