> But then I found "Regolith". There are a few distributions which have i3 out of the box, but this one had a special keybinding reminder that was one click (or keybinding) away. I was very surprised by how quickly I adapted once the barrier of entry was removed.
The i3 community variant of Manjaro is also a nice config for new i3 users (I'm one of them) on an Arch derivative.
But then I found "Regolith". There are a few distributions which have i3 out of the box, but this one had a special keybinding reminder that was one click (or keybinding) away. I was very surprised by how quickly I adapted once the barrier of entry was removed.
Once I switched funny things started happening. I wanted to slightly change the time format of the bar, and found that it was controlled by a tiny shell script. So I made my own tiny shell script that did exactly what I wanted. Eventually this sort of thing happened at lower and lower levels and I started hacking the C code and making PRs. It was really strange that the barrier between my window manager and it's code is smaller than the one between my previous desktop environment (xfce) and the new window manager. It's liberating.
All this said, when I had to use OSX at a previous company, the walled garden was pretty nice. It always worked and the usability was much better than most other environments I had used. But now that I've experienced something custom built to my preferences, I would have a hard time using something else.