Think about how much time it takes to move your mouse to button in a window, click it, wait for the next button to appear and to repeat the same task again. Using the keyboard for these kind of events saves you so much time throughout the day. Whether its opening apps, tiling/stacking windows, switching to workspaces, maintaining the system, shutting down the machine. The most important advantages are: Usability (with respect to the keyboard), speed and memory consumption.Įverything (ok, almost) has a key-binding in i3wm. This scales up with all applications that a user opens.Īlso, both DE’s come with their own GUI-toolkits (GTK QT) which softly force the user to use apps built with their toolkit. So while the two major Linux DE’s nowadays (KDE and GNOME) provide more and more options in every update, optimize their look and feel and so on, they also take quite an amount of memory. Running any code from the shell is quicker than running it within an IDE with graphical overhead. That’s why programmers prefer the terminal in the first place. Linux Desktop is continuously becoming easier to use, even for non-programmers.Īll graphical libraries that provide features such as animations, slide effects or in general a lot of customization will take quite some time to load. You may sound surprised: Why choose an environment in which you cannot start an application with your mouse?Īren’t all the major desktop environments (DE) trying to make the graphical look and feel, app startup and accessibility better from day to day?Īnd the KDE and GNOME team (and all other Linux developers that invest their free time) are making an important improvement for the Linux Desktop world to compete against Windows + macOS. Windows cannot be re-sized with the mouse (by default) as they do not open in floating mode but only in full-size unless they are split in half (or further) by opening other applications. The key point is that most navigation is done via the keyboard. Strictly said, i3wm is not even a desktop environment but rather “only” a tiling window-manager^. I do not want to go into details why I am running Arch Linux (Manjaro) in this post but rather talk about the “visual engine” in the background: the desktop environment. After switching from Windows/macOS to Linux about 1.5 years ago I tried many different Linux distributions and desktop environments.
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