[jrm4]

Yup, for me the broader question for just about every window manager is "why not EASY modularity?"

Would love to see something where this was the principle? Very little philosophy or opinion on how individuals do their own desktop, emphasis on "you should be able to add and take things off easily as you want." The metaphor being, you know, an actual physical desktop. It's an EMPTY table. Put what you want on it and nothing you don't.

(Like openbox perhaps, just with a little more friendliness towards well integrated panels etc. Which might be construed as "opinion" -- but seems like most WMs FORCE a lot of the things on you)

[idle_zealot]

I quite like how HaikuOS (and maybe BeOS before it, I can't claim familiarity there) handles this. There's one positionable window with a launcher and a barebones customizable set of control widgets. Everything else from system monitors to workspace switching are just normal application windows that you place in a convenient spot and pin so they show up on all workspaces. That combined with the powerful way they handle window management, allowing for creating custom tiled window sets and treating every window as tabbable, highlight just how samey and limiting most desktop environments are. I daily drive sway, which works completely differently, but Haiku's solution is so interesting that I find myself enjoying it despite the mismatch with my usual habits.

Really though, Windows, Gnome, Plasma, MacOS, they're all basically the same and all feel so cumbersome and limiting. Desktop metaphors have been stalled for so long, and when Apple took a shot at something new with Stage Manager they managed to downgrade the experience even further. I'm so disappointed by the state of things.

[qwerty456127]

If only Haiku had up-to-date Firefox, I'd be using it as a daily driver even if I had to run it in a VM.

[idle_zealot]

They do have an up-to-date browser in Falcon. What gets to me is the lack of multi-display support.

[from-nibly]

Bspwm just uses bash for configuration which is about as straight forward as you can get with modularity. Easy though? I dont think modularity is ever easy is it? I think the lack of it is one of the things that makes a thing easy.

[kaba0]

Bash is anything but straightforward

[qwerty456127]

Yeah, there are just two languages more weird than BrainFuck: TeX and Bash :-)

[cess11]

To some people that's what StumpWM offers, and easy molding is what attracted me to IceWM back in the day.

I'm more of a 'install i3wm, change a few things in the config, done' kind of person these days.

[IshKebab]

I guess there are a couple of issues with that:

1. Panels are fixed in place and don't have title bars etc. They're the only window type like that so you'd have to go to extra effort to make a UI to "lock" windows and unlock them or whatever.

2. If you delete the launcher then how do users start apps? Some old DEs let you right click the desktop but that's not very discoverable.

Much easier just to have settings somewhere do let you say which side (if any) you want panels on.

[graemep]

You can delete the launcher on most DEs. I do not have a launcher button on my work KDE desktop - I start apps using the keyboard to start a launcher.

[jwells89]

I believe the main issue is that it’s difficult to have any kind of consistent/coherent design in a desktop where everything is optional. Building good UI for managing panels can also be challenging.

[jrm4]

Great; I don't care about "design" as you're using it.

That entire field is somewhat unserious because it conflates engineering and actual usability with fashion, and often can't distinguish between the two.

That's exactly why I'm saying focus more on the modularity.