This week I switched to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. After years of using Arch Linux and a couple of months using NixOS — always using a Tiling window manager such as dwm, bspwm or Hyprland — I felt quite exhausted and frustrated with several day-to-day things that would get in the way of my workflow.

These little annoyances included sharing my screen on Wayland, automatically switching and detecting monitors, using shared libraries (this was NixOS specific). I felt like I’ve spent a lot of time into crafting my desktop and making it just perfect for my workflow, but then my workflow evolved and I always find myself with at most 3 windows open and always maximized — do I really need a tilling window manager for that?. So I guess the motivation for my switch was a combination of a couple of things:

  1. I don’t want to have to debug my desktop environment because some little thing doesn’t work as it should.
  2. I don’t need a specialized desktop environment, I just have 3 windows open anyway, I can navigate with Alt+Tab

In short: I want my desktop environment to get out of the way and let me focus on my work. For that to happen the desktop environment should be stable, minimal and intuitive to use. Note here that I’m using the word “desktop environment” to describe the whole environment, including the OS and the DE.

With those ideas in mind, I saw that Ubuntu had a new LTS release. So I decided to make the switch. It’s being a breath of fresh air to be honest. When I plug a monitor things just works, Bluetooth devices connect without any hassle, everything feels stable and polished. I don’t really think about my desktop anymore, I just turn on my laptop and start working on whatever I want to accomplish that day.

But I want to make very clear that I don’t think that my time spend tinkering with my distro and tiling window manager was time wasted, lot at all actually. There’s no such thing was “wasted time”. Time just passes, what matters is what you got out of what you did during that time. And I’ve learned a lot over those years about how Linux desktops work and even explored a whole new paradigm with NixOS. I’m very happy about the time I’ve spent customizing my desktop, but I just don’t care that much about it anymore, and that’s OK.

Resources

http://xahlee.info/linux/why_tiling_window_manager_sucks.html