The unreasonable effectiveness of i3, or: ten years of a boring desktop environment

First published on

My wife uses Windows and over the years I've helped her move things to new systems. Win8, 10 and now 11. With every upgrade the UI changes. Now I can't right click the bottom right corner anymore to open Task Manager. The UI feels "fresh" and up-to-date I guess, but does it really matter?

My desktop has looked like this since 2008. I love the picture of the gearbox, it's a testament to the hidden precision engineering that goes on inside the built world all the time.

I don't see much of the gearbox though, because most of the time my screens look like this:

The environment around my background picture has changed a little more, but has been stable for the last 10 years. My experience is very different to my wife's constantly changing system. In 2009 I moved from Windows to Ubuntu, then to Debian using Gnome. Then finally to i3 in 2013 after a brief affair with XMonad in 2012. So by now in early 2024, I've had the same minimal UI for more than 10 years, and if I'd only had the guts to adopt i3 earlier it could have been 15. I have made small changes but if I didn't like it I would revert back to the previous version. All the changes were conscious efforts and I had the freedom to go back when I wanted to.

This short post is in praise to boring stable systems, and a thank you to all the open source contributors that made my desktop environment possible.

  • OS: Debian (since 2011)
  • Window manager: i3 (since 2013)
  • Browser: Chrome (since 2008)
  • Editor: vim (since 2011, now actually neovim but I haven't noticed a difference with vim)
  • Terminal: gnome-terminal (since 2009)
  • Shell: zsh / oh-my-zsh (since 2014)
  • Mail: Gmail (since 2005)
Here are some new improvements to my home computer systems.
  • Backup management: syncthing (since 2022)
  • Home automation and energy management: home-assistant (since 2022)
  • Microcontroller management: espthing (since 2024)
  • Shell history management: atuin (trying it out since early 2024)
Being boring with tools is great. It gives you the freedom to be revolutionary in areas where you actually want to make a difference.

Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 4, 2024 at 2:44 PM

    Great article! I have a similar "boring" setup: debian, nvim, stumpWM (I am an ex-i3wm, and Emacs...

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousMarch 4, 2024 at 3:05 PM

    i3 is a fantastic WM. One of the killer features that put it ahead of other tiling WMs is the ability to tab windows in the current workspace (without a lot of extra manual configuration). Excellent for multi-tasking when you can dedicate a workspace to each conceptual task and then keep each window for that thing full screen, but tabbed on that workspace.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousApril 25, 2024 at 8:55 AM

    Your setup looks a lot like mine (probably because I adopted a lot from your setup). One recent change I made: started using fish/omf as shell (protip) because the performance is way better than zsh.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Security Is Our Top Priority" is BS

First published on
A couple of years ago I was asked to give a conference talk about software security. Well, actually I wasn't really asked, my company bought a sponsorship package with a speaker slot and I replied to the internal email asking for volunteers  🤣  Anyway, while preparing my talk, I realized a couple of important points about security that have not left my mind since: Security is limitless . You can always spend more effort to make things more secure. The same goes for quality, safety, employee happiness, etc. The needs of security are opposed to the needs of a convenient user experience . Improving one typically hurts the other. Now some organizations say "Security is our #1 priority". Really? You want to make something that has no limits your number one priority? I mean security is a good thing, but this seems a bit too simple? In fact, hollow marketing claims like that can make me a bit angry. In this post I'll help you understand what to make of statements like that
Read more

AI programming tools should be added to the Joel Test

First published on
Here's a wake-up call to all CTOs: AI programming tools are getting freaking amazing and if you don't allow your teams to use them somehow, it will bite you in the ass in a couple of years. You will be slower and you will lose your best people. The infamous Joel Test is a list from the year 2000 of 12 things all great software companies do. Since then most companies have implemented Git and CI/CD, checking of three items, so we have some space left in the 2024 update ;) I believe "Do you allow your developers to use AI assisted development environments?" is a necessary addition. I get that you don't want your source code to end up on some OpenAI / Microsoft / Github server somewhere, sure, but find a way to use your own models or learn to live with it. Note that this is often not the same as "#9 - Do you use the best tools money can buy?" as blocking AI tools is about data security, not money. So why do I think developers need AI programming tools? I&#
Read more