SWAYCredit: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/

Never accused of being fast and smooth, Mats Tage Axelsson explains how to try your next desktop and make the switch faster and smoother.

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 try it out on your current desktop. This is where we can bring you hope through our tried-and-tested method – stop hopping and take small steps instead, so you can later take the leap with confidence.

Testing times

Once you realise that there may be better desktop solutions available, you hit the next obstacle: the learning curve. Even though the concepts are easy to learn, it is hard to get used to new keybindings. You will stop using the mouse for many tasks, if you so choose, and learn to keep some order on your desktop.

All this means you will have a period when you struggle with new ideas and ways of starting your applications. Do you use menus to start applications? You may want to start typing the name instead. Getting used to these things takes some practice, so how do you stay active and productive while you learn?