2 months ago, I removed bspwm in favor of GNOME. After using GNOME as a
daily driver for some months now, I can appreciate it as a nice desktop
environment for many GNU/Linux users, however it does not meet my needs
as well as a customized window manager setup can.
In reality, I don't need *too much* from a window manager; it just needs
to manage windows in a reasonable way. For anything else I need, I am
free to program it myself as a learning exercise. I prefer understanding
most if not everything running in my environment versus having various
GNOME utilities running in the background.
After using firefox for a while, a deal-breaker for me was that the
regular version is impossible load custom extensions for without signing
them before-hand.
Although it's possible to load extensions through about:debugging every
time the web browser is started, it's significantly easier for me to
simply use librewolf and not worry about it. Additionally, I can now
leverage the many additional features librewolf has compared to firefox,
and now no longer have to worry about "configuring firefox" after
installing it.
Now that I use GNOME, I no longer have a need for neofetch since GNOME
has its own about page in the settings. This also means I no longer have
to deal with neofetch being unmaintained and fetching the wrong
background images under GNOME.
feh was one of the fastest image viewers I've ever used, however since I
now use GNOME, having a minimal keyboard-only image viewer is no longer
necessary.
Although zathura is a great piece of software that opens pdf files at
blazing fast speeds, I no longer have a use for it since GNOME's
document viewer works just as well, and even lets you use a mouse with
it!
The recent blur additions in picom were absolutely stunning, and I'm a
bit saddened to have to leave it, however I also no longer need to worry
about the compositor only working under X11.
tint2 is a great piece of software that I enjoyed playing with, however
it is drastically easier and more convenient to simply use dash-to-panel
in GNOME if you're looking for that traditional taskbar-like experience.
As a bonus, such a taskbar would work under both Xorg and Wayland, have
features such as preview on hover, and won't have anti-features such as
the bar not being clickable unless you perform Xorg shenanigans.
After over 5 years of bspwm, I have decided to enjoy myself in the
luxurious life that is GNOME.
Using bspwm and window managers in general was an invaluable learning
experience that gave me a deep understanding of many of the novelties
of the current linux desktop computing model. It had a profound impact
on my understanding of how operating systems work in general, and I
now wish to move on and enjoy modern GNOME simplicity.
What a ride. Although I absolutely loved configuring my keybinds through
sxhkd, more so than i3 / sway and similar window managers, I didn't
realize that most of what I was doing under bspwm could also be
accomplished under GNOME through gsettings.
Since I now use GNOME, I no longer need to worry about configuring a
separate program to show notifications. Although GNOME notifications
aren't nearly as customizable, they match the theme of the desktop
environment and get the job done.
Although qutebrowser was very cute, there are too many disadvantages to
using it that can be solved by simply using a more mainstream browser. I
cover some of those issues in previous commit messages.
Note that although this was great from a proof-of-concept point of view,
it's significantly easier and more effective to simply use the yomichan
add-on in a web browser like firefox.
