TERMINAL SETUPS

I havnt tried i3 or awesome.

I use VIM almost exclusively except in some more applied settings for maybe specifically an app.. and tmux works really nicely with Vim. That's why everyone says "tmux and vim should just get married and get it over with already" as a quote all over the internet. It could be the case with the other two as well.

tmux also has a really easy way to create your own plugins, and tmux persist sessions for savings windows and setups through reboots.

Again, these were things I wanted and found tmux to offer, while working really well with unique vim setups I had integrated across multiple computers. I don't know if i3 or awesome has these same features, but I think tmux is a good setup and I don't see a need to switch especially with tmux persist.

I'd be happy to hear recommendations about i3 or awesome over tmux advantages. tmux is so great to me, so if you had some good examples of how i3 or awesome trump tmux then I would definitely listen and consider and look into switching more. I've never had an issue with tmux and have really really liked it, and found every aspect I need to be easily customizable through .confs and never had to work with a predecided set of options rendered through a gui type customization, which I always find limiting for me, rather than just knowing or learning what to type in the .conf file for sys configs and having it just work.

DESKTOP THEMES
I've only recently switched to gnome and used LXDE before and really liked it. I try to ride with Fedoras upgrades, and I know there were alot of opinions going around about having the default installs being switched to gnome, but I have not had any runtime issues with it.

That being said, I have a really powerful laptop, the one I'm running gnome on (other is a hackintosh but thats not by choice its for dev reasons), so I don't find anything I do on my laptop being compromised due to gnome, maybe my own bad code, but not gnome.

That being said, outside of initial testing of my skylake, I mostly run testing on centos on other systems and my main laptop currently running gnome, is an interface for which to run other setups I effectively use as servers or actual servers (and tmux persist sessions make it great to do that easily and save my entire detailed setup if i have to suddenly walk away from a detailed complex environment and not come back to it for two days and pick up where i left off, and that happens often considering I work simultaneously on multiple projects depending on my priorities for variable work schedules and more entrepreneurial endeavors.) so I don't find myself fighting over computing resources because of gnome.

I have not used gnome since I first tried ubuntu about 7 years ago, so I've had it for about 6 months before and not too many issues, only with integration for other unix setups, which is exactly why I think making dev on it more accessible or inviting to people (gitlab being a good venue for it aside, any venue) is a good option.

so far, I've been really happy with gnome since i came back to it. It took me about 3 hours to be set up and learning how to customize and make my own themes for it.

Gnome is not a bad desktop and it could benefit from more development by users who care about these things, minimalist setups and are constantly aware about runtimes and computational efficiency in every piece of code they write, which sadly...and somehow, many people missed day 1 of learning coding (big 0) and never seem to consider it until everything is breaking, and then say "hey lets throw this on AWS without exploiting the backend at all to optimize for the GPUs were paying for at the kernel level and assume AWS will figure out how to optimize our code at every layer instead"

at the low level, I've never done any custom mods on LXDE, so I can't sit here and pretend like I know some really good comparisons on computational efficiencies and design of LXDE versus gnome, but I think gnome is a fine interface, but could benefit alot still from more user dev.

Thanks for the reply and open to any other suggestions you have.

I still consider myself an amateur at everything computer/compsci related. I only minored in Compsci and code 30% of my time at work and then alot outside of work, but I'm not a top level dev by any means. I'm an Electrical Engineer (one of those I know) and code because I want to..not to mention due to the overlap.

So I'm always grateful to get feedback from people who spend more time exclusively working in this space than I do.