I am potentially going to be able to put Linux on my work PC soon, have been using it on my personal PC and laptop quite happily with hyprland ontop of NixOS
Thinking of using NixOS for my work machine as well, however I don’t want to use hyprland or even Wayland as I need this machine to be stable and reliable (Nvidia GPU)
Is I3 still the best option for this or are there better alternatives? (leaning towards I3 ontop of KDE)
I’m also somewhat tempted to just go GNOME with the forge extension as it seems the most reliable, though the tiling on that extension is far from perfect
In a word - yes - i3 is incredibly productive and customizable, but it’s not for everyone. I’ve been using i3 with no DE or DM for about a decade. Every time I try to use a full DE like KDE, Gnome, etc, it’s just so slow and bloated, and gets in the way. And there’s 100’s of extra packages that get installed, and be updated, that I don’t use. I don’t need anything but terminals (of which I have about 40 open in 12 different virtual desktops), a browser, and an editor when vim isn’t enough. So for me, it’s perfect and simple. I don’t know what will happen when Wayland finally wins, but that’s 5-10 years away before it really wins.
It’s a good question - I don’t know, because I haven’t used it. If it’s 100% compatible with i3 down to its configuration and features, then sure, it’s palatable.
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/ still claims that sway is “i3-compatible Wayland compositor”.
I imagine once Wayland finally wins i3 users will turn into Sway users and that’s about it.
