Xfce is lighter weight than Gnome 3, and actually allows you to customize things that matter (to me). You can set it up in various ways visually, even though the default look is usable out of the box.
Xfce's window manager is the best of all I've tried. Maybe not as configurable as e.g. Sawmill, it has a lot of useful functions that are missing from Gnome-based offerings, and from macOS: window snapping, automatic window resizing to grab available space (in several ways), simple automatic tiling, easy putting a window above others, etc. They all can be configured to have arbitrary shortcuts.
Xfce has fewer ambitions to integrate things and have their own everything. It allows you to just work with your apps without distraction.
Most importantly, Xfce is not trying to imitate macOS, but does its own thing, and stays consistent. It has very little magic in it.
Also, bugs are quite few and far between. They do not seem to rush to release new stuff.
Does it have an expose style feature? I started using Gnome a few years ago almost by accident, and since then I can never go back to a window list. As Gnome started pissing me off (it is very unstable, in a version-to-version change way, not in a crash way) I discovered that I am too addicted to it and couldn't find expose style elsewhere.
In the old days, you got an exposé style feature by compiz and friends. I don't know the current situation, but for instance KDE/KWin also features an exposé style (can be triggered by keyboard shortcut or magic edges/corners for the mouse cursor).
Does Sawmill still work on new systems? Every time I install it gets more and more difficult, to the point where when I tried installing in on Ubuntu 18.04 I just gave up.
Comments
Xfce is lighter weight than Gnome 3, and actually allows you to customize things that matter (to me). You can set it up in various ways visually, even though the default look is usable out of the box.
Xfce's window manager is the best of all I've tried. Maybe not as configurable as e.g. Sawmill, it has a lot of useful functions that are missing from Gnome-based offerings, and from macOS: window snapping, automatic window resizing to grab available space (in several ways), simple automatic tiling, easy putting a window above others, etc. They all can be configured to have arbitrary shortcuts.
Xfce has fewer ambitions to integrate things and have their own everything. It allows you to just work with your apps without distraction.
Most importantly, Xfce is not trying to imitate macOS, but does its own thing, and stays consistent. It has very little magic in it.
Also, bugs are quite few and far between. They do not seem to rush to release new stuff.
Does it have an expose style feature? I started using Gnome a few years ago almost by accident, and since then I can never go back to a window list. As Gnome started pissing me off (it is very unstable, in a version-to-version change way, not in a crash way) I discovered that I am too addicted to it and couldn't find expose style elsewhere.
I think it does, in a form of a separate app: https://docs.xfce.org/apps/xfdashboard/start
In the old days, you got an exposé style feature by compiz and friends. I don't know the current situation, but for instance KDE/KWin also features an exposé style (can be triggered by keyboard shortcut or magic edges/corners for the mouse cursor).
Does Sawmill still work on new systems? Every time I install it gets more and more difficult, to the point where when I tried installing in on Ubuntu 18.04 I just gave up.