[Question] i3 and minimizing (I know it's not supported, but is enforced by some games)

How do you exactly deal with enforced minimizing after switching active windows or do you even experience that nowadays? Not minimizing yourself, but the game/program minimizing because it feels like minimizing because you swapped active windows. Doesn't matter if the window is fullscreen, tiling, tabbed, stacked. And I'm talking about Wine games, because the native ones (at least the ones I play) don't minimize or have a setting to be boarderless (or however it's spelled).

Thank you in advance!

More info about why I ask and if I searched (hope you don't have to read it to figure out what I'm asking, I suck at explaining, big time):

I was currently thinking about switching to i3 because tiling is something I'd need for every day use (because it's hell to adjust windows all the time for multiple hours a day, lol), but I also use my PC for playing games, and most of the games I play are rather unusual and enforce minimizing when alt-tabbing or switching workspaces, as well as some games have specific sizes (e.g. 1024x768) which you can not resize at all (and here floating mode helps, I know). So I was searching in the internet, but all information I have found was from before 2016 and the only solution to disappearing windows (after they minimize) was to trigger i3 fullscreen and then disable it for that specific game. I do know that i3 doesn't support any kind of minimizing and if you do want to "minimize" the game, there's a specific workspace (scratchpad or something, forgot the name) that you cannot access by just opening it (though you can freely pull in and out your stuff from there by keybinds).

Disclaimer: Google didn't really help much here. All I found is that i3 doesn't support minimizing and that you can not minimize anything, and that if a game forces minimize, the game is gone and you can't re-open it (was a topic from ages ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/i3wm/comments/6i6sz9/i3_and_fullscreen_wine_game/ and [SOLVED] i3 and full-screen games / Multimedia and Games / Arch Linux Forums). There wasn't enough information about that in the internet about the same question I have, only topics where people asked about minimizing and getting responses like "you don't minimize in tiling window managers", and nearly nothing specifically about what I'm asking. And I wanted to check it out in a VM but I can't figure out why I can't access the internet in Virt-Manager (I know Garuda isn't really optimized for VMs, also followed Distro Tube's installation on Youtube because I am too stupid to work it out myself, but internet still doesn't work).

To Garuda team:
When I saw i3 in videos I was sure I will never wanna use tiling window managers because they're pain as heck, but then, for some random reason, I decided to check out Garuda i3 (in a VM) and all the setup was so nice that I'm actually thinking about giving it a try instead of making myself a program that would tile stuff for me. :smiley: Really great job, because you don't really have to customize anything if you're not into that (which I personally don't like customizing myself) and it's really easy to use (aside super+F1/2/3/4... for some programs, but the config is easy enough to change that yourself). Good job with that!

Just install KDE Dragonized Gaming.
You can tile directly there as well, who wants more uses the successor of Kröhnkite.

3 Likes

Was also thinking about it, but I don't like that KDE is that heavy. I open one game from 2004 and my CPU runs at 70+ C, and I'd like to have it rather quiet (I actually used KDE, Dragonized, few months back and swapped to XFCE just because of the CPU temperatures) - now I run 2 browsers, 2 games and 3 documents at barely 60 C, while before I ran one browser and one game and CPU temp at 70+. Air cooling and KDE don't work for me. :smiley: I'd like something light that "doesn't even touch" your CPU, similar to XFCE.

Also, I kind of loved the tabbed layout in i3 when I toyed in a VM (again, stupid VM doesn't want to connect to internet so can't really see how it handles the games that minimize) and I'd really want to use it on a every day basis. Though I gotta agree, one could choose Garuda Dragonized over a super hot woman because that's how cool and hot Dragonized is.