I have a laptop with an 11 inch screen and 768p display. Naturally, my usage breakdown is:

  • 80% one window in fullscreen
  • 15% two windows side by side
  • 5% other

I’ve considered tiling window managers. I used i3wm on this in the past. It was a little complicated and I customized the bottom bar to show commands for dummies.

alt-Enter: term | alt-D: launch | alt-F: fullsc | alt-1: new workspace | alt-shift-1: move to workspace

That plus some battery, wifi, time info. I never got ‘good’ with i3 and would consult the cheat sheet regularly.

Is there a paradigm (tiling or otherwise) that would let me quickly and simply launch programs with the keyboard (like most distros these days) and switch between fullscreen windows? and set them side by side as needed?

My usage is keyboard-first but mouse-available. i3 didn’t seem tailored to mouse usage the way some other tiling wms are. and sometimes you’d launch a program like the wifi settings window and it wasn’t built to be resized for a twm, so it looked weird. (no floating window support.)

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    10·
    4 days ago

    I use KDE with Krohnkite.

    E.g. I have my cake and eat it, as windows can get dragged around if I want. Anything weird is just windowed like normal KDE.

    Works with mice, and works good OOTB!

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Yeah, I also recommend this. Particularly with laptops, it’s good to have a full-fledged desktop environment, since you’re more likely to need WiFi, power management, easy display configuration etc…

        • LeFantome@programming.dev
          1·
          2 days ago

          It was quite good for a while but I feel like it has crept up again. It is over 1.5G at start for me these days.

          It used to be under a gig.

          It makes a difference when you only have 8G on a laptop.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
            1·
            2 days ago

            Look up RAM usage in btop, sort processes by memory usage. A lot it is random services you can disable in the system setting or uninstall with a package manager.

            And yeah… it even matters on a higher RAM setup. Sometimes I have most of mine filled with a background thing, and 1GB vs 2 or 3 can make a big difference.

            • LeFantome@programming.dev
              2·
              23 hours ago

              Agreed. That does not change what I said though.

              For me, “baloo” is the worst offender.

              Also, great to see another btop fan. I use it a lot.

              • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
                1·
                22 hours ago

                Baloo can be disabled, it’s just the background search indexer. So can kaccess (the accessibility service) and kde wallet (the secrets manager).

                A lot of the widgets, effects and stuff take up RAM too.

    • dave@hal9000@lemmy.world
      1·
      4 days ago

      Yeah, shout out to Krohnkite - really solid stuff. The shortcuts for all it’s actions have become second nature now, amazing how I use the mouse so much less to get windows where and how I want them in a second