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I keep meaning to install either Pop_OS or Regolith, as a means of approaching tiled window managers with a ready to go, opinionated by default system. Pop_OS b

by j1elo 5y ago

I keep meaning to install either Pop_OS or Regolith, as a means of approaching tiled window managers with a ready to go, opinionated by default system. Pop_OS brings their own tiling, with easy enable/disable buttons, and Regolith is based on Ubuntu with i3. After trying vanilla i3 and Pop_OS before in the past, the inertia of years of using floating windows keeps me going back to known territory (Linux Mint). Also I don't have time to tinker with settings, so I need a well thought out set of defaults. Guess this is a good place to ask! Have you used Regolith and/or Pop_OS? Comments about how the implementations are in each one? Good/bad experiences with them?

pimterry 5y ago
I moved to Regolith relatively recently, replacing a previous custom configuration using qtile on top of Debian. I was already pretty comfortable with tiling window managers, and everything was easy & usable for me out of the box, but I did spend a little bit of extra time tweaking it further to get i3 to act just as I wanted it to. Still, moving to an OS where the tiling WM was properly integrated & supported everywhere OOTB was a dramatic improvement overall. It works great so far, all very slick, I'm very happy with it.
pedrovhb 5y ago
Over a few years I switched from Ubuntu + i3 to Regolith to Pop_OS, and each switch felt like a step up in terms of "it just works", like it's a higher level WM. Regolith, even though it comes with in much saner defaults and basic system tools than plain i3, still requires you to deal with low-level config files for many common things. Pop just feels like Ubuntu with tiling window management added, which isn't a bad thing. Thing just work even more often and there's some intangible eye candy feeling to using it which is nice. It's definitely not as robust in my experience; there's bugs I run into pretty often (lock screen will sometimes hang, dragging a tiled window to a new position will sometimes fail to update other tiled windows so you have overlapping windows or unused space). Still, overall it's a pleasant experience and these things don't bother me as much as having to figure out why my wifi or audio devices aren't working every other week. I'm on Pop_OS 20.04 for the LTS, so maybe these have been fixed in more recent versions.

by j1elo 5y ago

pimterry 5y ago

I moved to Regolith relatively recently, replacing a previous custom configuration using qtile on top of Debian. I was already pretty comfortable with tiling window managers, and everything was easy & usable for me out of the box, but I did spend a little bit of extra time tweaking it further to get i3 to act just as I wanted it to. Still, moving to an OS where the tiling WM was properly integrated & supported everywhere OOTB was a dramatic improvement overall. It works great so far, all very slick, I'm very happy with it.

pedrovhb 5y ago

Over a few years I switched from Ubuntu + i3 to Regolith to Pop_OS, and each switch felt like a step up in terms of "it just works", like it's a higher level WM. Regolith, even though it comes with in much saner defaults and basic system tools than plain i3, still requires you to deal with low-level config files for many common things. Pop just feels like Ubuntu with tiling window management added, which isn't a bad thing. Thing just work even more often and there's some intangible eye candy feeling to using it which is nice. It's definitely not as robust in my experience; there's bugs I run into pretty often (lock screen will sometimes hang, dragging a tiled window to a new position will sometimes fail to update other tiled windows so you have overlapping windows or unused space). Still, overall it's a pleasant experience and these things don't bother me as much as having to figure out why my wifi or audio devices aren't working every other week. I'm on Pop_OS 20.04 for the LTS, so maybe these have been fixed in more recent versions.