I prefer a top bar that contains global menu, system tray, launcher icon and applications at around 30px height. I also remove titlebars on windows because I use keyboard shortcuts for all of those actions.

Tiling Window Manager, no bar, fullscreen terminal with btop on workspace 1, 40% split ortholinear keyboard, neovim, vimium in librewolf, vim in shell...vim keybindings everywhere.

Ever since I tried tiling window managers, I can't go back to traditional style of handling windows anymore. Nowadays I'm on KDE, but I use extensions to automatically tile every window I open and close. Single applications are stretched to fullscreen, and every opened up window would then scale the applications to half screen and so on. There are different logics and algorithms (known as layouts) how this can work. Multi virtual desktops are a must with this philosophy, when opening and grouping multiple applications. In general automatic tiling (with manual intervention and rules for specific windows) does have its own problems sometimes.

Recently, and I mean since yesterday, I changed the philosophy to a different philosophy. I'm currently on an endless tiler, where windows are opened up and can be scrolled from left to right on the screen. The most prominent of these type of window managers would be Niri, but I use an extension on KDE to emulate this behavior.

On laptop, full tiling like i3/sway. I hate inserting a mouse to use a laptop, which tiling lets me avoid.

On desktop, tiling's good but doesn't really feel like a requirement. Something like COSMIC where you can choose between both works better.

I feel really lost with all these users talking about window managers, hotkeys and specific terms. I feel like a rookie😅

If someone has a video comparing a lot of different workflows, I’d love to watch it. I feel like my workflow could still be improved.

Currently I use Gnome on my Surface Go (hooked to a big screen) daily driver, Cosmic on my old MacBook Pro and KDE on my Steam Deck (hooked to the same big screen).

I love Gnome and how I’ve configured (with an extension) every program to open on a specific workspace at startup while just using gestures or keyboard to move between workspaces.

I’ve kind of reproduced this with KDE and Cosmic, but it’s not as perfect.

KDE doesn’t follow the window rules I’m setting and Cosmic doesn’t let you automatically start programs on a specific workspace.

Currently using niri with title bars hidden on main PC hotkeys to navigate and gnome on the TV pc with the hide top bar extension and dash to dock both on intelligent hide... Hotkeys snap to side and drag to resize

I liked the concept of Niri, but found some bugs, and now I run Gnome with PaperWM and a couple more customizations. Love my setup.

Bash is awesome. If I ever go blind I could still use linux comfortably with text-to-speech thanks to the terminal. I just need to finally sit down and learn awk.

I've tried a window manager once and now can't go back. It's to a point where I start using my Linux keybinds on my Windows laptop at work.

I tried KDE and Gnome but those weren't really for me. I did like the polished end-to-end experience you get with those desktop environments though.

I really like the terminal, most of my use is a web browser or terminal with tmux.

I use hot keys like cray, but I haven’t found a timing window manager I like yet (I don’t like when things shift automaticallly, it breaks my mental model), and I haven’t found a Linux desktop with the keyboard ergonomics of macOS.

But 95% of my time is with full screen terminals, so I’m actually pretty okay. I have customized vim and tmux to the hilt, and I like that.

KDE for me with floating windows. For certain things, I'll use s terminal, but most of my navigation is through KDE and some keybinds I set up on a keypad.

I miss Bumptop

Manual tiling/placement and focus with a full sized keyboard, giving me one-key-combo focus of any window on the screen, and exact placement/sizing. Unfortunately most window managers and compositors lack support for this. Tiling WMs are stubbornly self-arranging or only support swapping windows, which they'll later rearrange.

Using Waybar I have a detailed clock and a sound widget on bottom right corner of my screen, and left of that is space for “systray” icons.

My windows have a title bar, that show the icon and title, and a close button.

No task bar or other navigation elements on the screen or the windows.

I make heavy use of Alt+Drag actions for resizing moving windows around and constantly have windows rolled up so only the title bar is showing. I never minimize windows and rarely use fullscreen.

For accessing applications in a convenient way I use the root menu on desktop rightclick and the client menu on middleclick.

The whole setup is fully customized and built from ground up to be as least annoying and intrusive as possible.

This is basically my setup since ca. 15-20 years now. Started with Openbox on Debian and since 2008 Arch Linux, and around 2-3 years ago I switched over to labwc on Wayland which allowed me to re-create what I used on Openbox.

I changed my taskbar to be like the one in Haiku OS because I don't like long taskbar.

Not even one that pops up when I move the mouse to the edge of the screen.

how do you do that?

I seriously learned how to use computers on Windows XP, so any computer I set up for myself, I set up to be as similar to Windows XP as possible.

I use niri since it solves the issues of positioning that you have with stacking window managers and the amount of organization needed for a tiling window manager. I can add many related windows to the same row and use super+the horizontal scroll on my mouse to scroll between windows, and the normal scroll to scroll between workspaces. I have common apps and shortcuts bound to hotkeys, but I prefer a mainly mouse-driven workflow so for everything else I am just dragging things around.

In my browser I have a collapsed left sidebar for tabs and a collapsed top bar for navigation which I can hover to reveal, so all I see by default is the webpage.

• GUI - on SailfishOS phone
• TUI - on PDA / Linux handheld with physical keyboard
• Manual tiling WM on Laptop and PC - current order of preference StumpWM, GNOME PaperWM, i3 / sway.

I have windows like desktop navigation, but have EVERYTHING hotkeyed with the maximize, minimize, exit bar barely a whisper of a thing with none of the aforementioned buttons so I can drag windows, but other than that, all hotkeys. Even almost all if my software is hotkeyed.

I like the windows/kde style window navigation and always have a touchpad, not always a mouse. I'll generally use what the system offers with some requirements:

1. Changing between windows should be deterministic with no need to look at the screen
2. You should be able to do as much as possible from each input method (keyboard/touchpad/mouse) but not require combining them for an action
3. You should be able to do "emergency" actions (like locking or sound control) one-handed

Some general preferences:

• Single desktop
• Dock and top panel always visible, no fullscreen apps unless it's a video
• Keyboard+touchpad shortcut to change between windows (not apps)
• Shortcut to bring up specific app from dock
• Touchpad shortcuts for sound and brightness control
• Shortcuts for moving windows between screens and snapping them to the sides

KDE and gnome can be configured for all of the above. Windows already does most of it. MacOS breaks almost everything and is surprisingly hard to configure (I don't understand how it's considered good ui). I haven't tried tilling managers, they'll probably pretty usable too.

Simple, decluttered and self-evident.

For laptops, I prefer something like i3wm or hyprland with workspaces configured (i've started playing with caelestia and noctuila shells but mostly just running waybar). That lets me avoid the touchpad as much as possible as I hate those and pushes everything to vim style keyboard shortcuts. It also lets me emulate having multiple monitors without having to view all of them (I'm terrible at multi-tasking and lose productivity when I have too many screens available).

For gaming, I like Gnome with the O-Tiling extension (thank you for the user on here that informed me of that). That is more just due to Gnome being easy to configure and not the machine that I mainly drive.

My main machine is just an old refurb Optiplex micro 7050 that runs a few containers and is mainly just for browsing and networking outside of that.

All machines I have (with the exception of a work laptop) use that same vim configuration style though. The shortcuts between all of them are the same even if the applications those shortcuts open is slightly different. CTRL+ALT+F might open hyprfm on one machine, nautilus on another, and ranger on a third. So the shortcuts globally are more just thematic. Fuzzel also runs for uncommon applications that don't have shortcuts, but honestly I am mainly a terminal-first user so it's rare I actually call that.