Do I need Windows

Not the operating system, but the display concept. Do I actually need them?

I've been thinking a bit about my computing setup, primarily, how I plan to reconfigure my desktop machine to move off of Manjaro. It has been "fine", but I've found delays and fuck ups from their end, and some "choices" they've made to just not align with my personal computing preferences.

// FWIW, I'm the type of gal that expects my computer to work the same every time I boot it. If you, computer, decide to update something that I didn't explicitly authorize in the updater? See Ya!! And Ubuntu, and now Manjaro have broken that rule. Which is often why I stick to mainline distros like Debian, or Arch + a DE and not get "out of the box" type stuff, since that's someone/group controlling the direction, and I'm perfectly capable of doing nothing thanks :)

Anyway, I've been thinking about moving back to i3wm. I love i3wm, it's probably the closest to how my brain thinks. I LOATHE floating windows especially OVERLAPPING windows. I am typing this right now in a floating window centered in my screen, but that's because it's the only thing I am currently running.

My whole life, I couldn't STAND having two windows overlap, it just made my brain angry. So tiling windows is where I stay. But I'm currently running basic KDE and ensured I can do enough window snapping that I basically never overlap. I've gone into this before, so I digress.

Since I've been thinking about this, I was curious "do I actually need windows". This is probably a crazy though to have in 2023. Of course you do. What are you going to do? Run a single program in full screen, quit it, and open the next program? That's insanity. But is it?...

Okay it is. I have a 34" Ultra Wide monitor. If I fullscreened my terminal it would be absurd to run one program at a time on this display. And when I am playing a full screen game, what about a voice chat, or music player?

Why not simply have a window per workspace, spawned by launching the program.

Let's walk through the user journey

I boot my machine and am greeted with a TTY, like you would in a non-graphical linux install. I can then spawn "workspaces" like you do via "ctrl+alt+F<n>" to launch new TTY logins, but maybe a more user friendly keybind like "meta+shift+<n>". This greets you with a new session in the same login.

Now I can launch programs like you normally would from the command line, but if it is graphical, it would simply switch that workspace into graphics mode displaying your program in full screen.

This is basically the DOS style workflow I grew up with, just with workspaces. And not too dissimilar from my writing PC where I use tmux to get multiple screens.

Thinking out loud about this I don't doubt it exists out there somewhere. Maybe less sophisticated but I think it would be a lot of fun. The only quirk is ultra wide. I start throwing ideas out like "What if I can split the screen into multiple screens, like in tmux, so I can vsplit or hsplit to allow multiple "on screen" programs. But at this point I've invented a tiling window manager.

What was the point of all this?

Honestly, none. I would just rather my default user experience not be a blank "desktop" but a flashing cursor. And let any program requiring graphics appear separately returning me to the command line when I'm done. And I've also been looking a lot into FreeDOS for fun, because it came up on my feed and I was curious.

What now?

Well, rather than research how to make my own tiling window manager that effectively achieves this exact thing (since really this is just a very opinionated WM) I'll just continue to look into tiling WMs like dwm and awesome to find what I'll use when I finally get around to installing another Linux.

Conclusion

Yeah that's it. If you're like "Steph, this is stupid" let me know! Or if you're like "Steph, this is stupid and used to exist/exists <here>" shoot it over to me <3

I'll leave you with a final thought "Maybe I should start using Emacs?"

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