[Galanwe]

I guess it's a spectrum.

I share OP's point of view. I've had my youth years of complete custom desktop experience, every single detail under control and finely customized, on whatever distribution was the apogee of the time (gentoo, arch,...).

Years passing by though, I've grown past it. Now I just install Ubuntu, I don't want to loose time on wifi drivers, keyboard backlight, acpi suspend/resume, etc.

Doesn't mean that I don't customize my environment though. I've been using i3 for 10 years and would not stand anything else. Same for my vim configuration.

I just prioritize some things (i3, vim) over others (distribution, package manager).

[gautamcgoel]

Can you explain why you're so find of i3? I've played with it but it never stuck.

[Galanwe]

It hink the other comments already made good points, but just to complete it for me:

- There's very little learning curve with i3. After setting/learning 2 or 3 keyboard shortcuts you're good to go. That makes the adoption a no brainer.

- 99% of what I do is done in a shell (code, sysadmin) or a browser (read doc, write doc). That means I often need a lot of shell windows all over the place. The tiling really helps here. I could use tmux/screen for that (that's what I did before i3), but I often already have tmuxes on the remote boxes I ssh to, and the inception makes navigation harder.

- it's fast, there no animation or latency whatshowever. I can very quickly open a shell, ssh, run a command, close it, etc.

Most of these could be done with any keyboard oriented tiling wm, I just so happen to use i3.

[michaelmrose]

Not the original commenter here but

- i3 treats individual monitors as virtual desktops instead of having them stretch across all monitors which makes it easy to shift say a workspace with a browser or a chat app into a secondary monitor without losing the current task or having to rearrange everything.

- i3 lets you define keybinding modes that work much like modes in vim

- i3 is very simple and comprehensible its about as non magical as can be making it using it predictable and simple