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I don't understand how you can objectively qualify a tiling manager as "broken". 1st of all, tiling managers are a matter of personal preference, no wether it'

I don't understand how you can objectively qualify a tiling manager as "broken". 1st of all, tiling managers are a matter of personal preference, no wether it's "broken". 2nd of all, I've used i3 plenty, and the amount of power it gives me when I'm working is immense. I no longer need to alt+tab 7 times to get to the terminal for the monitoring servers, I always know they're on screen 4. I need my web browser ? I know it's in screen 2. Heck, I can pin apps, and even screens to specific monitors. When I'm working on an incident, my throughput is basically multiplied by 3 as a result of how streamlined my work environment is. That is simply not possible with other environment where the mouse is the main device. Yes you have virtual desktops, but try having 15 open terminals without having them pinned in some form. Just a simple swipe to the corner and your GPU will heat-up from the 3D acceleration required to show all the windows :D All-in-all, I genuinely believe that tiling wms are an amazing godsend, but for my use case. And I cannot emphasize this enough. It's a personal preference. Yes it's a bit of a pain to set up (although I literally used a two-part youtube video to set up i3, and never touched it again, not even need the Arch wiki), but if you don't have to tinker in your configuration are you really running linux :D

laumars 5y ago
> I don't understand how you can objectively qualify a tiling manager as "broken". 1st of all, tiling managers are a matter of personal preference, no wether it's "broken". People in IT love to declare their subjective experience as objective scientific fact. I don’t know if it’s because they’re taught that the industry is a science (albeit computer science) or if it’s just their inability to disable their analytical part of the brain but you see the same bullshit posts all the time from programming language debates, $SHELL preferences, desktop environments, operating systems, etc. IT engineers arguing other mundane preferences are as old as vi and emacs.
- md8z 5y ago
  I am not talking about this as a preference, I think they are actually a fundamentally flawed design. This is my experience from using it for a long period of time and talking to hundreds of people about this and reading probably in the thousands of github issues and comments where the various bugs pop up. Is there some other better way you know of to identify issues like this? If so I would like to know. Otherwise it is somewhat specious to say that I don't know what I'm talking about. How long to I have to deal with bugs in this stuff before my opinions don't get handwaved away as bullshit?
  - jeromenerf 5y ago
    1. There is no single design for “tiling window manager”. Some uses lists, trees, manual tiling… All can be inadequate. 2. The “tiling” part is no longer the only feature, most have floating modes, automation interfaces, … 3. Bugs happen everywhere.
    - md8z 5y ago
      For 1, all of them are inadequate in the same way, because tiling is just not adequate for most use cases. Most desktop apps are not designed for tiling, and the few that work well with it, also work just fine with another system. For 2, if you have to use all those other features, I think that defeats the purpose of it. I can't count the number of configurations I've seen that float the majority of windows. What is the point? I ask people about this and they know it's bad but they just keep on going with it, it's like nobody wants to actually admit it's a problem. I'm sorry if I'm getting worked up about this but it's really frustrating to keep having this same type of conversation over and over again where nobody actually wants to fix any problems. For 3, See above, there are specific bugs here that don't need to exist and could actually be fixed, quite easily I might add, but are purposefully being ignored because people expect it to be that way as part of the design. To me, that's pretty inefficient, and if it can be improved, I'm going to keep calling it out because I think people deserve the help. Maybe that's my character flaw, I don't know.
      - laumars 5y ago
        Maybe channel that energy into fixing those bugs yourself? Or writing your own WM. That’s what I did.
        md8z 5y ago
        I have already done that for quite a long time, that doesn't fix the problem, that just makes it so there is yet another half-assed and broken WM to add to the pile. Or should I say, graveyard, because so many of them have come and gone over the years... Sorry to be blunt but that is another myth that I see going around in open source communities, that the way to fix anything and everything is to just sit down and write more code and try to close as many github issues as possible however you can. It's not. That only gets you so far and in a lot of cases it can make things worse.
md8z 5y ago
I am telling you this as someone who had that personal preference for at least 10 years. They are broken and they don't work, the uses cases you use them for can be done better with anything else. I'll go through them for you, keep in mind I am not doing this to challenge you. I am doing this because I have had all exactly the same thoughts as you in the past, and my thoughts all changed when I decided to look at the problem in a different way. In my experience, all that staring at terminals all day messes with one's head, it makes it very hard to see other solutions that could exist outside a very terminal-centric viewpoint. "I no longer need to alt+tab 7 times to get to the terminal for the monitoring servers, I always know they're on screen 4. need my web browser ? I know it's in screen 2" Binding an application to a workspace or a key can be done with pretty much any window manager. But you don't want to do that because "screen 4" is abstract and doesn't actually mean anything. You are putting this through an extra level of abstraction for no real reason, it would be better and less confusing just to have some way to identify the correct app. "Yes you have virtual desktops, but try having 15 open terminals without having them pinned in some form." This is not actually a good feature of the desktop, this is all a workaround because of the other horribleness of various linux terminal programs that don't offer a good way to distinguish between windows. Also, you can upgrade your GPU you know? It is worth it in general if you want a faster and less laggy display. "And I cannot emphasize this enough. It's a personal preference." Respectfully, please stop emphasizing this, it doesn't add anything to the discussion. It is the equivalent of saying "well that's just your opinion". Of course it is our opinions and preferences, but we are here to discuss them. Right? "if you don't have to tinker in your configuration are you really running linux" This I think is part of the major problem. The Linux community seems to intentionally gravitate towards things that need more tinkering just for the sake of doing so, and actively resist efforts to reduce the amount of tinkering that needs to happen.

laumars 5y ago

> I don't understand how you can objectively qualify a tiling manager as "broken". 1st of all, tiling managers are a matter of personal preference, no wether it's "broken". People in IT love to declare their subjective experience as objective scientific fact. I don’t know if it’s because they’re taught that the industry is a science (albeit computer science) or if it’s just their inability to disable their analytical part of the brain but you see the same bullshit posts all the time from programming language debates, $SHELL preferences, desktop environments, operating systems, etc. IT engineers arguing other mundane preferences are as old as vi and emacs.

md8z 5y ago
I am not talking about this as a preference, I think they are actually a fundamentally flawed design. This is my experience from using it for a long period of time and talking to hundreds of people about this and reading probably in the thousands of github issues and comments where the various bugs pop up. Is there some other better way you know of to identify issues like this? If so I would like to know. Otherwise it is somewhat specious to say that I don't know what I'm talking about. How long to I have to deal with bugs in this stuff before my opinions don't get handwaved away as bullshit?
- jeromenerf 5y ago
  1. There is no single design for “tiling window manager”. Some uses lists, trees, manual tiling… All can be inadequate. 2. The “tiling” part is no longer the only feature, most have floating modes, automation interfaces, … 3. Bugs happen everywhere.
  - md8z 5y ago
    For 1, all of them are inadequate in the same way, because tiling is just not adequate for most use cases. Most desktop apps are not designed for tiling, and the few that work well with it, also work just fine with another system. For 2, if you have to use all those other features, I think that defeats the purpose of it. I can't count the number of configurations I've seen that float the majority of windows. What is the point? I ask people about this and they know it's bad but they just keep on going with it, it's like nobody wants to actually admit it's a problem. I'm sorry if I'm getting worked up about this but it's really frustrating to keep having this same type of conversation over and over again where nobody actually wants to fix any problems. For 3, See above, there are specific bugs here that don't need to exist and could actually be fixed, quite easily I might add, but are purposefully being ignored because people expect it to be that way as part of the design. To me, that's pretty inefficient, and if it can be improved, I'm going to keep calling it out because I think people deserve the help. Maybe that's my character flaw, I don't know.
    - laumars 5y ago
      Maybe channel that energy into fixing those bugs yourself? Or writing your own WM. That’s what I did.
      - md8z 5y ago
        I have already done that for quite a long time, that doesn't fix the problem, that just makes it so there is yet another half-assed and broken WM to add to the pile. Or should I say, graveyard, because so many of them have come and gone over the years... Sorry to be blunt but that is another myth that I see going around in open source communities, that the way to fix anything and everything is to just sit down and write more code and try to close as many github issues as possible however you can. It's not. That only gets you so far and in a lot of cases it can make things worse.

md8z 5y ago

I am telling you this as someone who had that personal preference for at least 10 years. They are broken and they don't work, the uses cases you use them for can be done better with anything else. I'll go through them for you, keep in mind I am not doing this to challenge you. I am doing this because I have had all exactly the same thoughts as you in the past, and my thoughts all changed when I decided to look at the problem in a different way. In my experience, all that staring at terminals all day messes with one's head, it makes it very hard to see other solutions that could exist outside a very terminal-centric viewpoint. "I no longer need to alt+tab 7 times to get to the terminal for the monitoring servers, I always know they're on screen 4. need my web browser ? I know it's in screen 2" Binding an application to a workspace or a key can be done with pretty much any window manager. But you don't want to do that because "screen 4" is abstract and doesn't actually mean anything. You are putting this through an extra level of abstraction for no real reason, it would be better and less confusing just to have some way to identify the correct app. "Yes you have virtual desktops, but try having 15 open terminals without having them pinned in some form." This is not actually a good feature of the desktop, this is all a workaround because of the other horribleness of various linux terminal programs that don't offer a good way to distinguish between windows. Also, you can upgrade your GPU you know? It is worth it in general if you want a faster and less laggy display. "And I cannot emphasize this enough. It's a personal preference." Respectfully, please stop emphasizing this, it doesn't add anything to the discussion. It is the equivalent of saying "well that's just your opinion". Of course it is our opinions and preferences, but we are here to discuss them. Right? "if you don't have to tinker in your configuration are you really running linux" This I think is part of the major problem. The Linux community seems to intentionally gravitate towards things that need more tinkering just for the sake of doing so, and actively resist efforts to reduce the amount of tinkering that needs to happen.