OUR EXPERT
Mats Tage Axelsson keeps finding new ways of using Linux for everyday tasks. His desktop stays the same, despite trying – making the laptop dance is still some way off.
Even the default setting for Awesome has neat features, and it shows you all its apps in a dropdown menu. e all have a desktop on our computers and they have caused countless flame wars over the W years. Barring hardcore hackers who live in a terminal shell, most people want a nice graphical frontend to look at while they work or play.
The two most common choices are Gnome and KDE, which work splendidly for most situations. In spite of this, there’s merit in trying other options. Apart from looks, you also have resource usage to consider. If your system is a Raspberry Pi or similar, you may want a more slimline binary.
You can change the look of your desktop on a daily basis, but you may have more pressing demands on your time. It is still interesting to get the desktop to look exactly the way you want, though, so let’s see how we can get you desktop surfing more easily…
Desktop hopping
For low-spec systems, you may need a slimmer solution. Common choices are i3, Awesome and dwm. These are slim and tiling, meaning they occupy the entire screen as default. The standard paradigm is to have applications floating and spread all over the screen. In a tiling window manager, you have a second window on the other half of the screen.
There are other strategies, however, where the main window is always large and the others stay small. These strategies are best to learn by using them,seeing how they fill up your screen. Your situation is unique to you, though, so getting this right takes some exploring.
As mentioned, this is even more tedious when you can’t
