Today, I’ll show you an alternative: the i3 windows manager (i3wm). Thanks to the terminal, a developer have already access to a powerful tool to get things done, without the need of a full blown desktop. If you use the terminal pretty often (and you should), a desktop environment might be useless for you, even if you don’t realize it. But everybody has different needs when using a computer a developer won’t have the same needs as a designer. These desktops are meant to be used by everybody. It’s basically a set of icons, windows, toolbars, widgets, wallpaper and other functionalities which give to the users “easy” ways to do what they want. Many Linux distributions, and many Operating Systems (OS) in general, like Windows or macOS, have their own desktop environment. You thought that having icons everywhere on your desktop with a beautiful start menu was the better and only way to interact with your computer? Next thing you know, they log in to a blank screen.įor me, I have Xfce, i3wm and dwm on my home pc (for some time had bspwm too), and nothing has ever gone wrong for me., updated Twitter #Tools #Mouseless Configuring i3 Window Manager: a Complete Guide Many users mess up their configs when they run install scripts, and it replaces half their config, breaking stuff.

Don’t clone a git repo and blindly run its “install script” without knowing what all files it’ll replace. Of course, this is only one example, and you may not be using polybar either.

if you want separate configs for both, make different files and use the right path with -c flag while invoking polybar in respective wm configs.

use same polybar config (and invocation command) for both (i.e.

To clarify this to OP, having multiple DE isn’t recommended, but multiple WMs don’t pose any issue if you can sort out their configs in such a way that they don’t conflict.įor example, if you’re installing both i3 and bspwm and want to use polybar on them, make sure you either

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