Open another window, and each window now takes up half of the screen. In short, it means that your windows are automatically laid out in such a way that your screen is always full. If you haven’t heard of tiling window managers, you should check them out. The biggest difference between i3 and the default GNOME desktop environment on Ubuntu 20.04 is that i3 is a tiling window manager.

I hope that this post consolidates a lot of the information out there and makes it easier for someone to fully setup i3 in one go :) Why Use i3?īefore we dive in, I think it’s prudent for me to explain why I chose to use i3. I did all of the following configuration on Ubuntu 20.04, so I cannot speak to other versions/flavors of Linux. In this post, I will outline some of the more advanced configuration changes I made and point to some good documentation for getting started. I haven’t run this setup since college, so I had to re-learn (read: re-google) a lot of the solutions, tips, and tricks I found before that made my experience more pleasant. I also decided to use the i3 window manager. A few weeks ago, I started running Linux full time again (specifically, Ubuntu 20.04).

I3 manager