6 ms·

I'm so ready to jump from my i3 setup to Gnome if they get the tiling even half as good as i3's is. Why? Because of Wayland (which gives me proper (Hi)DPI suppo

by vesak 9y ago

I'm so ready to jump from my i3 setup to Gnome if they get the tiling even half as good as i3's is. Why? Because of Wayland (which gives me proper (Hi)DPI support for multiple monitors) and integration that I don't have to tweak myself in order to work. So quite excited about this.

ge96 9y ago
Somewhat related: Regarding i3-wm is there such a thing as pre-defined resolution tiling for the sake of UI testing? That would be pretty neat. Imagine a bunch of windows that were tiled (think mosaic) according to known device resolutions like 320x680 (or something like that for mobile devices) then you could have say a browser open in each tile (with local dev url) and refresh/shows the UI as displayed on every resolution that would be impressive.
- vidarh 9y ago
  I don't know about pre-defined, but i3 lets you define layouts with specifications for how windows should get "swallowed" into each tile, so it should be doable to set something up.
  - ge96 9y ago
    Curious why you say "swallowed" Yeah I mean I don't think it's a perfect division of say if your laptop/screen has 1920x1080 and you want to divide that by some known resolutions. Good to know about being able to define layouts. Would be cool to just call it in another tab (number bottom of screen)
    - vidarh 9y ago
      > Curious why you say "swallowed" Because it's the terminology used by i3. You define "placeholders", and which criteria i3 should use to decide which placeholder a given window should open in. Here are more details [1] > Good to know about being able to define layouts. Would be cool to just call it in another tab (number bottom of screen) I'm not sure what you mean. You can switch workspaces in a key definition, so you certainly can bring up a layout on whatever workspace you want with a given keypress. [1] https://i3wm.org/docs/layout-saving.html https://i3wm.org/docs/layout-saving.html
      - ge96 9y ago
        I mean for me opening a new window? (unsure of the terminology) ie. start with 1, new panel 2. Anyway use alt + number to open the new panel. If I could have the predefined tiles and bind it to a key combo and then they would open up in a new panel (like 2) Anyway thanks for the links/explanation
- JetSpiegel 9y ago
  You can poke the i3 API to resize windows, but for arbitrary resolutions you need floating windows and that defeats the point of i3.
  - ge96 9y ago
    What is the point of i3? I use it because the Ubuntu UI uses so much resources (from my experience) and my computers are generally trash.
    - JetSpiegel 9y ago
      IMHO, the point of i3 is having tiled windows. As a stacking window manager it's quite bad because it has no compositor. That's why it's fast, but badly coded applications can be less stable.
      - ge96 9y ago
        Interesting, I don't know what Compositor is but agree with the speed.
majewsky 9y ago
There is a tiling window manager for Wayland called "Way Cooler" (a pun on the Awesome WM, I suppose). It apparently has an i3 preset. http://way-cooler.org http://way-cooler.org Recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676625 I haven't tested it yet, but bookmarked the HN thread because I want to try a tiling window manager, but decided to make until there's a good one for Wayland.
- jryan49 9y ago
  There is also http://swaywm.org/ http://swaywm.org/ which is supposed to be an i3 clone for Wayland
  - vesak 9y ago
    Yeah, I know people are working on cloning i3. Perhaps these attempts will be successful some day, but so far, they are very lacking compared to what Gnome gives.
    - craftyguy 9y ago
      you're trying to compare a WM (i3) to a DE (GNOME). Of course the DE is going to have more stuff in it..
      - digi_owl 9y ago
        Never mind the question, do you need all that stuff? More and more i feel what is needed is not bigger DEs, but more useful, and non-DE oriented, standards.
        majewsky 9y ago
        Same for me. I moved from being a heavy DE user to doing nearly everything in terminal windows over the years. I recently ditched NetworkManager for wpa_supplicant + systemd-networkd, and was surprised by how much faster the laptop now connects to the WiFi when wpa_supplicant is doing everything, rather than having to talk to at least two other processes (NetworkManager and its GUI applet) over DBus.
tapoxi 9y ago
I migrated over to Gnome and Tilix as a tiling terminal emulator. I find its a little easier to deal with than a tiling WM. https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix
kuschku 9y ago
> Why? Because of Wayland (which gives me proper (Hi)DPI support for multiple monitors) Don’t expect too much, GNOME considers proper HiDPI out of scope and only supports 96dpi and 192dpi (and other integer multiples) Everything inbetween is handled by rendering at 192dpi and then downscaling. So if you have a 144dpi 4K screen, and try to run minecraft, minecraft will run at 6K resolution and be downscaled. The result is horrible performance. The only solution for proper HiDPI support for multiple monitors today is Qt, which supports it even on X11.
- vesak 9y ago
  >Don’t expect too much, GNOME considers proper HiDPI out of scope and only supports 96dpi and 192dpi (and other integer multiples) Argh. That's depressing. But still, Gnome with Wayland is the only DE I've seen that gracefully handles multiple monitors with different DPIs.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    I’ve been using a 144dpi 4K screen and 104dpi 1080p screen together with KDE and QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS and it worked fine.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      From elsewhere i have the impression that Gnome on X11 is actually behaving wrongly, the people in charge has been told so repeatedly, the breakage is recent, any they refuse to fix it...
      - kuschku 9y ago
        That is correct. Gnome will not ever implement any DPI scaling on X11 again, or proper DPI scaling, they will only do integer scaling, because that allows them to write pixel-perfect layouts. This is the same as macOS and iOS. All other platforms – Windows, Android, Qt, the web – use the opposite model.
craftyguy 9y ago
Sway: http://swaywm.org/ http://swaywm.org/

by vesak 9y ago

ge96 9y ago

Somewhat related: Regarding i3-wm is there such a thing as pre-defined resolution tiling for the sake of UI testing? That would be pretty neat. Imagine a bunch of windows that were tiled (think mosaic) according to known device resolutions like 320x680 (or something like that for mobile devices) then you could have say a browser open in each tile (with local dev url) and refresh/shows the UI as displayed on every resolution that would be impressive.

vidarh 9y ago
I don't know about pre-defined, but i3 lets you define layouts with specifications for how windows should get "swallowed" into each tile, so it should be doable to set something up.
- ge96 9y ago
  Curious why you say "swallowed" Yeah I mean I don't think it's a perfect division of say if your laptop/screen has 1920x1080 and you want to divide that by some known resolutions. Good to know about being able to define layouts. Would be cool to just call it in another tab (number bottom of screen)
  - vidarh 9y ago
    > Curious why you say "swallowed" Because it's the terminology used by i3. You define "placeholders", and which criteria i3 should use to decide which placeholder a given window should open in. Here are more details [1] > Good to know about being able to define layouts. Would be cool to just call it in another tab (number bottom of screen) I'm not sure what you mean. You can switch workspaces in a key definition, so you certainly can bring up a layout on whatever workspace you want with a given keypress. [1] https://i3wm.org/docs/layout-saving.html https://i3wm.org/docs/layout-saving.html
    - ge96 9y ago
      I mean for me opening a new window? (unsure of the terminology) ie. start with 1, new panel 2. Anyway use alt + number to open the new panel. If I could have the predefined tiles and bind it to a key combo and then they would open up in a new panel (like 2) Anyway thanks for the links/explanation
JetSpiegel 9y ago
You can poke the i3 API to resize windows, but for arbitrary resolutions you need floating windows and that defeats the point of i3.
- ge96 9y ago
  What is the point of i3? I use it because the Ubuntu UI uses so much resources (from my experience) and my computers are generally trash.
  - JetSpiegel 9y ago
    IMHO, the point of i3 is having tiled windows. As a stacking window manager it's quite bad because it has no compositor. That's why it's fast, but badly coded applications can be less stable.
    - ge96 9y ago
      Interesting, I don't know what Compositor is but agree with the speed.

majewsky 9y ago

There is a tiling window manager for Wayland called "Way Cooler" (a pun on the Awesome WM, I suppose). It apparently has an i3 preset. http://way-cooler.org http://way-cooler.org Recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676625 I haven't tested it yet, but bookmarked the HN thread because I want to try a tiling window manager, but decided to make until there's a good one for Wayland.

jryan49 9y ago
There is also http://swaywm.org/ http://swaywm.org/ which is supposed to be an i3 clone for Wayland
- vesak 9y ago
  Yeah, I know people are working on cloning i3. Perhaps these attempts will be successful some day, but so far, they are very lacking compared to what Gnome gives.
  - craftyguy 9y ago
    you're trying to compare a WM (i3) to a DE (GNOME). Of course the DE is going to have more stuff in it..
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      Never mind the question, do you need all that stuff? More and more i feel what is needed is not bigger DEs, but more useful, and non-DE oriented, standards.
      - majewsky 9y ago
        Same for me. I moved from being a heavy DE user to doing nearly everything in terminal windows over the years. I recently ditched NetworkManager for wpa_supplicant + systemd-networkd, and was surprised by how much faster the laptop now connects to the WiFi when wpa_supplicant is doing everything, rather than having to talk to at least two other processes (NetworkManager and its GUI applet) over DBus.

tapoxi 9y ago

I migrated over to Gnome and Tilix as a tiling terminal emulator. I find its a little easier to deal with than a tiling WM. https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix

kuschku 9y ago

> Why? Because of Wayland (which gives me proper (Hi)DPI support for multiple monitors) Don’t expect too much, GNOME considers proper HiDPI out of scope and only supports 96dpi and 192dpi (and other integer multiples) Everything inbetween is handled by rendering at 192dpi and then downscaling. So if you have a 144dpi 4K screen, and try to run minecraft, minecraft will run at 6K resolution and be downscaled. The result is horrible performance. The only solution for proper HiDPI support for multiple monitors today is Qt, which supports it even on X11.

vesak 9y ago
>Don’t expect too much, GNOME considers proper HiDPI out of scope and only supports 96dpi and 192dpi (and other integer multiples) Argh. That's depressing. But still, Gnome with Wayland is the only DE I've seen that gracefully handles multiple monitors with different DPIs.
- kuschku 9y ago
  I’ve been using a 144dpi 4K screen and 104dpi 1080p screen together with KDE and QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS and it worked fine.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    From elsewhere i have the impression that Gnome on X11 is actually behaving wrongly, the people in charge has been told so repeatedly, the breakage is recent, any they refuse to fix it...
    - kuschku 9y ago
      That is correct. Gnome will not ever implement any DPI scaling on X11 again, or proper DPI scaling, they will only do integer scaling, because that allows them to write pixel-perfect layouts. This is the same as macOS and iOS. All other platforms – Windows, Android, Qt, the web – use the opposite model.

craftyguy 9y ago

Sway: http://swaywm.org/ http://swaywm.org/