Adventures in i3wm
Firsthand, what is i3wm?
The i3 window manager, is a tiling window manager, which in simple terms, decides the positioning of windows on your desktop.
Basically just a "huge fucking nerd" way of managing your windows, and usually (without configuration) looks like this:
Why would you even use that
Because its funny???
No but seriously this time.
I generally prefer it because it greatly reduces the amount of friction between me and my computer, I don't have to worry about a program starting as floating instead of full-screen for some reason, I don't need to worry about manually moving everything around, or having useless title bars laying around, I just do a summon keybind, super + d or super + enter, prefixed by super + v/h depending if I want my existing windows vertically split or horizontally, and let it do it's thing and get to work.
The theming support is, mwa chefs kiss, pictured above is how it looks by default, but you can greatly change that by editing a few config files and installing some different applications, as seen bellow.
I have mine styled to the wonderful wonderful Catppuccin colour-scheme, and ive attempted to make everything as minimal and small in size as possible.
Transitioning
God my blogs have been about that a lot lately (you haven't written one in a month or so what are you on about)
Transitioning was actually reasonably easy, I still use Fedora 40 as my base, but I started out by reinstalling on my desktop with the i3 spin and went from there.
After that, fixing small problems like screen tearing, Nvidia drivers, and FUCKING VIM KEYBINDS, everything else was a breeze (fixed screen issues with Picom, drivers with an install script I found, and i just chucked the vim keybinds out of my config)
Regarding my laptop, I didn't even have to reinstall my OS (though i probably should), simply having to install the i3 package and swap which session I log into on my login manager (which is just whatever gnome uses)
I still have to go through the bout of uninstalling gnomes DE (another reason to reinstall...), but that wont be on the top of my schedule for a while.
Configuration
Configuration is piss easy, pop into the files, open a wiki, commit and push changes. I adore.
Thats another point of friction that gets alleviated by using this, I can simply change whatever I want and not have to deal with any repercussions.
Want to boot a new deamon on startup? Great! just put exec --no-startup-id XXXX in your config, save and reload and it's live and on your system.
Same with other things like swapping out a system service for a different one. i3 either doesn't even have that service to begin with, or it's as simple as swapping them in the config file.
It's just got everything I need and nothing else, couldn't recommend it more.
Oh speaking of which
Trying it out
If you'd like to try i3wm on your system with absolutely no strings, just install it with your preferred package manager
sudo dnf install i3
sudo apt install i3
and run it from your login manager or grub or whatever when you next boot. Don't like it? uninstall it and move on.
It should also be noted that i3 is an X11 window manager, and there is a drop in replacement for it called "sway" which is exactly the same, just on Wayland.