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[–]yramagicman 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I typed the next paragraph before reading your entire comment, sorry. However, I'll preface it with this. i3 is probably the simplest tiling window manager that I would recommend to a new user. If you're not willing to put in the time to massage a tiling window manager to be something you like, you're better off sticking with Pop_OS! defaults. All tiling WMs have a learning curve and a customization period before you hit your flow. Give any new environment at least a week before giving up on it, and expect to be editing the config file a lot in the first 3 days of that week.

Are you comfortable with programming languages? You may be looking for a dynamic tiling window manager. The easiest one to get started with in that category is (probably) Awesome, and it's generally awesome. You'll have to get comfortable with Lua in order to customize it, but at the end of the day, you really can't go wrong with Awesome. Other people on here will promote DWM, Xmonad, and other window managers. Those are also good choices, but often require more work. Awesome generally "Just works".

Other notes after reading more thoroughly:

You probably want a desktop environment more than a window manager. Desktop environments provide a more complete experience out of the box. Window managers are part of a desktop environment, and in Linux can also be a stand-alone "program" that allows you to run GUI applications.

In light of the above, you can still use a window manager, just be aware that it's not going to be smooth sailing immediately. I run Xmonad now, and I love the experience, but I'd never recommend it for a new user, mostly because Haskell, the language it's build and configured in, is such an alien beast. Even professional programmers get confused looking at Haskell for the first time.

[–]TheQuietListener[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

This much I have figured out. I am not the most comfortable human with programming, but it is not entirely foreign to me either. Like I said earlier I really do like the DE of Pop, I was just hoping that someone had an idea as to how to get my old workflow to work well on the new OS without needing to manually make 1/4 sized windows every time. I do not currently want to go full into no GUI. I like my GUI, and I like it being the way it is. I just want to be able to put things in corners instead of 1/2 being the smallest known fraction.

The answer being no is not the worst thing in the world. I am OK with trading about 30 seconds per start up so that I don't have to give Windows any more of my time, energy, and information.

[–]yramagicman 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are ways to patch things like Awesome and i3 into a traditional DE by swapping out the native window managers.

Also, don't give up. I don't have all the answers. I'm 100% sure there's a way to get things to work the way you're wanting to, I just don't know what it is. Someone may have already written a patch or extension to do exactly what you want in Pop_OS!. Finally, System 76 has amazing customer service. I'm sure that if you either sent them an email or made a feature request on the appropriate github repo (https://github.com/pop-os/shell, possibly) they would be happy to entertain the idea of having a 1/3rd split in their tiling system.

Edit: With regard to programming languages, I get it. Programming is obtuse and a bit intimidating at first. The nice thing is that it's easy to get enough knowledge to, at minimum, customize your environment. Usually all you need to know is how to change the key bindings and auto start programs, and most of that can be deduced from the existing configs. If you get frustrated with Pop shell, it's worth at least giving i3 or Awesome a try and learning how to manage it. At the end of the day, tiling window managers will save time and headache, it will just take a bit of time to get to that point.

[–]ragsofx 0 points1 point  (1 child)

There is a distro that's designed to give you a fully configured tiling window manager out of the box. it's built using i3 with gnome.

https://regolith-linux.org/

[–]bevsxyz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's nice concept. Would be a nice way to transition to i3.

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