I disagree with the sentiment of this article (I don’t remember Microsoft having anything to do with Gnome 3 being…uh…Gnome 3) although I thank it for it unintentionally introducing me to tiling window managers. I’ve been using i3 for over 10 years and every time I try gnome/kde again, I am scrambling back to the comfort that is a TWM.
The worst thing with Gnome now, is the amount of baggage the few Gnome applications I use bring with them. I keep replacing them step by step because they're so tied to Gnome it's really painful to have dependencies on them if you don't use Gnome.
On a lower level: Some Gnome apps will hang for up to tens of seconds with no UI or error messages if there is no dbus user session running unless DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS is set to an empty string. Evince is a case in point.
I get they're not written to run outside of Gnome (and that a lot distros will run dbus user sessions on non-Gnome setups too), but it's nevertheless infuriating.
I don't particularly like dbus, but I also don't particularly dislike it. So it's not like I went out of my way to strip out a user session bus.
My current setup just happens not to spawn a bus for the user session because nothing else I care to run actually cares whether one is running or not, until I ran into Evince.
It mostly just annoys me the user hostility of hanging like that for a feature that the app can run just fine without - popping up a warning if a user happens to trigger something that is degraded without it would be far less user hostile.
Out of curiosity, how do you do your i3 installation? I've become accustomed to starting with Ubuntu Server and then installing x, video drivers, i3, and eventually various system utilities by hand. It leads to a very lightweight and tidy setup, but it takes forever. I tried starting with a normal Ubuntu installation, but de-GNOMEing the system wasn't easier.
I'm not running i3 (any more; went to bspwm and then my own) but I've always started with normal Ubuntu. For i3wm I seem to remember it was reasonably straightforward as long as you're fine with some of the tentacles of Gnome. That is, I'd still typically run the Gnome settings stuff, and run a bar that'd happily handle docking of nm-applet and the like. I think next time I might look to a distro with xfce or similar and strip down from that instead as a means to get a cleaner system without the pain of building up from scratch.
> as long as you're fine with some of the tentacles of Gnome
Ah, herein lies the hangup. GNOME is fine on its own but I find its tentacles incredibly annoying when they make their way into i3. Maybe I just need to learn how to make my own Ubuntu fork and shove my setup into that.
