About 4 years ago I got a 13.3" Thinkpad laptop to replace an old Chromebook for portable development, and installed Arch + i3 on it (btw). After a bit of ricing the configs, it started feeling really homey. I love using workspaces here! They feel perfectly suited for laptop screens which have minimal space, allowing me to keep my browser full-screen and my IDE full-screen while still quickly switching back and forth to reference one or the other.
On the other hand, I don’t really use workspaces when I’m on my desktop PC (I use a 27" monitor). I just installed KDE to get ahead of the Windows 10 EOL, and while I looked into combining i3 and KDE, I haven’t really felt the need for i3’s workspaces or using KDE’s virtual desktops. With a 27" monitor, I feel like there’s enough space to split my browser and IDE half-and-half on screen, and I’m ok using a file browser or terminal window as floating windows. Another consideration is that I’m always using a mouse on my desktop, so switching between workspaces with the keyboard wouldn’t feel as natural.
What about you? Do you use workspaces differently between devices? Does screen size affect your choices at all?
I switched to sway on both my lapto (13" 1080p) and desktop (27" 1440) to force myself on using workspaces, and man i have to say I was missing out a lot, now I thinking of giving Hyprland a try to for dynamic tiling which sound fantastic especially for bigger screens.
I really wish I could load Sway on my desktop… unfortunately I’ve got an Nvidia card and I couldn’t get the live ISO to boot with sway. :<
Very tempting to try it on my laptop though! All the setups I’ve seen using it look really clean.