After trying sway for a while and finally getting the screen share to work enough, I remembered why I chose tiling managers and not DE long time ago.

DEs are very hard to customise and not keyboard centric. While trying GNOME I got annoyed that I couldn’t switch windows by title, access workspaces by number or name and general unpredictability of layout.

There are tradeoffs. Everything works out of the box and the configuration is both centralised and comprehensive. In particular I lost per window screen share, cpu performance controls, keyboard layout, automounting.

Most of these can be configured with some effort. I think for my type of work with terminals, multiple workspaces but small monitor and nixos with declarative configuration, it makes more sense to persist using the tile manager long term.

This is the same argument that using customisable environments like vim or emacs instead of premade defaults of proprietary editors. Short term it doesn’t make sense to invest so much effort. Long term the investment returns more value.