 I have been a window manager, a tiling window manager user for pretty much the last three years. I have used basically all of the tiling window managers out there and I really like quite a few of them and there are a few that I don't care for but I spend a lot of time in tiling window managers and I've spent a lot of time customizing them. It's just been a very, it's been a very rewarding experience. I enjoy tiling window managers but one of the things that I haven't truly done in at least a couple years is spent a lot of time in a non-tiling window manager or a non-tiling desktop environment. It's just not something that I've done for any long period of time. Now I have spent like a month in KDE. It was a fine experience but it was a off and on kind of thing. Like I only had it on my laptop at the time and that was where I spent my time in that for that review and then when I was spending most of my time on the computer I would spend it on my main machine where I was using a tiling window manager, whatever it was at the time. So I haven't spent a lot of time in a non-tiling window manager on my main PC in a long time. Yesterday I decided it was time to rectify that and I decided that I was going to spend a significant amount of time on my main machine without any window manager installed whatsoever or at least any tiling window manager installed just to see if I can do it because honestly there are some merits to using a non-tiling window manager. It does have some appeal to me that it didn't have maybe even a year ago where I was very much into all the racing and stuff that I used to do. Now granted that wasn't all that long ago but you guys get the idea like I'm trying to move past that trying to grow a little bit. Not that I'm never going to customize anything ever again, never going to race again. That would be a claim that I could just, that would be a lie. I'm definitely going to race something again I guarantee it but I'm trying to tone that down a little bit as I focus more on productivity this year. So what I thought I'd do is actually hop to a desktop environment for a good period of time. I'm talking about a couple of months at least. I'm going to try to give this a good go and I want to see how well I do in it because I am a tiling window manager guy. I prefer to use a whole bunch of workspaces. I prefer to use the keyboard to do all of my stuff. I prefer everything to be tiled exactly where it's supposed to be. All of that is a preferred way for me to do my work. I really do enjoy it. I want to see over the course of the next two months or however long I happen to make it. I can be productive in a non tiling environment. That's what I want to find out. So yesterday not only did I hop to a new desktop environment but I also completely nuked and paved my main hard drive in my machine and actually reinstalled the distro. So that's what I spent my yesterday doing. So first let's talk about the distro. It's not going to come to any surprise. I stuck with Fedora. Not technically distro hopping if you stay with the same distro but I suppose technically I did distro hop because I went from the KDE spin to the XFCE spin. So that kind of answers the question of what desktop environment I went to. The reason why I did it this way instead of just installing XFCE on the installation that I had is simply because I didn't want to have both XFCE and plasma installed and uninstalling plasma on Fedora is a let's just say it's not an easy thing to do. And it's basically one of those things where you'd spend a lot of time doing it. Maybe you'd succeed at the end of it but a lot of things would probably be broken at the end. So I just decided to back up everything, nuke and pave and reinstall a fresh XFCE spin on this PC. And that's what I did. So this right here is what I have come out with so far after a day. This is XFCE as I have it. Now as you'll notice, I haven't done a lot in terms of writing. So I thought about it like I've looked at some of Linux scoops videos where they take XFCE and make it look fantastic. And I may do that but I haven't done it yet and I've looked through Unix porn of everybody who's posted a XFCE rice and I've seen some there that are pretty cool and I might emulate some of those someday. But right now I'm actually kind of happy with the way this is right now. I've just, you know, I've changed the wallpaper. I've added some things to the bar, made sure that all the key bindings that I need are working. There are still some things that I want to tweak. I want to have the weather applet here actually show the temperature in the bar instead of showing it when I hover over it or when I click on it. I'm not sure how to do that. Yeah, I didn't see an option for it, but that's something that I want to do. I want to put some spacing in between these things because the lack of padding here is really driving me absolutely bonkers. But that will come later. So those are things that I want to do. I really do like the whisker menu, but I don't use it all that often. Like I thought that I wouldn't, but what I did was actually just installed Rofi. I have a lot of Rofi scripts. So not having Rofi on my machine was just not something that I was prepared to do. So I just installed Rofi, used all of my configuration files and it works fine. I like it a lot and I probably won't ever have a machine without it on there. So that's what I do. I have found myself right clicking and using this menu quite often when I don't do the, when my hands on the mouse already anyways, and I have a view of the desktop. I found myself using this menu quite a lot. That's kind of cool. So that's something that I obviously would never do it in a window manager. So that was nice. One of the things that I have done to kind of ease my transition into using a non-tiling desktop environment is ensure that all of my key bindings that I'm used to are here. So I get super enter to get a terminal. I have super shift enter to get crusader, which actually popped up on the wrong monitor, which is awesome. There's crusader. I have all shift S to take a screenshot, things like that. I have all of these things set up so that most of my key bindings that I would normally use in a tiling window manager are still there. And I'm going to actually create some new key bindings as well because I want to be able to create some or at least learn the key bindings if they're already there to the point where I can move windows into certain places with the keyboard so that I don't have to use the mouse to drag things around because I don't, you know, I like dragging things around like every once in a while. This is fine. But I've found myself just kind of leaving things where they kind of spawn unless they're on the wrong monitor. So I would like to at least learn the key bindings to move things so that I can move them from one side of the screen to the other. That'd be kind of cool. I know those things exist. I'll do that as well. One thing that I haven't used and I know a lot of people use this when they use a desktop environment is alt tab. I don't use alt tab all that much and or at least at all like it's here and it's it's fairly useful. But I find those extra key taps, the extra number of times you have to actually, you know, press tab in order to cycle cycle through these things. Totally blinking on the word that that, you know, that I need to use there. But you guys got to get the idea. The number of times I've had to tab to cycle between these. And the thing is, is that oftentimes I'll find myself like if I have like six applications here, I'll fly past the one that I actually need and then have to go all the way back around. Now, I know that there is a key binding to go backwards. Like I think it's alt shift and tab in order to go backwards. So if I do alt tab and then alt shift and tab, yeah, that goes backwards. Like that. I know that that's there, but I never remember when I need it. So that it's kind of pointless. I should learn it. Maybe that's a good way to switch between windows. But I don't think that it actually is. I found myself just moving the mouse. Probably not as efficient as it needs to be. Maybe alt tabbing is something that I'll need to kind of gain muscle memory for. But as of right now, that's not something that I've been doing, which is probably not a good sign for my long term productivity. But we'll see how that goes. So the last thing that I want to talk about are some problems that I've found. So the first one and one that I've solved is that I have two monitors. I've talked about this before. You can't see obviously both of them, but you're just staring at one, the one that's usually sits right in front of me. The problem was is that when the computer would at least pretend to put the monitors to sleep, when the monitor would come back, it would have me log in like I had expected to do. And then when I came back to everything set up here, the monitors would be mirrored and that's not useful for me at all. Now, I was able to fix this by creating a profile here and then ensuring that these two boxes were checked. Basically, what that allows it to do is just to reset the profile every time it comes back, if the profile was lost while the computer was asleep. And that worked out fairly well. I found that online somewhere and it was really good. Also, somebody mentioned it to me on Massive on afterwards. So I got that fixed. The one thing that I haven't gotten fixed is this part here. And that's the display power management. I have not been able to get this to actually work. And it's infuriating. And the thing is, this is not an XFC problem because it also happens on plasma. It happens on genome. This is something to do with my hardware or something that I run on my system that will just not allow my monitors to go to sleep. I don't know why. And it's mind boggling because I don't I can't quite figure out what it is. It's some process that runs in the background that lets the computer the monitors to go to sleep for a split second, then turn right back on. And I've been messing around with it now for ever since yesterday when I started doing this, and I have not been able to solve it despite several solutions from many different people, both on Mass Done and on various forums and stuff. I've tried forcing it with a with Xset DPS or whatever it's called. I've tried obviously having this on. This is the way that it should work. I should be able to click on this and it should just work, but it doesn't. I've tried to edit the extra settings that also do this exact same thing in the screensaver. So if you are here and you have the screensaver on, there's actually settings here for blanking and putting this monitor to sleep. I don't know why they're in both places, but they are in both places. That's kind of messy, but it doesn't matter because it still doesn't work. So I don't, you know, I've just managed. I've just turned all this stuff off because it's actually more maddening when the screen will go to sleep for a second and turn right back on. I just rather have them on all the time than have it tease me that it might work sometime. Now, I thought that maybe it was Firefox because I've had in the past this problem where it was the browser that was keeping things open. But I closed Firefox. I ensured that it had no processes running and it was still, it still won't go to sleep. And that's just, like I said, it's maddening because there are many times during the day where I'm either out of the office or I'm standing at the standing desk behind me and I don't, you know, want these monitors just to run all the time. It's a waste of electricity. It wastes the life of the monitor and I don't want that. So basically my options right now are to either leave them on or shut them off with the power button, which is not that big a deal on the 27 inch, which is the smaller one that you guys don't see. That that power switch is right underneath the bezel. Really easy to get to. But the 32 inch, which is the one that you guys are looking at, that power button is on the far back and it is really hard to reach. So that's a pain in the tuchus. And I honestly, if there's anything that's going to stop this experiment in its track, it's this because honestly, it's the only problem that I truly have had that I haven't been able to solve. It's I just don't know where else to look next. It's kind of one of those things that's just going to make me really, really annoyed. So yeah, that's the one thing that I haven't been able to solve yet. I'm still going to be looking into that. The other thing that I want to do is find a new terminal. So I was using XFC for terminal, which is the default terminal of XFC. It's not a great terminal if you use nerd fonts because it apparently doesn't support nerd fonts, or at least it doesn't see them. Like I have nerd fonts installed, they're in the appropriate places. But if you go into the font selector for XFC for for the XFC for terminal, they don't show up. I don't know why it's really weird. Maybe there's some kind of work around. I didn't actually bother looking. I just downloaded Terminator after someone told me that I've worked in Terminator. So I've been using Terminator. The thing is, I don't really like Terminator all that much. Now, I probably could put some effort into making it so I like it. But first of all, your Terminator developers, what on earth is that? OK, first of all, if your window is this wide, just make it full screen. OK. But also, don't have a peer like that where you can only see part of it. It's a half of a half on the monitor. That's probably an XFC thing. Maybe it wouldn't happen if I didn't have multiple monitors or whatever. But that's annoying. It drives me nuts. But this they have scroll bars all over the place. Make it so that this is just one big list so you can scroll down instead of two columns. It's not the biggest deal, but it bothered me. Right. It's one of those things they just didn't really care for that much. Like I said, I could go through and probably put some effort into making this so that I actually like it. But the settings panel drives me nuts. I do enjoy the fact that the two terminals that I've used so far have tabs. Everybody knows I like tabs, so that's cool. Also, this one has horizontal splits and vertical splits, which is cool. I'm sure I'm sure there's key bindings for this. I will definitely figure those out if I stick with Terminator. I would definitely get rid of the scroll bars because good Lord, the scroll bars are huge. But anyways, that's another thing that I want to do. Something I'm going to explore. I'd probably just download a Lackardy or Kitty or whatever because those will definitely work here, but they're not really. Those are really meant for tiling window managers. I've always felt I know they'll work perfectly well in a desktop environment, but I've just always felt they work better in a tiling window manager than a desktop environment. It's just something that I've always felt now. Obviously, you can because they're going to come with like title bars and stuff. You can disable those, but just it's just one of those things. I'll probably try to stick with this or search for a different terminal, whatever happens to be, and we'll see how that goes. So yeah, I've switched to XFCE and overall actually quite happy with my choice of doing this. I've had a good time over the course of the last day, you know, just kind of figuring things out. And I've obviously I've used XFCE before, so I'm not a complete new. But, you know, it's just been it's been a little bit and it's been fun getting things set up, kind of getting used to figuring out, you know, the key bindings that I need to have here. Learning some of the new key bindings, setting up the workspaces that they're actually, you know, functioning the way that I want them to, you know, just the little things and it's been very fun. If the monitor going to sleep thing would go away and, you know, let me fix that, I'd say my experience has been perfect. It's been very enjoyable and I'm, you know, happy about it. I don't know how long this will last. Like I want I want it to last a significant period of time because I want to see if I can do it. I'm going to challenge myself and I'm not giving up at the first sign of trouble. But I could see myself getting annoyed so much without monitors not going to sleep that I know ended. I'm hoping that that doesn't happen because I want to try to fix it. I want to try to actually live in a floating atmosphere, if you will. And we'll see how that goes in a couple of months. I will make another video if I've made it that far and we'll see how it goes. Because I'm not really going to talk any more about XFC itself. I'm going to want to talk about the experience of it from a tiling window manager users perspective of using a non tiling environment. And just to see how it changes the way I work changes the way I be productive, you know, all that stuff. So we'll see how that goes. If you have thoughts on this change or if you've made a similar change or you've gone, you tried and you went back, whatever, leave those comments in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Massive Outer Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast. Links for Liberapay and YouTube will be in the video description as well. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon. YouTube, you guys are all absolutely amazing without you. The challenge is to not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.