dotfiles VS PaperWM

For me launching Gnome with xmonad as the window manager stopped working a few years ago. Instead I have xmonad set to autostart 2 seconds into a desktop session with --replace set. dotfiles

With regards to 1, I've got a system that works pretty well for me. You can look in my dotfiles and the script called setup-xmonad.sh. I've configured things to run xmonad --replace shortly after the desktop comes up and that works great.

> xmonad itself can’t run with modern Gnome

That's not really true. I use the gnome-flashback sesson and have an .desktop in ~/.config/autostart that runs xmonad --replace after I log in. It's true that logging in with a gnome session using xmonad as the WM isn't really an option any more but switching to xmonad after login continues to work great and is easier to set up than creating your own session ever was.

https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles/blob/master/setup-xmonad...

I wasn't able to get those instructions to work on more recent versions of Ubuntu. In my dotfiles and setup repo I've got a solution that works for me using autostart and xmonad --replace.

Yes, there's stuff that you can't get just from parsing the man page too, but it's a huge help. I know it's not done every startup, I have running that as part of my "update everything" script.

https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles/blob/master/mupdate.sh

I've been using XMonad for over 10 years now. Originally I went with Awesome but then decided I liked still having a normal desktop environment and XMonad's integration with Gnome was really easy.

The way I've done this has changed a bit over the years, these days I drop a file in .config/autostart letting xmonad replace the normal window manager after Gnome gets itself sorted out.

https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles

Hmm, I don't use a vertical panel so it might not be comparable. My dotfiles are here though if you want to take a look.

But with auto-tiling you need to place windows according to a pre-set configuration, it needs to fit whatever layout you want to go for and it needs to be able to resize the window without breaking the content. This works pretty well for libadwaita apps, but a lot of webapps seem to assume a certain minimum window size. Another issue is how to handle modal dialogues, where paperwm for example sets an override to ensure they're not attached to the main window. Should the settings window then be treated as a separate window and tiled, or should it be left floating above all others?

I like Gnome's simplicity, agree with most of its deviations from the tired old Windowsy desktop status quo, and am very happy to depend on all its great integration work. I can't quite live with the simplistic window management, but extensions cover that (as they do much else). With Fedora + Gnome + PaperWM, I'm quite at peace with the current linux desktop situation.

Still I'm looking forward for something like PaperWM to be possible in KDE - or even to write it by myself

I have noticed in one of your comments in this thread that you are looking for novel ideas of the UI look. As others commenters stated, you might be interested in tiling window managers like i3 [0] or sway [1]. They are truly a gem for productivity and sometimes for an eye [2].

However, I love the concept of scrollable window manager like PaperWM [3] is. When I had a smaller screen (24" 16:9) I was complaining a lot on unused space on my screen. With PaperWM I was finally happy with its dimensions, because I could have huge IDE on the left and small part of terminal displayed on the right. That way I knew if something was printed to terminal, while my editor took 80% of the screen.

[0]: https://i3wm.org/

[1]: https://swaywm.org/

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/

[3]: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM

If you want something really different, give PaperWM a shot.

You may want to try PaperWM (GNOME extension) https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM