For most of the time for the last 15 something years I’ve been actively using Linux, Gnome has been my weapon of choice for the desktop environment. I even went through the slightly painful and still ongoing transition from practical but boring gnome 2 to slightly less practical and flashy gnome 3.

After some suggestions from a colleague, lately I’ve been going back to the experimental paths of trying out other desktop environments and window managers. I ended up liking i3 a lot! I never was a big fan of the tiling window managers before, as they always seemed to be on my way. Which is kind of annoying because their raison d’être is to take the task of managing window size and position away from user, releasing them to use their time more productively. While I still keep spending time trying to make i3 work the way I would wish it did, somehow I seem to have passed the initial learning curve and started enjoying using it. Cool!

After the honey moon was over, I started to miss the nice-to-have features from full blown desktop environments such as theming, font support, automount, volume management etc. So, my first tryout was to go with gnome3 and replace gnome shell with i3 as window manager. There are several guides around but none of them seemed to work for me, not even the i3-gnome package from aur. I would only end up with grey screen telling me that something went wrong. I was in no mood for further detective work on that front. Next, it tried XFCE with i3. This was nice, but it still didn’t feel right. I had some issues which i can’t remember right now. But it mostly worked the way i wanted.

The last resort i had, was to go with MATE Desktop Environment (an actively developed fork of Gnome 2) and replace it’s window manager with i3. After an admittedly short trial period, I’ve really liked this. So, long story short, here’s what I actually did. I use arch but the instructions should apply to any other mainstream linux distro out there.

First install mate.

sudo pacman -S mate

Logout and back in using mate as the session. Next, let’s set i3 as window manager. Now, here things get a bit hairy. Because i3 does not support –replace argument to replace the existing window manager we need a script that kills the current wm and starts i3. With MATE, the wm is called marco. Hence the name ofr the script, marco_to_i3.sh. Save it into eg. ~/bin.

#!/bin/sh
killall marco
i3

Open mate-session-properties and add marco_to_i3.sh into startup applications. Now, on the next login, i3 will replace marco. You can also run the script by hand right now. This has an unexpected side effect, the desktop managing file manager, caja will open up in a separate window. Some may find this acceptable, even preferred, but I’d rather not see it popping up.

With dconf-editor, navigate to org/mate/desktop/session and remove ‘filemanager’ from required-components-list. Relogin and, voilà, you’re on you mate session with i3!