Bell curve compares KDE and tiling window managers across developer intelligence levels
Description
The meme shows a blue Gaussian IQ-bell-curve diagram with percentile markers (0.1 %, 2 %, 14 %, 34 %, 34 %, 14 %, 2 %, 0.1 %) and IQ scores 55-145 along the x-axis. On the left tail is a simple, goofy-smiling Wojak head captioned “KDE, Gnome, xfce”. In the middle peak a crying, bespectacled Wojak is captioned “herbstluftwm, i3, awesome, xmonad, bspwm”. On the right tail a hooded “enlightened monk” figure is again captioned “KDE, Gnome, xfce”. The joke riffs on the bell-curve/galaxy-brain trope: new or ultra-senior users pick mainstream desktop environments while mid-level tweakers obsess over niche tiling window managers. For engineers, it lampoons the pendulum of tooling sophistication, Linux desktop customization culture, and the cyclical quest for productivity
Comments
39Comment deleted
Career progression: 1) KDE. 2) 800-line xmonad.hs to reclaim 4 pixels. 3) Realize DORA doesn’t track pixel efficiency - reinstall KDE and ship the feature
After 20 years in the industry, you realize the real power move isn't mastering obscure tiling WMs - it's billing $500/hour while using stock GNOME because you're too busy architecting distributed systems to care about your window gaps being pixel-perfect
After 15 years of maintaining bspwm configs across three machines, debugging X11 quirks at 2 AM, and writing custom polybar scripts, senior engineers realize that KDE's 'just works' philosophy isn't a compromise - it's the architecture decision they should have made when they still had time to actually ship features instead of tweaking window gaps
KDE rice peaks the curve because it trades tiling purity for actual productivity - after 20 YoE, that's the real high-score architecture
After a decade of i3/XMonad, I found the real 10x: deleting 3,000 lines of dotfiles and letting KDE remember my monitors
Linux WM bell curve: interns and staff engineers both ship KDE/GNOME; the middle tier writes 800 lines of i3/xmonad config to save 200ms per Alt-Tab and loses an hour every time they dock a second monitor
tiling is mostly a meme tbh Comment deleted
Tiling is kinda convenient for just coding Comment deleted
its like, fine for coding everything except graphical stuff Comment deleted
its awesome, but only using popOS version. ubuntu integration is very buggy . But is still much better than windows version or a meme UX provided by MacOS Comment deleted
ubuntu integration is shitty because ubuntu is shitty. get a better distro Comment deleted
yeah. i know. But its good enough at the moment. and i`m fine with it Comment deleted
fair. you do you Comment deleted
what, no Comment deleted
Tiling are winner on mobiles Comment deleted
when i want to get stuff done i turn on floating mode Comment deleted
xfce is a de, not only a wm i ran xfce + bspwm for a reason Comment deleted
the actual one on the right is the dude who realizes that everybody can use whatever works for them Comment deleted
Yep. Same old story Comment deleted
if something opens a new window when you run it to test it just awkwardly moves all your other windows around and ends up being an inconvenience Comment deleted
that's why I use tabbed tiling, not whatever i3 does by default Comment deleted
you can add an exception for a window or program if you don't want it to be tiled Comment deleted
weston, plz Comment deleted
there's no coming back from tiling wms Comment deleted
you can waste or save your time both on gnome and sway, it doesn't matter what you choose Comment deleted
Windows>>Linux any day Comment deleted
key=unusability Comment deleted
then why tf it deletes all my torrent clients? even mac does not Comment deleted
just use windows xp (like I did until 2022) Comment deleted
rly? Comment deleted
yes, you can google this problem they gave all torrent clients some category of malware in their piece of shit called «Windows Defender» Comment deleted
use what you find easiest to use Comment deleted
I'm glad to have finally reached the right end of this bell curve, well many other bell curves too. Comment deleted
Galaxy brain: Mate Comment deleted
yeah nobody said it was revolutionizing. I think. Comment deleted
So one workspace for ide, other for browser and switch between them in a process Comment deleted
switching desktops is what I do for that. Definitely way faster than alt+tabbing, but that's nothing to do with floating/tiling and everything to do with good desktop switching keybinds Comment deleted
yes, but most people have more than two windows also I like to have separate windows for docs and stackoverflow-ish stuff also usually one more window for project home (like github or codeberg) Comment deleted
in my case, all browser windows are on desktop 3, with wm tabs separating them Comment deleted