At last, some good things happening in 2021. The Fedora Project announces the first-ever official i3 window manager Fedora spin which will be available with Fedora 34 release.
The i3 is a tiling window manager for X11 and a very popular one. The i3 window manager is used by many users today due to its portability and speed. Although, tiling window managers are a bit difficult for general users to use due to their window and keyboard-driven nature. That is completely different than a traditional icon, menu-driven desktop environments such as GNOME, KDE Plasma, etc. However, it is super fast and once you are comfortable, you can get your work done in a much faster way in a tiling window manager like i3.
But today, to use i3 or any tiling window manager in your Linux distributions, you have to install it manually (sudo dnf install i3) and configure the xorg server to run it during startup.
Fedora 34 – i3 spin
Now, for the first time ever, Fedora introduces an official i3 window manager spin with Fedora 34 release. That means you get a complete Fedora workstation with i3 configured and ready to be installed.
By design, i3 has very low storage and memory footprint. That means, with the power of Fedora in-house software and with the i3 window manager at the top, many users might start using Fedora for this reason.
Along with that, many customizations would be done by the team when it ships officially. SO, users need not tweak or configure much, and it’s readily available for use for everyone as a .iso file.
What about Sway
Many might say, why not choose Sway for an official flavor. Sway is an i3 clone for the Wayland display server specifically. And it is advanced and uses a more advanced display server. But I think it’s better to start with i3 and who knows in the future we might see another flavor with Sway in Fedora.
That said, the Fedora 34 string freeze is due this month, and not sure how this would play out. The final Fedora 34 release is still a couple of months away.
Overall, this is very good news in a way, that many people may start using it for experiments and even start to like it. The popularity and uses of tiling window managers would definitely improve.
What’s next?
Check out the official page and details below if you want to contribute.
