Moving away from tiling window managers

This is the story about how I’m moving away from a tiling window manager, dwm, to a full-blown desktop environment, GNOME. It’s hardly an interesting story, but I feel like writing about it.

I started using tiling window managers quite early in my Linux desktop journey, which started in 2019 with Xubuntu.

Why Xubuntu?

My choice for Xubuntu was largely influenced by my hardware constraints: I wanted a lightweight distribution, meaning it shouldn’t require too much of my 8GB of RAM (at the time). Because of that, I was later drawn into tiling window managers since that’s as lightweight as you can get.

dwm, a weird choice for a beginner

I made a weird choice for a beginner: dwm. I guess because I felt challenged by it, like what does it mean to compile it from source and configure it by changing its source code? Since I learned a ton from it, so I don’t regret it, but it wasn’t without struggles.

The bad parts

It was perfect out of the box for my workflow for some time (mostly terminals and Firefox), until I started to use more GUIs that have a lot of modal windows (like Android Studio, GIMP, Inkscape etc.) and whatnot, as you can attest by my attempts to tweak it.

It might come as a surprise that the function keys don’t do anything out of the box — if you try to increase or decrease volume with it, nothing will happen. You have to add this functionality yourself, typically by binding these keys to a shell script like this, with software like sxhkd or in your dwm config.h.

A notification system also needs to be set up, dunst being a popular choice. For example, I used systemd-timer to check every minute if my battery is dying or if it’s fully charged.

But this is all stuff you need to maintain. For example, the shell script I used to increase/decrease/mute volume worked fine in Xubuntu but not in Fedora.

The experience will likely never gonna be as good and polished as something you have out of the box with GNOME or KDE, as well.

The good parts

Being lightweight is what made me stick with dwm initially, apart from curiosity. It hardly requires any RAM to work, and does it job very well.

Managing windows with dwm was often not a problem too (unless for some GUIs as I already noted, which wasn’t typical for me anyway), the default keybindings are very well thought, and tagging windows is really powerful.

But I also don’t mind Windows-style floating windows. I really like Windows-style Alt+Tab too, and that’s something I missed, particularly to toggle between the last two used windows.

Tiling windows are not a huge productivity gain for me, since I don’t have a huge monitor and other apps other terminals are less usable with half the screen real estate. In fact, I would mostly use monocle layout for GUI apps anyway.

GNOME

Recently, I found myself more interested by beautiful user interfaces, animations etc.. dwm, of course, is by design very plain and boring.

So I decided to install Fedora 35, with comes with GNOME as desktop environment by default and my overall impression until now is that it’s beautiful.

The good parts

The whole desktop is beautiful, the animations are smooth and everything works out of the box, and that’s a major good part.

This doesn’t come at a cost in usability too. I love to use touchpad gestures to navigate through the desktop when I’m being lazy laying on my bed browsing the web with one hand on the touchpad.

The notification system is pretty good too.

I’m still getting familiar with the keybindings, but I’m trying not to complicate it too much. For example, I didn’t even add one to open a terminal. I just hit Super, type Terminal and press Enter to open it.

I see now the value in not having to maintain your desktop environment. I guess I just declared dotfiles bankruptcy, I’m wondering if one day I’ll have to declare init.vim bankruptcy too…

Having learned that lesson, I’ll try as much as possible to stick with the vanilla experience. As minimal tweaks as possible. It’s best if I just get used to the stock experience, be productive with it, and avoid maintaining various Ansible tasks to reproduce my desktop environment the way I like it.

The bad parts

Unfortunately, there were more bad parts than I expected, but nothing major. Some of them are more Fedora-related than GNOME-related.

To start with one related to GNOME (or shall I say GNOME in Wayland): Alacritty window decorations are broken (as in not consistent, ugly etc.). It seems to be complicated who is the real culprit, nevertheless it happened and it sucked since I had to abandon my Alacritty configuration because of it in favor of GNOME terminal, which do not provide the convenience of a configuration file, so I had to came with a questionable way of doing it.

Talking about configuration files, this is an issue with GNOME — it’s very hard to keep configuration under source control. Essentially, the only way to configure it programmatically is with dconf, which I have done with Ansible’s help.

Now, going into more Fedora-related issues… All videos outside YouTube and Netflix didn’t play at all. Later I found this is solved by downloading the ffmpeg-libs from the RPM fusion repository, a step I automated with Ansible too. Fedora apparently can’t bundle some proprietary video codecs for our convenience because of legal reasons, so this is fine.

And also… GNOME takes a lot more RAM to work than dwm, obviously. I didn’t find this to be an issue now, since I’m mostly using a browser and doing lightweight front-end web development (my side projects), but it may be.

Conclusion

I’m oddly excited about experiencing this new desktop environment anyway, it’s a feeling familiar to my first time trying dwm as well, so I guess it has something to do with trying new stuff. But hope I won’t be changing much, I hope I’ll stick with GNOME for a very long time and just spend my time learning other things other than configuring my desktop environment — even though it’s fun to do and I can’t help myself doing it at times, it can spare me some time.