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KDE is now my favorite desktop

(kokada.dev)
892 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 18 Sep 25 12:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.399s | source
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ekjhgkejhgk ◴[18 Sep 25 19:32 UTC] No.45293951[source]▶
I have a terribly uninformed question. Ive been using i3wm ever since I learned it exists. Ive always had old machines and used to run Lubuntu, and at some point moved to i3wm. Its super fast and light which is what I care about the most.

I dont feel like Im missing anything, but then again a lot of people dont know theyre missing things which they cant imagine (before cars if youd ask people what they wanted, they wouldve said faster horses, etc etc).

So: What am I missing by using i3wm instead of for example Gnome or KDE? I dont care about pretty and shiny and animations. What else? Surely the whole holabalooba cant all be about pretty drawings and animations...?

(Sure, I probably would be able to find out by myself by trying these things but... since my starting point is the belief that Im not missing something, why would I be looking at these things...?

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1. dualogy ◴[18 Sep 25 19:51 UTC] No.45294175[source]▶
I used i3 for a few years before switching to KDE 1 or 2 years ago. For me choosing a full Desktop Environment over just-a-window-manager is about getting all the basics already co-installed with it: a default file explorer, default calculator, default terminal other than xterm, especially a default network-manager GUI, a sys-tray already populated with volume / screen / power / bluetooth / mounted-devices / clipboard / clock & date, a launcher, a system-wide config GUI ... without a DE, every single one of these is a manual install (plus researching the best choices and verifying & comparing their quality live) and/or numerous configuration files in diverse places, googling their syntax / incantations ... since all this stuff is "side-show stuff" (ie not my code editor, browser, email client, office suite), I nowadays appreciate batteries-included when setting up a new machine, reducing overall time-to-code-editing. But the endless custom-tweaking back then was good fun back in its own right. =)
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2. ekjhgkejhgk ◴[18 Sep 25 20:27 UTC] No.45294602[source]▶
Excellent response, thank you. Ive finally understood the difference between "Desktop Environment" and "Windows Manager".

Calling this stuff "side-show" very much resonates with me. I set this stuff up once when I install i3wm on a new system, and it works well. The problem is when I want to do something that Id never foreseen, there I go into googling for the bash command I need, and that I find annoying.