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Comment by binaryapparatus | Hacker News Reader

It is bit of a nonsense to pick one distro with specific UI and call it 'Linux' in general.

I did similar thing with Arch recently, was long time user that switched to Mac six years ago. Then due to all the suspicious moves from Apple I installed Arch again and can't be happier.

Linux is what you make of it, not what any distro thinks it should be. I am using xmonad and there is nothing silly looking on my screen.

If doing any usability tests, fedora/red hat would be very low on my priorities list.

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Yup. Ever since I went i3 I found that most endless discussions about desktop UI are essentially meaningless twaddle. Using a tiled WM fundamentally changed the way in which I interact with my machines, and for the better.

I still like the ubuntu eyecandy, but I only see it at most once or twice a year just before I install i3.

I second this. i3 is probably the best WM ever made. It's dead simple to configure, endlessly configurable, but also works right out of the box. And three keyboard shortcuts ($mod+d, $mod+Q, $mod+E) are all you ever need to learn (although I'd certainly recommend learning all of them.

It's just better. The same way that vi and emacs are better than Notepad and Gedit.

Take a look at stumpwm sometime … it's a tiling WM written in Lisp. Only problem is that the default command key is, frankly, insane (C-t). That's easily fixed, though.

I need to give i3 a shot, though, and port some of its functionality!

That does look nice, but I'm dubious as to whether it could match the convenience of i3 for me: They're philosophical opposites.

The nice thing about stumpwm is that you can hack your WM to fit your purposes. The nice thing about i3 is that while you can customize it to a greater or lesser extent, you almost never need to. it just works, right out of the box.

Do you use X11 on arch or no? Ubuntu has been having weird network problems and sleep problems for me. Looking into it has led to little to no answers. Im assuming the annoying part about arch will be trying to get a relatively simple desktop experience but most tutorials take you down quite a path to get there it seems

Yes, X11 with xmonad, it all works perfectly.

I also don't use any login manager, I log in into console then use startx to start gui. This way it is easy to test and debug things before booting X11, if I ever break anything. Never happened so far but I like having pure console at start.

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