[098799]

When someone says "that works out of the box" what I hear is "I don't want to spend time customizing things to work better for me", which is fine, but surprising coming from someone who claims to have used tiling window managers.

[Darmody]

To me it means: I don't have to spend a whole week tweaking stuff so the DE won't get break my workflow with annoying things.

Which then translates to bugs here and there, inconsistency and may other problems.

And while Gnome is a pain in the *s sometimes because they remove features, it's still better than the alternatives to me.

[nik5]

Why would you spend whole week, if you can copy the configs from older machines?

[Darmody]

Because some tweaks can't just be saved and restored later.

[behnamoh]

which is one of Gnome's problems. I don't want to install extensions only to realize they won't work on the new Gnome version.

[Darmody]

But installing the 3 or 4 extensions that I need takes no more than 2 minutes. I don't have to tweak anything else.

[SebastianKra]

The core discussion here is: "how much should the computer adapt to the user vs how much should the user adapt to the computer".

On the one hand, the benefit of customizing a system for yourself should be obvious.

On the other hand, adapting yourself to a system also means adapting to other people. This allows improving the shared understanding of how computers should be used:

- Designs can push users to more efficient workflows.

- New features, use-cases and apps can be developed based on shared assumptions.

- Other developers can integrate with or expand on the existing designs. eg: MacOS launchers [1] build on various system features.

In IntelliJ, I regularly discover new functionality that I wouldn't even know existed had I used a text editor with extensions.

Customise your system too much, and you cut yourself off from this "conversation". Perhaps this is why some users still live in heavily customised terminal environments, despite massive improvements to GUIs [2].

[1] Raycast, Alfred, Launchbar [2] https://capiche.com/e/consumer-dev-tools-command-palette

[zvmaz]

It means: "I don't want to spend time customizing things that may not even work better for me."

I acknowledge that some people like crafting their own computing environment[1], and it can be really interesting and rewarding , but some people like to work on other things, or simply lose interest in fiddling indefinitely with config files and all (like I have).

For the latter, there's Gnome.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/SystemCrafters

[johnchristopher]

> but surprising coming from someone who claims to have used tiling window managers.

Why are you using the verb "claim" if not to throw doubt over op's word ?

> When someone says "that works out of the box" what I hear is "I don't want to spend time customizing things to work better for me",

I call that putting words in people's mouth.

[2143]

> "I don't want to spend time customizing things to work better for me"

That's me.

I have tried every major DE, and something or the other is not right with all of them!

I used to use gnome with a lot of customizations.

Over the past couple of years I decided to adapt my workflow and muscle memory to what's provided by default. Works well for me now, even though it was a little awkward at first.

I'm currently using gnome with no customizations.

I'm not claiming gnome is the best DE or anything.

I also really like XFCE btw.

[alpaca128]

I also "claim" to have used tiling WMs (in fact I'm using one right now) and Gnome is my favorite DE as well. I've tried pretty much everything and in the end it doesn't matter what you use as long as you can define useful keybindings.

And imho dynamic tiling is the wrong approach. Automatic rearrangement of windows never works well in real situations that just don't fit a small selection of fixed layouts. Not sure why static tilers are so rare, but Gnome offers static tiling and is very polished, so I guess that's why I like it.

[bandrami]

Not to be pedantic, but doesn't Gnome also tile?

[michaelmrose]

A tiling window manager is one which by default automatically assigns each newly created non-dialogue windows to a non-overlapping share of the screen according to a set of rules.

A lot of environments have a function to relocate the focused window to a predefined portion of the screen. For example left and right half. This makes it a stacking environment with limited tiling features.

[uncletaco]

> Not sure why static tilers are so rare, but Gnome offers static tiling and is very polished, so I guess that's why I like it.

[seba_dos1]

I think it's more like "I don't want to be overwhelmed with lots of decisions right at the start, but I want an ability to change things incrementally to serve my needs as I go". Which is why I like Plasma too for its out-of-box readiness and configurability.

[petepete]

I used Awesome WM for years but now use GNOME exclusively. It looks great, works intuitively, isn't resource heavy and with Wayland is super smooth.

I used to tile terminal windows but now do everything in tmux. I spend 95% of my day in either browser or terminal.

[johnchristopher]

Is there a workflow based around a main container and fixed layouts in tmux ?

[petepete]

Sorry I missed this reply. I tend to usually have full window panes for most tasks and then introduce others ad hoc when necessary, usually running scripts or testing code I'm working on in a repl. I don't do anything too fancy.