Ultralight Mint
Embrace minimality and learn some keyboard gymnastics with the featherweight Sway desktop.
One of our new favourite Ubuntu-derivatives is Regolith Linux. It’s fairly unique in its choice of the ultra-light i3 tiling window manager.
Tiling window managers take some getting used to, and also a whole lot of configuration, but Regolith ships with remarkably sane defaults and easy to learn keyboard shortcuts (i3 is very much keyboarddriven, but converts say they never looked back).
Also, it still has all of the GNOME infrastructure and applications for managing sessions and settings, so all of your system administration can be carried out with familiar GUI apps. It’s well-known that we’re big fans of Pop!_OS too, and in particular its COSMIC (Computer Operating System Main Interface Components) desktop. This features a tiling mode that, while not having the diminutive resource footprint of i3, offers users a gentle introduction to the joy and efficiency of keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures in harmony.
WINDOW TILING IS AN ART “To make the most of window tiling, much like an Etch A Sketch you’ll want to use a combination of horizontal and vertical arrangements.”
There’s no reason we shouldn’t have these sorts of things in Mint too; the i3 window manager is in the Ubuntu repositories. But we’re going to try something else. Sway is a lightweight window manager inspired heavily by i3, except that it is for Wayland. If you are familiar with i3 you will quickly get the hang of Sway; most of the default keys are the same, and you can even use your own i3status scripts. In fact, you should be able to use your i3config file without modifications. Sway is in the Ubuntu repos, but it’s an old version from January 2020. It would take some work of the compiling variety to get the latest version working, so let’s just install the repo version to dip our toes in: