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Comment by rvdginste | Hacker News Reader

Do you use i3 all by itself, or do you add base services from a desktop environment?

In the context of a laptop, I am thinking about things like: mounting external drives, power management configuration, network configuration (access to wireless networks), switching keyboard layout (e.g., US, US international), ...

(edit) Context: I did use i3 all by itself before, but always seemed to be missing something. Afterwards I switched to KDE which I do like, but i3 is snappier and a tiling wm is handy on laptops with small screens and/or older hardware.

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In my case, I use i3 almost all by itself. I use some external services, mostly gnome, like:

- polkit and friends (asks for a password when attempting to run some "admin" task)

- NetworkManager applet (for Wifi / VPN)

- blueman (for Bluetooth)

- udiskie (removable media mounting, with udisks2 behind the scene)

- dunst for notifications

- Rofi for launching apps

I don't use a keyboard layout switcher, but use the US Macintosh layout with level 3 shift for my non-English writing needs (produces dead-keys, like Lvl3+E / E -> é, mapped to the Windows keys).

I don't use a power manager, either. My laptop is happy to give me the same kind of battery life as in Windows with whatever the Arch defaults are.

This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to know. Thanks!

A window manager is only part of what's needed to get a full desktop setup. While desktop environments come with a bunch of programs preselected for you, a window manager really just manages windows. You essentially have to assemble your own desktop environment.

Afaik you can use i3 as a replacement for kwin if you want the i3 experience with a premade desktop environment.

you have to BYO some of these utilities, udiskie for external drives, ibus for keyboard layout. Stuff like wifi should be part of your init system, for me connman runs at start up no matter the WM.

Yes, I understand, but I've searched for this before and it is hard to find a list of the utilities that people typically use with i3wm or any other barebones window manager.

IME it's a process of "oh, I wish this happened" and then you search the arch linux wiki :)

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