What type of UI navigation do you prefer on a computer?
So for a long time pretty much every computer used the traditional like windows layout with moveable windows that minimized or maximized and had a taskbar and start menu and whatnot. You had some minor changes with Mac and stuff, but now you can really have some radically different ways to use a computer.
Personally I have differing preferences if I'm using a laptop or a desktop.
On my desktop I prefer a dock and to use the mouse to click around. More of the windows style. Then on a laptop (which I use most often) I use a heavily gesture based navigation.
Currently I have Gnome modified so that when I am in a program, like the web browser I'm in typing this, it is full screen. The top bar is hidden, and there's no dock of any kind. Not even one that pops up when I move the mouse to the edge of the screen. Instead I have everything for navigation hidden inside the task view. I swipe up on the trackpad with 3 fingers to bring it up. That's how I see time, battery life, and the other topbar stuff too. If switching quickly between two things I put one of them in a 2nd desktop and use a 3 finger side swipe to move back and forth.
I'm curious to know what other unique or highly custom navigation methods people are using on Linux. I know tiling window managers are pretty popular. Is there a general consensus on what's best these days? Or is everyone doing slightly different things?
basiclemmon98
in reply to XiJinpingStanAccount • • •XiJinpingStanAccount
in reply to basiclemmon98 • • •I see what you mean. You get rid of the buttons so you can click and drag the window bar without accidentally clicking them right? I've got everything so smushed into one bar it's like the opposite. Altho I really don't USE the buttons since I have it in fullscreen all the time and just close things from the Gnome task switcher. So maybe I'll remove my buttons too. Might be a good idea.
This is what I mean by the bar being all smushed together:
That's the entire screen. I messed with the browser settings to make it so I had more screen space for the actual webpage.
𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
in reply to XiJinpingStanAccount • • •Using Waybar I have a detailed clock and a sound widget on bottom right corner of my screen, and left of that is space for “systray” icons.
My windows have a title bar, that show the icon and title, and a close button.
No task bar or other navigation elements on the screen or the windows.
I make heavy use of Alt+Drag actions for resizing moving windows around and constantly have windows rolled up so only the title bar is showing. I never minimize windows and rarely use fullscreen.
For accessing applications in a convenient way I use the root menu on desktop rightclick and the client menu on middleclick.
The whole setup is fully customized and built from ground up to be as least annoying and intrusive as possible.
This is basically my setup since ca. 15-20 years now. Started with Openbox on Debian and since 2008 Arch Linux, and around 2-3 years ago I switched over to labwc on Wayland which allowed me to re-create what I used on Openbox.
XiJinpingStanAccount
in reply to 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬 • • •𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
in reply to XiJinpingStanAccount • • •My desktop computer monitor is a 28 inch 4K screen, so yes, it is on the upper end of the median screen size, I guess. I ran Hyprland on my laptop (13 inch 1080p) for some time but I like my environment harmonized, so I use the same configuration there, too.
For easier management I make use of labwc’s areas and snapping feature to have windows proportionally the same size on both screens. The areas use percentages by default, which makes it quite easy. I have top, bottom, left, and right, the four corner quarters and two different center regions.
On my laptop I usually only use the center region for the browser.
labwc
labwc.github.iostarblursd
in reply to XiJinpingStanAccount • • •XiJinpingStanAccount
in reply to starblursd • • •starblursd
in reply to XiJinpingStanAccount • • •Interstellar_1
in reply to XiJinpingStanAccount • • •I use niri since it solves the issues of positioning that you have with stacking window managers and the amount of organization needed for a tiling window manager. I can add many related windows to the same row and use super+the horizontal scroll on my mouse to scroll between windows, and the normal scroll to scroll between workspaces. I have common apps and shortcuts bound to hotkeys, but I prefer a mainly mouse-driven workflow so for everything else I am just dragging things around.
In my browser I have a collapsed left sidebar for tabs and a collapsed top bar for navigation which I can hover to reveal, so all I see by default is the webpage.
kittenzrulz123 [they/them, she/her]
in reply to XiJinpingStanAccount • • •dubs
in reply to XiJinpingStanAccount • • •Mordikan
in reply to XiJinpingStanAccount • • •For laptops, I prefer something like i3wm or hyprland with workspaces configured (i've started playing with caelestia and noctuila shells but mostly just running waybar). That lets me avoid the touchpad as much as possible as I hate those and pushes everything to vim style keyboard shortcuts. It also lets me emulate having multiple monitors without having to view all of them (I'm terrible at multi-tasking and lose productivity when I have too many screens available).
For gaming, I like Gnome with the O-Tiling extension (thank you for the user on here that informed me of that). That is more just due to Gnome being easy to configure and not the machine that I mainly drive.
My main machine is just an old refurb Optiplex micro 7050 that runs a few containers and is mainly just for browsing and networking outside of that.
All machines I have (with the exception of a work laptop) use that same vim configuration style though. The shortcuts between all of them are the same even if the applications those shortcuts open is slightly different. CTRL+ALT+F might open hyprfm on one machine, nautilus on another, and ranger on a third. So the shortcuts globally are more just thematic. Fuzzel also runs for uncommon applications that don't have shortcuts, but honestly I am mainly a terminal-first user so it's rare I actually call that.