alt Hacker NewsI’ve tried the minimal tiling WM thing several times. It’s not for me. Too many little QoL holes that require manual setup to fix and the disjointed patchwork of small utilities that don’t work with each other or share config conventions quickly becomes grating.
I spend a disproportionate amount of time tinkering with Linux desktops trying to make them act the way I like anyway, but the amount of tinkering is exponentially higher with a minimal WM setup. I can’t get any work done under them.
I also don’t really care to administer everything via the CLI and don’t find it a good use of my time to write Bash scripts for everything. If I’m going to do that I’d rather just write my own DE, because even if that’s a wildly larger task than writing a few scripts I’m going to get vastly more satisfaction out of it since I can make everything work exactly as I think it should.
To be clear - I agree with your statement that Linux is full of sharp edges that won't get fixed. I got abandoned by a series of desktop systems. Like you I had gone to and from the linux desktop but had found it unpolished. I was with Mac OS X for a while, and then a major upgrade broke my workflows. Finally I gave up on having a nice desktop. Once I had accepted that, I found a kind of contentment. It has been 15 years, I wouldn't go back now.