this is a shitpost/showerthought. Don't make me shove it on an image. I will if I have to

gnome3 is already for neckbeards because only neckbards think gnomes belong in computers instead of being free i nthe forests

something something Gnome is the new Slugdge

I don't use Gnome3 because I dislike CSD, also Gnomes should be sending me to the Nordic mythology realm known as "the Hidden World" NOT removing features from my file manager.

WTF is an "OSGUI"?

well, it's what the individual acronyms stand for. Operating System Graphical User Interface.

Duh. What is that supposed to mean? Some kind of settings GUI? The graphical desktop in its entirety?

OK, maybe you haven't tried any of them.

Basically, some people are making interfaces for the operating systems that only have a windows manager, and isn't a complete desktop environment, so it's basically one step above a terminal. Things like i3 or dwm, as opposed to more fleshed out things like KDE or Gnome.

Gnome3 basically encourages the user to launch their programs as fullscreen things and scroll between them. The WM based UIs also do this, but call it "desktops" and tile the windows you have in each desktop.

I went through a craze of shoving different ones into VMs and felt that things like i3 and dwm behave similarly to the way I dislike Gnome3.

Did you just make that term up? I've been using window managers (mostly i3) for over a decade, I've never seen anyone call it an "OSGUI". It's a "window manager".

Also no, standalone WMs (the ones I've seen, anyway) don't encourage you to launch applications as fullscreen windows. Tiling WMs specifically are about putting multiple windows on the same desktop, visible at the same time. Most dynamic/stackings WMs (e.g. Openbox) literally have the same style of window management as what (old) Windows and standard linux desktops like Gnome 2, KDE or XFCE are doing.

He definitely made that up , because I have never seen an adoption of making gui for wm either , I think what he's tryna convey is people building shells with stuff like quickshell to possibly look like a DE?

Also no, standalone WMs (the ones I’ve seen, anyway)

OK, so I guess I don't know the "official" name for "standalone window managers". Which is what I was trying to get at with OSGUI, since WM is built into desktop environments, which leads me to :

Most dynamic/stackings WMs (e.g. Openbox)

https://openbox.org/

It says here that Openbox is to be used in Gnome or KDE. Can you use it as a standalone WM? I don't see it in my listing in my little fedora UI testbed VM :

$ dnf environment list --available 
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
ID                                Name                                 Installed
custom-environment                Fedora Custom Operating System              no
workstation-product-environment   Fedora Workstation                          no
server-product-environment        Fedora Server Edition                       no
cloud-server-environment          Fedora Cloud Server                         no
kde-desktop-environment           KDE Plasma Workspaces                       no
kde-mobile-environment            KDE Plasma Mobile                           no
xfce-desktop-environment          Xfce Desktop                                no
phosh-desktop-environment         Phosh Desktop                               no
lxde-desktop-environment          LXDE Desktop                                no
lxqt-desktop-environment          LXQt Desktop                                no
cinnamon-desktop-environment      Cinnamon Desktop                            no
mate-desktop-environment          MATE Desktop                                no
sugar-desktop-environment         Sugar Desktop Environment                   no
budgie-desktop-environment        Budgie Desktop                              no
cosmic-desktop-environment        COSMIC Desktop                              no
developer-workstation-environment Development and Creative Workstation        no
basic-desktop-environment         Basic Desktop                               no
i3-desktop-environment            i3 desktop                                  no
miraclewm-desktop-environment     Miracle WM Desktop Environment              no
sway-desktop-environment          Sway Desktop                                no

don’t encourage you to launch applications as fullscreen windows. Tiling WMs specifically are about putting multiple windows on the same desktop, visible at the same time.

Yes, I get that. Do you also get that it's pretty hard to see the 5th or 8th level of fibonnachi tiling and use it to read text? I mean this in contrast to being able to float them about and whatnot. You either move it to the next desktop or tile it. there's not much flexability and it's all designed to be navigated by keyboard shortcuts, wheras gnome does something similar, but expects you to move the mouse to weird places on the screen to get them.

Yes, openbox is a standalone window manager. I used it as my first standalone window manager years ago before i moved on to tiling.

I think your problem with tiling is a matter of switching mental model, or it's just not for you. But you're right, having like 5 or 8 windows open on a given workspace on a dynamic tiler is not a good experience, which is why i never open more than 3 or 4 windows on a given workspace. I either close what i don't need or send it to another workspace. The benefit of tiling is that you don't have to bother arranging your windows cause it already does it for you, and you can see all windows that are open at a glance. Even in a floating environment i doubt having 8 windows open at once is a good experience. You're gonna be doing a lot of alt-tabbing and clicking the window you want to switch to, or whatever keybind DEs use for that.

I'm not sure what the correlation is between gnome 3 and standalone window managers. Initially i switched because i liked the idea of it being more minimal, but i also like the dynamic tiling model, which is something that doesn't seem to work as well with most DEs, aside from maybe cosmic, but atp i have no reason to try it.

What does Christopher Street Day have to do with any of this?

Client-side decorations.
In most DEs and WMs, the compositor or the shell is responsible for the window border, Close button etc.
On GNOME, the client (application) is expected to do all of that.
There is a mechanism for a WM to request an app whether to draw CSD, and for the app to request SSD, but they don't need to be implemented.

Don't make up terms when you don't know what something is called, and especially don't expect those terms to be self-explanatory.

Do you also get that it’s pretty hard to see the 5th or 8th level of fibonnachi tiling and use it to read text?

I use i3 every day, so no, I don't think it's hard to read text in it. Most applications are just fine at half the size of the screen, and terminals can easily do their job as a sixth of the screen depending on what you're running in them. Even less when you have an extra-large screen. IMO it's also better at organizing windows than standard DEs when you have more windows than can be reasonably displayed at the same time, because you can "hide" them with tab mode, with IMO has a smoother, quicker workflow than alt-tabbing in Gnome, KDE etc.

there’s not much flexability

There's all the flexibility. You can even set single windows or entire workspaces/desktops to floating mode, i.e. the normal mode for most standard desktop environments. The issue with Gnome >=3 is that it doesn't have that kind of flexibility, or the flexibility to decide what fraction of screen space you want to give to an application other than 100% and 50% and it's not even lightweight in resource use to make up for the lack of features.

It says here that Openbox is to be used in Gnome or KDE. Can you use it as a standalone WM? I don’t see it in my listing in my little fedora UI testbed VM

I don't think many people use it like that, especially not with such heavy DEs. Since Openbox is a window manager, not a desktop environment (which come with their own window managers), it's unsurprising that it's not mentioned in a list of desktop environments. IDK what the package is called on Fedora, but generally you install a standalone window manager by explicitly installing that window manager. Try something like dnf search openbox.