12 ms·

Linux: We need tiling desktop environments

183 points by ashitlerferad 2y ago

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
Love both i3wm and Sway WM. This is what computing should be. Windows has surprisingly decent tiling functions out of the box, too, but you'd never realize it without some experimentation. Next time you're at a Windows box, try holding Win, maybe Shift as well, and mashing the arrow keys. A minute or two of experimentation might make your whole $DAYJOB workflow that much more enjoyable!
- IggleSniggle 2y ago
  It's the one thing I hack into macOS (I use BetterTouchTool for this but only because I already have a license from back when I wanted to mod my TouchBar), and would otherwise genuinely miss coming from any other operating system. I think even iPadOS has tiling shortcuts!
  - nerdponx 2y ago
    You can also get true tiling window management with Amethyst, or Hammerspoon if you love customizing things in Lua and starting from an absolutely empty configuration.
    - Reefersleep 2y ago
      Just want to add that I'm having a pretty good experience with Amethyst. No file-based configuration, sadly, but it does all of the tiling and movements I need. Hammerspoon (via Spacehammer) seemed too slow for me.
- lambdaba 2y ago
  Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/) makes macOS window management good enough (for a non-tiling WM), by adding keyboard shortcuts and drag gestures.
  - swah 2y ago
    And the new MacOS version also finally got Windows XP style tiling. (I still like Rectangle because I can do it from a longer distance..)
- kalaksi 2y ago
  KDE also has extensive keyboard shortcuts for window management (among other things) but most of them are not set by default.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
    I didn't know that! Tracks with my experience with playing around with KDE, like, a decade ago. So much user-configurable power lying just under the surface.
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    One thing I love about kwin is that the exposé feature lets you navigate the windows with the keyboard. macOS itself doesn’t have that feature.
  - wing-_-nuts 2y ago
    I want to love KDE, I really do, but I've grown to love gnome and os x's ability to have close, min, max buttons down in the toolbar for apps as that saves a significant amount of screen real estate. I tried out kde plasma for a while and just couldn't get past it. Having said that, I did discover kde connect while using that, and I love that app! It's so nice for putting audio books on my phone and controlling playback
    - dingnuts 2y ago
      KDE has this feature now, you just have to add the global menu applet to your task bar and it will do the Unity/Apple thing where the task bar is relevant to the selected application
      - c-hendricks 2y ago
        Client Side Decorations are different than moving the menu bar. Even using the global menu in KDE (which isn't that new BTW, I think it was in KDE3), you'll still have a "height = title bar + toolbar", where with CSD it's "height = toolbar".
    - 2y ago
- ar_lan 2y ago
  For those on macOS, yabai + skhd have been part of my workflow for years now. They are fantastic to bridge the gap I miss so much from i3.
  - chambored 2y ago
    I switched to Aerospace from Yabai
    - nicce 2y ago
      I switched to Hammerspoon... seems to be good enough with enormous power if you know Lua.
  - azthecx 2y ago
    I used it for years too but had issues with managed laptops and security settings, I've heard that aerospace is meant to work even then. If anyone reading this wants to take a stab at tiling wm in Mac don't be deterred, there are good options available there too.
- bluGill 2y ago
  I tried that, but most apps just don't scale down well. Important UI elements just disappear, while less important elements maintain their size, unless the app has most of the screen. Those are apps like teams and outlook that I would expect most office users to keep open all the time on Windows (teams is really bad about assuming I want to see the avatar of whoever is speaking more than their slides). Edge did a little better, depending on the page I was looking at.
  - pxc 2y ago
    This is one of my pet peeves as a visually impaired person. Basically nothing scales right for me anymore. Apps and websites designed for desktops have such insane padding that when I scale them up, basic information is truncated. By the time they're easily readable for me, 'progressive' websites go into mobile mode and do things like collapse their (non-resizeable) sidebars. Last week I tried to cut down on excess padding in a sidebar by resizing it and literally watched it go from 40% excess/wasted horizontal space to completely collapsed and hidden behind another click (and thus unusable with keyboard friendly addons like Pentadactyl).
    - eviks 2y ago
      User styling can fix some websites at a high cost of fiddling with the layout But we do need some a shift away from this awful low density design paradigm
    - bluGill 2y ago
      If you live in the US you may have an ADA case against whoever does the website. Many other countries have their own version of that with different rules.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
    I do keep Outlook and Teams open basically all the time, and full-screened, yes. Here I can only counsel that having multiple smaller monitors was a wiser investment dollar per dollar than one big monitor.
- nicce 2y ago
  There is also rather new decent competitor for Sway: https://hyprland.org/ https://hyprland.org/
  - azthecx 2y ago
    I've been using Awesome for about two years and started using Hyprland in parallel due to its very good multi monitor + multi resolution support and it's been great. The only two issues I have with it is slightly increased power draw from ~7w to ~10w on idle and screen sharing does not work. I use very default configs so maintaing both is not an overhead. Awesome offers very high dpi and battery life and Hyprland smooth animations and multi resolution support.
noinsight 2y ago
Tiling wm’s are a niche within a niche (Linux on the desktop)… you can’t really expect much engineering resources to be devoted to them.
- doubled112 2y ago
  In real life, in the probably hundreds of developers and IT professionals I've worked with, I've met exactly one who was actually using a tiling window manager. It was different enough to be a thing we playfully argued about often.
  - elric 2y ago
    Good window management is a niche skill (on the user side). I often see "normies" waste so much time tabbing between windows or turning their heads between monitors or whatnot. When I want stuff side by side, I press a hotkey to arrange stuff side by side. My WM has a bunch of tags (virtual desktops on steroids), where each tag has its own purpose and a dedicated default layout (tiled for terminals, fullscreen for a browser, etc). I feel like "tiled vs non-tiled" is a false dichotomy. It's tiled and floating and full screen and spiraling and horizontal split and vertical split, etc. The right tool for the job.
    - doubled112 2y ago
      Absolutely agree. Use what works, and we should always be grateful to have good options. However there's a lot to most of the tiling window managers that never clicked for me. I've always assumed it's a personal problem. Perhaps I have spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about "why not?" I'm not good at remembering keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+Z seems to be all I need. I've tried sorting and categorizing apps into tags, but it makes me slower. If apps open on a virtual desktop that I couldn't see, I'd just lose it. If I can't see something it stops existing pretty quickly, which makes even too many virtual desktops a losing battle. Inconsistent behaviour will always pull me out of whatever I'm doing. 4 apps tiled, 5th app opens in a floating window, now I'm distracted. For now I use a single 4K monitor at 100% scaling with a couple of virtual desktops. Current task(s) and background apps. I haven't spent much time managing windows since. Once the windows are open for the day, that's a solved problem. Memory is cheap. Windows mostly open where I left them last time. There's a certain cognitive load to keeping all of that straight. The computer is supposed to do the thinking and apparently I can't.
elric 2y ago
I've exclusively used Awesomewm for the past 15ish years (with a brief attempt at Sway, but that's a story for another time). I don't understand what OP is talking about. Do they want more integration between the WM and the DE? If so, I don't understand why? AwesomeWM does everything I need it to do, without getting in my way. Maybe I'm misunderstanding OP? Edit: the comments on the blog post talk about integrations with things like volume management and network management, apparently that's (a|their) defintion of DE vs a WM. Those are not features I care about at all, so maybe I'm not the target audience here. AwesomeWM has plenty of widgets for volume or wifi or whatnot, but I mostly use a terminal.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  > Do they want more integration between the WM and the DE? Yes. I haven't used a DE in well over a decade, but I assume it's for stuff like being able to drag and drop from one window to another, etc. (Also a happy Awesome user for almost as long as you - although I still haven't learned Lua!)
- dingnuts 2y ago
  There are a lot of little things that daemons like gsettingsd handles, like resolution changes if you add a monitor or change the size of the window you're using your VM in, that you have to do manually if you are not using a desktop environment I got tired of doing that stuff manually ten years ago, myself. when I plug in a USB stick I just want it to mount, I don't need to wind up reading the mount man page. I have shit to do.
  - jwells89 2y ago
    Yeah, many years ago I ran a crunchbang-style setup with openbox and tint2 and while the low resource usage and customizability was great, it was irritating having to find and set up daemons, tray items, etc (all of which seemingly coming with their own list of incapabilities/tradeoffs) for every little thing. I absolutely sympathize with minimizing bloat, but it feels like things like volume keys should fall within the scope of bare minimum out of the box functionality.
- 2y ago
kergonath 2y ago
We had Moom on the front page yesterday. I would adopt it in a heartbeat on Linux if I could. It is easy to use, easy to understand, great even with a mouse and does not require you to remember yet another dozen of keyboard shortcuts (though you can if you want). Using the finer grid is a pleasure and it works great. All the alternatives I tried have huge technical barriers to entry.
medo-bear 2y ago
Objectively speaking, nothing comes close to StumpWM
- BeetleB 2y ago
  What are the advantages of StumpWM over Awesome?
  - tmtvl 2y ago
    Because we're on HN I'd say that StumpWM being made in Common Lisp may be trotted out as the main advantage. Personally I'm quite fond of it having Emacs-like key chording (it's the keyboard equivalent of a cascading menu versus a flat menu). That said I'm so fond of awesome's tags and layouts that I can't bring myself to switch over (and programming those myself is way above my skill level).
    - medo-bear 2y ago
      > Because we're on HN I'd say that StumpWM being made in Common Lisp may be trotted out as the main advantage It's not because it is in Common Lisp, it is because you can program it live without needing to restart the program to see the result. Some people call this 'hot-reloading' but Common Lisp implementations take this to an unreached level. Also it has sane defaults (well ... for Emacs users) but you can also mold it into whatever you like.
lucasoshiro 2y ago
The last versions of KDE Plasma 5 offered tiling windows as an option, and it could be configured to be used only with the keyboard, like a tiling WM. However it was not so polished (I was waiting it to be more usable) and I kept my KDE + XMonad configuration. However, after Plasma 6 that option was missing, and I my KDE + XMonad setup doesn't work anymore (perhaps I need to adapt it but I didn't have time to do that so far). Also, Wayland doesn't help: using a desktop environment with other window manager only works on X11. Does someone know what happened to tiling on Plasma 6?
- dizhn 2y ago
  They ditched the existing stuff which were handled by third party software and started implementing new tiling functionality from scratch. It's a good faith effort to embrace tiling natively but this change meant they caused all existing solutions to break without providing anywhere near the same functionality. Hopefully they or 3rd parties will fix this in the future.
  - lucasoshiro 2y ago
    I hope so. I liked my KDE + XMonad setup, but picom really made my PC slow. A 100% KDE solution would be perfect, as I'm not a XMonad power user
    - RealStickman_ 2y ago
      I just switched from sway to KDE + Kröhnkite. That might be an option. According to the reddit comments I've seen, there aren't any plans to expand tiling functionality much beyond what it currently is in KDE.
      - dizhn 2y ago
        Even if that's the case, the tiling "primitives" (I don't know if that's the right word) for 3rd parties to leverage is there. By the way khronkite was forked a bunch of times to create things like Bismuth which isn't supported in plasma6 anymore. Are you sure khronkite itself works? Are you using kde5 ? Or this fork https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite ?
bryanlarsen 2y ago
AFAICT, KDE does exactly what he's looking for; integrating tiling into a full featured desktop manager.
- r14c 2y ago
  I was upset with the KDE project for some years because they dropped amaroK during the transition from KDE 3 to 4, but after seeing the new work in Plasma and moving on to other music players once amaroK 3 rotted. I really love the work they've done and I'm back to having KDE as my daily driver. Previously I used wmii, dwm, and xmonad on different systems.
codedokode 2y ago
I mostly use full-screen windows (effectively no windows at all). I think that floating windows and tiles are made for those with large expensive 4K monitors, but not for smaller screens.
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  I work exclusively on the display of a 15-inch laptop, and I frequently have 2, less frequently 3, tiled windows.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Most applications are designed for full screen on the common displays of their day. 1080p monitors are common enough that everybody still designs their apps for them and so you can use them less than full screen on a 4k monitor. Back when smaller monitors were common apps were designed for them and could be used tiled on 1080p monitors. If you can still find such an app it will work great tiled, but few projects allow for the idea that you might want to work on something else at the same time and so less than full screen is not something they allow UX to think about.
- solomonb 2y ago
  Same. I've used XMonad forever but 90% of the time I have single applications open full screen. I use XMonad's tabs feature heavily. So in one virtual desktop I have an editor and a few terminals which I tab between, then in another virtual desktop I do the same for web browsing, and another virtual desktop for comms.
- JanMa 2y ago
  That’s also what works best for me! A single monitor and only one window on fullscreen. When I need to switch applications, I navigate to another fullscreen window. Sometimes I like to joke that my brain is single threaded :-)
flabbergasted 2y ago
I'm surprised there hasn't been any mention of my favorite rust based tiling windows manager - LeftWM (https://github.com/leftwm/leftwm?tab=readme-ov-file#why-go-left https://github.com/leftwm/leftwm?tab=readme-ov-file#why-go-l...)
entropie 2y ago
I use xmonad for well over a decade now. I tried others because ghc is a pretty big payload to maintain on a gentoo system but always came back to xmonad. I invested quite a big time in my config (I dont speak haskell, so it was sometimes pretty hard) but I would say my general config is quite minimal: 3 displays. 9 workspaces, named. Pretty basic tiled layouts. Named "scratchpads" (basicially popups with fixed client/programms; like a fullscreen popup with my terminal emulator with a tmux session a semi transparent pavucontrol and clipboard manager/copyq). Important: one hotkey to send the actual client to fullscreen (I have no idea why this feature seems to be a hard one when testing other tiling WMs). Hotkeys for switching displays. This seems (for me?) pretty basic needs but I found thats not easily reproducible with other tiling wms. Some time ago I introduced my GF to a thinkpad with my xmonad config and she was within a hour absolutely able to use a multi monitor setup comfortable with her keyboard. She really liked it. My config for reference: https://gist.github.com/entropie/c8072585593b784bff9b8af95c187b5d https://gist.github.com/entropie/c8072585593b784bff9b8af95c1...
- rout39574 2y ago
  XMonad mafia represent! :) My config is koff more involved. I did a lateral from CTWM into XMonad quite a few years ago, so many of my keystrokes bring associated workspaces to their default locations. I've got 44 workspaces, and 6 displays, many of them loosely grouped into "document" pairs for working on different projects, and "monitoring" pairs for different focuses of _looking at_ different things. The monitoring pairs are much less intensively used.
  - entropie 2y ago
    I would like to have a look at your config.
- MSFT_Edging 2y ago
  Feels good to see someone else who can't speak Haskell but struggles their way to a working xmonad config. I really want to just move to wayland and get it over with, but the tiling wm options are slim. I want a dynamic tiling setup, so sway isn't it. I think hyperland can do something similar but I don't want the candy associated with it. I just need the smallest overhead to throw windows into tiles.
jzb 2y ago
For GNOME, the Tiling Shell extension works well for me. I've also used, and liked, gTile. Of course, with an extension there's always the danger that it will break between releases and/or the developer will get bored and stop maintaining it. The nice thing about Tiling Shell is that it's not all-or-nothing tiling. It's tiling when I want it, otherwise just "normal". COSMIC Desktop is promising, but has a lot of maturing to do.
rom1v 2y ago
I think tiling is great for terminals, but not for the whole desktop (I don't want my web browser or video player to be resized because I open a new program). So I use a "normal" floating environment (xfce, but could be another one), and I use Terminator in full screen enabled on a specific shortcut, so that I have tiled terminals.
- ihalip 2y ago
  Terminator really is great, infinite scroll is what really sold it to me ~9 years ago and I've been a happy user ever since.
- anewguy9000 2y ago
  this. the uis for different apps have different needs - ex. keeping a video editor wide and narrow. and its not uncommon to want more apps open than would fit into their own tiles or having to move to another desktop workspace. i just wish there was a compositor or window manager for wayland that supported working this way, none really do. without a tiling wm, apps in gnome want to open right in the center of the screen, and don't remember their positions, its comically bad
  - 3np 2y ago
    qtile is very flexible, I'd be surprised if it's not configurable to get you to where you want.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >I think tiling is great for terminals, but not for the whole desktop (I don't want my web browser or video player to be resized because I open a new program). This, I can't imagine anyone wanting that sort of tiling. Anytime I have a use case for tiling in my own job it ends up being impossible to get things tiled the way I want and also have the things I don't want tiled setup correctly on my other screen.
  - rout39574 2y ago
    Years of XMonad use here. Really, it's not the interference you are imagining. Much of the time I have a web browser using a whole portrait-aligned monitor, but sometimes I feel like having it 2-up in a landscape monitor. The win of nice clean window separation, without giving up significant percentage of my display space to window decoration, is -profound-. I have one pixel borders around my shells, and I have it because I fiddled with zero and decided I liked one better. How many pixels do you lose to decoration, so you can mouse over them cleanly? That's a major win.
djaouen 2y ago
I like EXWM because it fits in with my continuing Emacs obsession lol
big-green-man 2y ago
Hard disagree. I'm a Sway user and tiling wm evangelist, I absolutely do not want a suite of preinstalled software to come baked into my wm/compositor. I'm happy to install the software that I need. If someone wants to distribute a complete Linux desktop with a tiling wm as default, that would be interesting, but a generic DE with a tiling wm to me seems like a waste of time.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dicytea 2y ago
  No one's saying that they should include a DE into Sway. Your precious WM will still be with you even if someone decides to make a new tiling DE. I'm a Hyprland user and honestly, cobbling together a poor man's DE using half-baked amateur-ish GTK apps and copy-pasting Nerd Font icons no longer spark any joy for me. I'm basically ready to jump at the first sight of a viable alternative. I'm very optimistic about Cosmic DE in this regards.
  - subsection1h 2y ago
    > cobbling together a poor man's DE using half-baked amateur-ish GTK apps Do you think that GNOME's web browser (Epiphany?) and KDE's web browser (Konqueror?) are better than Firefox and Chromium? Do you think that GNOME Text Editor and KDE's text editor (Kate?) are better than Emacs?
    - dicytea 2y ago
      By DE, I'm mostly talking about having a cohesive graphical shell, not the random apps that comes pre-installed (who cares about those?). The login manager, lock screen, taskbar, notification daemon, launcher, OSD, workspace overview, etc. In WMs (or WM-like compositors), you either have to cobble all of this together yourself or just give up and convince yourself that you're a minimalist. Doing this kind of stuff was fun for a while, but these days I'm starting to crave for something actually good and polished.
    - 2y ago
autarchprinceps 2y ago
"We need more desktop environments" - Nooo, absolutely not. You need one or maybe two good ones, and it can have tiling as a feature or at worst plugin. The fragmentation and lack of key features and stability testing as a result is already a major reason for people not to adopt Linux desktops. And even if we don't consolidate, there is already an idiotic amount of just different tiling desktop environments, let alone all desktop environments. What on earth do you want even more for? Just add features to existing ones, so that everybody benefits. Competition isn't really needed in open source, since you can just add all of the things to one shared solution. Imagine if everybody suggested making a brand new kernel for each combination of hardware, or the likes.
- ebiester 2y ago
  If only Gnome was amenable to features... They are a very opinionated group.
bradrn 2y ago
For a while I used XMonad (as a window manager) together with Xfce (as a desktop environment). It had its rough edges, but I really liked the experience. I could easily fit my windows on the screen the way I wanted to, while still getting the integration of a well-designed desktop environment. Alas, I had to drop this setup on moving to Wayland. And I can’t get it back easily, because Wayland compositors generally don’t allow for their window managers to be swapped out. I now use Sway WM, which is perfectly acceptable… but I still miss my tiling desktop environment.
- 3np 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41364546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41364546
delichon 2y ago
I'm a long time Ubuntu user but not exactly a power user. When I installed i3wm I really liked it but was very handicapped by losing the rest of Gnome. I didn't understand how much "windows manager" encompasses. Suddenly just finding an app and opening it was pain. I ended up getting rid of it because of the constant challenges of replacing this and that from Gnome, but I still miss the tiling desktop. Is there anything out there for those us who need more hand holding?
- dingnuts 2y ago
  it's been a few years since I've done this, but I used to have the same problem as you and I found that if I ran MATE but replaced the default WM in it, Marco, with i3, I got to have my tiling WM inside a proper DE. It was really great! If you are interested there are a few guides you can find if you search. I'm certainly not the first or only person to do this. I only stopped using it because I eventually got a very large screen and tiling doesn't fit my flow anymore, so I just use KDE now lol
  - tacone 2y ago
    Wow, do you have any link with instructions explaining how to do that?
  - 3np 2y ago
    IME, same approach works flawlessly in Xfce too (and from what I hear GNOME and KDE).
calvinmorrison 2y ago
increasingly it's not that I need or desire any more features, but shit simply doesnt work if I dont bootstrap my window manager with a service layer desktop environment. My xinitrc includes sillyness to get KDE, gnome, dbus, systray icons to all work juuust right. If you use KDE+i3 as the WM, none of those problems exist. So its more like, other apps expect certain things to work in a certain way so make sure you get all the ducks lined up and then youll be good to go
WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
https://github.com/leukipp/cortile https://github.com/leukipp/cortile
GuB-42 2y ago
I read the blog post as "everything's fine". Tiling window managers are a niche, wanting to integrate them into a desktop environment is even more so, and the article mentions no less than 3 options for doing it. For me, that's really good for a niche. Personally, I am a lot more worried about the X11/Wayland situation, with the former being more or less deprecated, and the latter still having issues after all these years, and compositors and therefore window managers being a common point of issue.
- Gormo 2y ago
  > with the former being more or less deprecated Nah, it's not. That's just wishful thinking by Wayland acolytes.
  - gabrielgio 2y ago
    It is not wishful thinking from acolytes, it is development effort from the freedesktop group. Most of the effort it is now target wayland. X11 is not deprecated yet but probably won’t get many new features (e.g. HDR).
    - badsectoracula 2y ago
      XWayland isn't going anywhere any time soon and the main difference between XWayland and Xorg (the standalone X server) is the module that talks with the underlying hardware, which is only a small part of the otherwise shared codebase - and said module is basically using the same DRM API like pretty much every Wayland compositor and it isn't really that complicated to keep working (or even that big in size). As for HDR i think the main reason you don't see it on X is because at this point there isn't much of an incentive for anyone who can both work with X11 and has the time to do so and has the necessary hardware. Personally i believe i could work on it, if i had an HDR monitor[0] but chances are even if i had an HDR monitor i'd only be using its HDR mode for games - and at that point it'd be easier to just switch to another virtual terminal and run the game via Gamescope (which already supports HDR). I'd expect HDR to come to X11 much faster once mixed content between HDR and SDR starts becoming common on the Web as that'd require the X server to do the color space transformation for the (otherwise SDR) window regions that display HDR content (and probably need some update to use the atomic modeset API to seamlessly switch between HDR and SDR, something Xorg doesn't do now but again, without the need to mix HDR/SDR there isn't that much of an incentive). [0] ok, i have one but it is one of those "barely HDR" HDR400 monitors, i only tried its HDR mode under Windows when i bought it, saw it looking quite meh and never tried it again since i bought it a few years ago
Retr0id 2y ago
IMHO, a better taxonomy for WMs (and DEs) is "keyboard-centric" vs "mouse-centric" vs "trackpad-centric" (and "touchscreen-centric", but we don't talk about those). Of course you can have all of them at once, but there will always be compromises.
- whatever1 2y ago
  When I touch the mouse I need to have access to UI that lets me manage my desktop with the pointer. When I am not using the mouse why clutter the screen with unnecessary UI? Same if the system detects that I am about to use my thumb to touch the screen. I think the UI should adapt to the user inputs instead of trying to dictate to the user how to work.
  - zzo38computer 2y ago
    I also think that such UI will be unnecessary, unless it displays something that you might want to see even if you are not touching it. Most commands can be entered by keyboard, including many commands for window management; some can use the keyboard and mouse together (e.g. to manually change the position and/or size of a window). However, sometimes it may be helpful to display status indicators, e.g. if you have both tiled and floating windows, it can help to display an indicator for this. Also, an operating system design might involve capabilities, and the status of these capabilities (e.g. audio, network, automation, etc) might also be displayed as window indicators that the user can adjust (mute, redirect, etc).
- aidenn0 2y ago
  KDE will let you configure keyboard shortcuts for darn-near every WM thing you might want to do. Only a fraction have default shortcuts, but they are still pretty useful. Example: Hit Ctrl-F10, type part of the title of a window, use the arrow-keys to pick the one you want.
- zzo38computer 2y ago
  I think it would help to be designed to be usable by the keyboard alone but also to be usable by the combination of keyboard and mouse, and to work well either way, and you can do both together if you want to do (they are not different modes so you do not need to switch the mode). Microsoft Windows has some of that; you can push ALT+SPACE and use the menu for move and resize by the arrows, but you can also use the mouse to move/size windows. Microsoft is not the best way, but this specific example is one of the things that can be done. I also think that multiple document interface and tabbed windows could also be implemented in the window manager, that would not need to be the features of specific programs such as a web browser. (Some additional commands for application programs to interact with the window manager would be helpful; a window was created by another one, and is a part of the same program as this one, and some application commands are not specific to this window (but sometimes the user might want to start a separate instance for some windows anyways), etc.)
gabrielgio 2y ago
> but they sacrifice the full-featured nature of a desktop environment. _For me_ it is not a sacrifice, it is conscious choice. I have everything on the tip of my finger and have all (or most) of my config done in a single file, I don't need a heavier DE for no benefit. > increased control over their workspaces and the ability to customize their desktop... Is it even achievable? I don't think you can't have the full-featured nature of gnome and the control of sway. They have antagonistic design. For example, on sway you set up your workflow by composing a lot of software together (with things like wofi, mako etc), while on gnome it is already a cohesive package with everything you need already in place (and trying to change that is uphill battle). Also if the author allow me, the text is quite prolix, you say the same thing over and over again without providing any concrete example. > there is a limited number of desktop environments that offer non-traditional (MS Windows-like) window management. Like what? From those DE you have listed what are they missing? Why do you need more?
sam0x17 2y ago
These tiling environments are great when you can just drag corners with your mouse to change the size of regions. When that isn't a feature, I find it isn't very usable for me at least
colordrops 2y ago
There currently is no tiling window manager that does all of these things, and it's driving me crazy * native tiling (not scripted on top like gnome or kde extensions) * Wayland-based * ability to disable xwayland scaling * screen sharing + window sharing * Good multimonitor support * doesn't crash 3 times a day
skgough 2y ago
One feature of i3 and friends that I really relied on when I was using a laptop as my main computer was the tab mode. Being able to tab between windows on half of your screen while keeping your browser open in the other half was extremely useful. I know BeOS had tabbed windows in the 90s in a floating window manager; it makes me wonder why this idea didn't catch on in the early 2000s. Windows has started to add tabs to individual programs incrementally as part of their rewrites of core applications in the new GUI frameworks. Notepad got tabs and so did Explorer. So they see the utility. Why hasn't tabbing been included as a core feature of the window manager outside of these niche tiling window managers for Linux?
- solomonb 2y ago
  You can do tabbed windows in XMonad.
boring_twenties 2y ago
Xmonad integrates nicely with xfce and MATE, at least. Probably KDE as well.
BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
I'm still on X because there is no sane way to run a tiling window manager in Wayland using proprietary Nvidia drivers. Sucks because Hyprland is pretty cool, but I am not willing to put up with whatever stupid bullshit is necessary to use it and have access to CUDA.
benterix 2y ago
Am I the only one who gets mildly annoyed by the plural in the title? Singular would be just fine - true, precise, without any vague implications.
dabber21 2y ago
Didn't Gnome want to do add tiling? https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/07/26/rethinking-window-management/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/07/26/rethinking-windo... (hn link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880235) whatever happened to it
TrevorFSmith 2y ago
Fedora has a Sway spin that installs all of the usual applets like volume and network config. Sway can also be installed on any Fedora machine with one dnf command. I just don't have the problems described in the article.
perakojotgenije 2y ago
Quicktile: https://github.com/ssokolow/quicktile https://github.com/ssokolow/quicktile https://ssokolow.com/quicktile/ https://ssokolow.com/quicktile/ Nobody is mentioning it but it is such a great tiling manager, I use it all the time. Just select the window with alt-tab and then tile the windows with Ctrl+alt+numeric keyboards. It's quick and it doesn't need a mouse to tile windows. And it can integrate into any x11 windows manager.
- ensocode 2y ago
  Cool, thanks a lot. Was looking for something like that without the need of gnome. Works great with XFCE and there is even a maintained package in AUR for the archers.
mgaunard 2y ago
The main applications that I use are a web browser, a terminal, and a text editor. Both my terminal and my text editor support tiling natively, and I assume there are extensions for my web browser to do the same. I'm not sure adding this complexity at the window manager level is really that useful.
Animats 2y ago
I would settle for console windows having a border. I hate that on Ubuntu, when two console windows overlap, there's no visible boundary. That's just stupid.
gigatexal 2y ago
They exist. It’s the one and only reason I use Linux is I fell in love with i3 and now Sway. They’re not just good for terminals. I do like me some tmux but I find tiling and stacking and all the glory of a titling window manager the best part of desktop Linux.
- supercheetah 2y ago
  I would say those aren't really desktop environments. They provide the bare minimum for window management and compositing, but not much more. Desktop environments encompass much more than that, like managing file type associations, and protocol handling.
  - gigatexal 2y ago
    Some users might need that. And even expect it. I don’t need it. I know the tools to open the file types or XDG is configured with default apps.
evnix 2y ago
If your desktop environment requires me to click twice instead of once to switch or choose between two instances of chrome. Then I know you only care about the cool factor and is not going to be a great UX. Stop asking me to use alt+tab and cycle through windows like a caveman or ask me to setup workspaces like its 1980. "Stinky smelly nerds" seem to forget about large touch screen monitors and VR devices and that all icons can fit in one stretch of wide screens.
taeric 2y ago
I like tiling well enough. What surprises me is that I don't have an easy way to script different window setups. Would love to be able to press a function key and have it put specific windows on my various monitors, with overflow placed on a new desktop.
th0ma5 2y ago
PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM is very neat and I've been using it for a while
qwertox 2y ago
I like it how it is on Windows 11, with 6 zones (tl-l-bl and tr-r-br, where t=top, l=left, and top and bottom target that quarter of the monitor while the middle targets the entire height of that side) and maximize/unmaximize windows by dragging the title bar to the center top of the monitor. Then, in addition to this, with Actual Window Manager, map two layouts (2|2, 3|3, so 4 "panes" or 6 panes) via shortcuts where the dragging of the title bar shows these panes as targets for the window to pull it in when pressing shift at the same time. And with Ctrl-Shift Z or X I select one of the two layouts. The 2|2 and 3|3 layouts are useful if I want a grid of terminal windows on the monitor while Windows's native features are good to move windows around quickly. The benefit of having multiple terminal windows in a grid vs one tiled terminal is that I can pin selected terminals to the foreground. I wouldn't want a desktop environment to generate layouts automatically for me, unless it can see what I'm doing and ask me if it should switched to a layout it proposes to me through a preview image on the display.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
  Mnyeah, for me the Windows 10 tiling was just right. In Windows 11 it's way too fiddly. Like every time I tile a window say to the left half of the screen (WIN + <-) it brings up every other window as an option to tile to the right half even if I already have a window tiled there. There's other fiddlyness but I can't be bothered now. I need to make a list so I can kvetch properly about it, with bullet points and all. And references. But overall I'm sorry to say even Win 11 is still better at tiling windows than almost anything I've tried on Linux (I had Xmonad on a laptop way back when and that was actually quite good). Though of course there's always text mode with Midnight Commander so :P
jethronethro 2y ago
Need? Or is is simply a matter of some people just wanting them?
MainlyMortal 2y ago
I think what most people, including tiling people, would actually want without realising it is Divvy (macOS)/gTile (gnome)/PowerToys (Windows). A regular floating window manager but you can move any floating window into a tiled window based on a grid of potential locations. It's hard to explain in words but look any of them up and it's the best no-compromise solution for everyone.
- DrDeadCrash 2y ago
  I can confirm for power toys on Windows, I find it essential for making use of multiple 4k screens.
  - MainlyMortal 2y ago
    It's honestly the best of the lot but slept on in these parts because of being Windows only. KDE started to clone this as a native feature but it seems to be abandoned. Story of linux I guess. I really, really can't recommend PowerToys enough.
- amarant 2y ago
  Not so! I'm sure they're great for a bunch of usecases but they don't fit mine, which tbf is probably not very common. I've got an ultrawide monitor, 32:9 aspect ratio, and I like to have three columns, with the middle one being basically 16:9, and the right being fairly narrow, so that the left can be somewhere perhaps slightly wider than 4:3. Regular tiling positions aren't flexible enough for that
  - wongogue 2y ago
    Powertoys FancyZones can do that.
    - amarant 2y ago
      Ah, but that's on windows, which rules it out for me
- 2y ago
zamalek 2y ago
I agree to an extent. Very often people/users ask for things based on what they know because it's hard to imagine what they need. Solving that's really the essence of UX/product management. I don't think a tiling DE is what is needed. Based on my experience, there are some core issues to resolve here: * The notion of a running apps area (dock, taskbar) seems to be essential for users. * Users (myself and people I know) typically have one application maximized at a time. The exception would be when cross-app interaction is required (drag and drop) or when it really makes sense to have multiple apps visible at once (terminal + editor). * When users have multiple apps open, there's typically a pattern to how they accomplish this. * Virtual desktops are hard. You have to dedicate congition/memory to what is running on which desktop. * Most users don't want to spend hours learning+editing config files to get something basic working (i.e. the article is definitely correct about having a DE vs WM here). I consider something along the lines of this to solve all the above: * Typical DE goodies. * An infinite canvas, not virtual desktops. * Presets for window placement, i.e. fancy zones[1] that can be placed anywhere on the infinite canvas. * The camera (current view rectangle) can be translated and scaled/zoomed. Zooming would effectively be alt+tab. * Camera position presets - these would be analogous to virtual desktops. They can be any shape or size, and can overlap. The idea here is that you could have one camera focusing on your editor fancy zone, and another focusing on the editor+terminal. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzones https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...
kkfx 2y ago
We do have some tiling WM, not DE ok, but still enough. Casual users who want DEs are typically former Windows users who have no idea about tiling concept and current sorry state of GNU/Linux DEs it's definitively not good to teach anyone anything except instability, arrogance etc. Bold terms, I know, but the right terms IMVHO when we talk about Gnome or Kde DEs now. Tiling is VERY good for a PROPER desktop, but actually we miss a proper desktop for the masses, we have Emacs/EXWM, but most X11-based apps can't be sane, proper desktop apps being simply widget based or WebVM-based apps. A proper desktop app is something easy to bend by the user, flexible, automatable, not a rigid tool where the user can't do much more than clicking around and have only cut/copy/paste IPCs and even very limited.
lsh0 2y ago
notion, the fork of ion3: https://notionwm.net https://notionwm.net https://github.com/raboof/notion https://github.com/raboof/notion
lofaszvanitt 2y ago
Linux's biggest problem is the multitude of options in every space, all unique, none of them recognises existing systems that work well and none of them borrow the working solutions from the predecessors. Everyone has to offer some mind bending individual solution that are mostly useless. All of these are centered around the heavy gravity of egos that created them. That's why gimp and krita is unusable compared to PS. Watch in awe as the real peepz, who know what works and what not will sweep these fn abominations out of this space when the Linux Desktop's usage stats will climb above lets say 10%... and they will be cheeky enuff to ask money for it :D.
rburhum 2y ago
I have been wanting to look into tiling managers, but I was always putting it off because of tasks I had to do. I read this post, and it made me look into how to use the default tiling manager of my current distro (Using Kubuntu and Plasma). It literally is Cmd-T, pick a default layout (the upper right area has some default ones, too), and then whenever you want to tile, just shift drag the window and it will snap. Been using it all day and I love it. The article does not talk about this one, but man, glad it made me wonder about it.
replete 2y ago
Anyone else smell ChatGPT in this article? This article is calling for something to happen that already is happening. I just came back to the linux desktop and I'm pleased to discover I can pretty build features I like into a normal desktop environment through GNOME extensions. It's unfortunately quite fragmented still at the moment, but looks very promising. I think once COSMIC lands and more people use it we'll see even more of this extensible desktop rather than the all-in elitist desktop approach. It's already there to be honest, but it's hidden in plain sight. And of course if you want to be a cool kid there's hyprland
jrm4 2y ago
It's true that we don't need more distros. It's also true that we don't "more tiling." We can use more Window Managers maybe. We sure as hell don't need more Desktop Environments. What we've always needed is more modularity. (and instead, we got Wayland, which in practice was mostly the opposite of that)
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
Shoutout to cortile at https://github.com/leukipp/cortile https://github.com/leukipp/cortile which is an app that you install on top of lxde, xfce, gnome etc and enables tiling features. Great alternative to a fulm blown i3wm when ypu are sharing the computer with less savy users
diegolas 2y ago
sounds like a really niche requirement to make such a strong statement. if there are no more tiling desktop environments it is because there are not enough users for them to be in such demand.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
I use most of my apps "full screen" and tab rapidly between them. Very rarely, I use 2 windows side by side. Most of the times I use 2 screens. I do agree that tiling is better than floating, but I think full screen with good alt tab/virtual desktop is even better
tracker1 2y ago
I really like the direction of System76/Pop/COSMOS is going with this. You have free floating windows along with tiling and multi-application tab views. Add in app location pinning and you've pretty much got all the bases covered. I'm not sure about their light/dark + accent color(s) though, I do hope they (re)generate the icon suite for the color though, at least for system directories and primary apps. I'm also slightly concerned with tray icons/apps, which hae a few different API/formats already.
eternityforest 2y ago
I always think I should probably try out having multiple things in the screen at once, but... I usually forget that feature exists when I'm actually working... I'm kind of amazed by a lot of programmers, it seems like they have multiple threads running in their mind at once, writing code while also optimizing their workflow and laying things out on the screen and keeping track of where different things are, all often while generating ideas for how tools could be better.
hulitu 2y ago
> Linux: We need tiling desktop environments man fvwm2rc
cassepipe 2y ago
I work from my laptop and the smallish screen makes tiling unattractive/overkill. I much prefer a very quick way to change windows which most DEs make surprisingly more difficult than it should be. I use Cinnamon because it's basic yet customizable enough (you can't remap changing windows in both directions in GNOME). I set up Super + J/K to change windows (and turned off animations for that). If using too much windows, I know Super + 1/2 will always be the navigator/terminal (order in pinned apps in the panel)ot I use Ctrl + J/K to change terminal tabs so I can always switch between $TERMINAL_EDITOR and the shell/gdb/etc. I use vim's buffers for the editor and Shift + J/K to move through tabs (I use fuzzy find option when there is many buffers) I use vimium (Shift + J/K) in Firefox to go through tabs (although the Ctrl + L + % feature is great to move between tabs.) It's consistent enought that I dont' forget about it and thus use it
hulitu 2y ago
> Linux: We need tiling desktop environments ? I heard there are some.

183 points by ashitlerferad 2y ago

Love both i3wm and Sway WM. This is what computing should be. Windows has surprisingly decent tiling functions out of the box, too, but you'd never realize it without some experimentation. Next time you're at a Windows box, try holding Win, maybe Shift as well, and mashing the arrow keys. A minute or two of experimentation might make your whole $DAYJOB workflow that much more enjoyable!

IggleSniggle 2y ago
It's the one thing I hack into macOS (I use BetterTouchTool for this but only because I already have a license from back when I wanted to mod my TouchBar), and would otherwise genuinely miss coming from any other operating system. I think even iPadOS has tiling shortcuts!
- nerdponx 2y ago
  You can also get true tiling window management with Amethyst, or Hammerspoon if you love customizing things in Lua and starting from an absolutely empty configuration.
  - Reefersleep 2y ago
    Just want to add that I'm having a pretty good experience with Amethyst. No file-based configuration, sadly, but it does all of the tiling and movements I need. Hammerspoon (via Spacehammer) seemed too slow for me.
lambdaba 2y ago
Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/) makes macOS window management good enough (for a non-tiling WM), by adding keyboard shortcuts and drag gestures.
- swah 2y ago
  And the new MacOS version also finally got Windows XP style tiling. (I still like Rectangle because I can do it from a longer distance..)
kalaksi 2y ago
KDE also has extensive keyboard shortcuts for window management (among other things) but most of them are not set by default.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  I didn't know that! Tracks with my experience with playing around with KDE, like, a decade ago. So much user-configurable power lying just under the surface.
- chuckadams 2y ago
  One thing I love about kwin is that the exposé feature lets you navigate the windows with the keyboard. macOS itself doesn’t have that feature.
- wing-_-nuts 2y ago
  I want to love KDE, I really do, but I've grown to love gnome and os x's ability to have close, min, max buttons down in the toolbar for apps as that saves a significant amount of screen real estate. I tried out kde plasma for a while and just couldn't get past it. Having said that, I did discover kde connect while using that, and I love that app! It's so nice for putting audio books on my phone and controlling playback
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    KDE has this feature now, you just have to add the global menu applet to your task bar and it will do the Unity/Apple thing where the task bar is relevant to the selected application
    - c-hendricks 2y ago
      Client Side Decorations are different than moving the menu bar. Even using the global menu in KDE (which isn't that new BTW, I think it was in KDE3), you'll still have a "height = title bar + toolbar", where with CSD it's "height = toolbar".
  - 2y ago
ar_lan 2y ago
For those on macOS, yabai + skhd have been part of my workflow for years now. They are fantastic to bridge the gap I miss so much from i3.
- chambored 2y ago
  I switched to Aerospace from Yabai
  - nicce 2y ago
    I switched to Hammerspoon... seems to be good enough with enormous power if you know Lua.
- azthecx 2y ago
  I used it for years too but had issues with managed laptops and security settings, I've heard that aerospace is meant to work even then. If anyone reading this wants to take a stab at tiling wm in Mac don't be deterred, there are good options available there too.
bluGill 2y ago
I tried that, but most apps just don't scale down well. Important UI elements just disappear, while less important elements maintain their size, unless the app has most of the screen. Those are apps like teams and outlook that I would expect most office users to keep open all the time on Windows (teams is really bad about assuming I want to see the avatar of whoever is speaking more than their slides). Edge did a little better, depending on the page I was looking at.
- pxc 2y ago
  This is one of my pet peeves as a visually impaired person. Basically nothing scales right for me anymore. Apps and websites designed for desktops have such insane padding that when I scale them up, basic information is truncated. By the time they're easily readable for me, 'progressive' websites go into mobile mode and do things like collapse their (non-resizeable) sidebars. Last week I tried to cut down on excess padding in a sidebar by resizing it and literally watched it go from 40% excess/wasted horizontal space to completely collapsed and hidden behind another click (and thus unusable with keyboard friendly addons like Pentadactyl).
  - eviks 2y ago
    User styling can fix some websites at a high cost of fiddling with the layout But we do need some a shift away from this awful low density design paradigm
  - bluGill 2y ago
    If you live in the US you may have an ADA case against whoever does the website. Many other countries have their own version of that with different rules.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  I do keep Outlook and Teams open basically all the time, and full-screened, yes. Here I can only counsel that having multiple smaller monitors was a wiser investment dollar per dollar than one big monitor.
nicce 2y ago
There is also rather new decent competitor for Sway: https://hyprland.org/ https://hyprland.org/
- azthecx 2y ago
  I've been using Awesome for about two years and started using Hyprland in parallel due to its very good multi monitor + multi resolution support and it's been great. The only two issues I have with it is slightly increased power draw from ~7w to ~10w on idle and screen sharing does not work. I use very default configs so maintaing both is not an overhead. Awesome offers very high dpi and battery life and Hyprland smooth animations and multi resolution support.

noinsight 2y ago

Tiling wm’s are a niche within a niche (Linux on the desktop)… you can’t really expect much engineering resources to be devoted to them.

doubled112 2y ago
In real life, in the probably hundreds of developers and IT professionals I've worked with, I've met exactly one who was actually using a tiling window manager. It was different enough to be a thing we playfully argued about often.
- elric 2y ago
  Good window management is a niche skill (on the user side). I often see "normies" waste so much time tabbing between windows or turning their heads between monitors or whatnot. When I want stuff side by side, I press a hotkey to arrange stuff side by side. My WM has a bunch of tags (virtual desktops on steroids), where each tag has its own purpose and a dedicated default layout (tiled for terminals, fullscreen for a browser, etc). I feel like "tiled vs non-tiled" is a false dichotomy. It's tiled and floating and full screen and spiraling and horizontal split and vertical split, etc. The right tool for the job.
  - doubled112 2y ago
    Absolutely agree. Use what works, and we should always be grateful to have good options. However there's a lot to most of the tiling window managers that never clicked for me. I've always assumed it's a personal problem. Perhaps I have spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about "why not?" I'm not good at remembering keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+Z seems to be all I need. I've tried sorting and categorizing apps into tags, but it makes me slower. If apps open on a virtual desktop that I couldn't see, I'd just lose it. If I can't see something it stops existing pretty quickly, which makes even too many virtual desktops a losing battle. Inconsistent behaviour will always pull me out of whatever I'm doing. 4 apps tiled, 5th app opens in a floating window, now I'm distracted. For now I use a single 4K monitor at 100% scaling with a couple of virtual desktops. Current task(s) and background apps. I haven't spent much time managing windows since. Once the windows are open for the day, that's a solved problem. Memory is cheap. Windows mostly open where I left them last time. There's a certain cognitive load to keeping all of that straight. The computer is supposed to do the thinking and apparently I can't.

elric 2y ago

I've exclusively used Awesomewm for the past 15ish years (with a brief attempt at Sway, but that's a story for another time). I don't understand what OP is talking about. Do they want more integration between the WM and the DE? If so, I don't understand why? AwesomeWM does everything I need it to do, without getting in my way. Maybe I'm misunderstanding OP? Edit: the comments on the blog post talk about integrations with things like volume management and network management, apparently that's (a|their) defintion of DE vs a WM. Those are not features I care about at all, so maybe I'm not the target audience here. AwesomeWM has plenty of widgets for volume or wifi or whatnot, but I mostly use a terminal.

BeetleB 2y ago
> Do they want more integration between the WM and the DE? Yes. I haven't used a DE in well over a decade, but I assume it's for stuff like being able to drag and drop from one window to another, etc. (Also a happy Awesome user for almost as long as you - although I still haven't learned Lua!)
dingnuts 2y ago
There are a lot of little things that daemons like gsettingsd handles, like resolution changes if you add a monitor or change the size of the window you're using your VM in, that you have to do manually if you are not using a desktop environment I got tired of doing that stuff manually ten years ago, myself. when I plug in a USB stick I just want it to mount, I don't need to wind up reading the mount man page. I have shit to do.
- jwells89 2y ago
  Yeah, many years ago I ran a crunchbang-style setup with openbox and tint2 and while the low resource usage and customizability was great, it was irritating having to find and set up daemons, tray items, etc (all of which seemingly coming with their own list of incapabilities/tradeoffs) for every little thing. I absolutely sympathize with minimizing bloat, but it feels like things like volume keys should fall within the scope of bare minimum out of the box functionality.
2y ago

kergonath 2y ago

We had Moom on the front page yesterday. I would adopt it in a heartbeat on Linux if I could. It is easy to use, easy to understand, great even with a mouse and does not require you to remember yet another dozen of keyboard shortcuts (though you can if you want). Using the finer grid is a pleasure and it works great. All the alternatives I tried have huge technical barriers to entry.

medo-bear 2y ago

Objectively speaking, nothing comes close to StumpWM

BeetleB 2y ago
What are the advantages of StumpWM over Awesome?
- tmtvl 2y ago
  Because we're on HN I'd say that StumpWM being made in Common Lisp may be trotted out as the main advantage. Personally I'm quite fond of it having Emacs-like key chording (it's the keyboard equivalent of a cascading menu versus a flat menu). That said I'm so fond of awesome's tags and layouts that I can't bring myself to switch over (and programming those myself is way above my skill level).
  - medo-bear 2y ago
    > Because we're on HN I'd say that StumpWM being made in Common Lisp may be trotted out as the main advantage It's not because it is in Common Lisp, it is because you can program it live without needing to restart the program to see the result. Some people call this 'hot-reloading' but Common Lisp implementations take this to an unreached level. Also it has sane defaults (well ... for Emacs users) but you can also mold it into whatever you like.

lucasoshiro 2y ago

The last versions of KDE Plasma 5 offered tiling windows as an option, and it could be configured to be used only with the keyboard, like a tiling WM. However it was not so polished (I was waiting it to be more usable) and I kept my KDE + XMonad configuration. However, after Plasma 6 that option was missing, and I my KDE + XMonad setup doesn't work anymore (perhaps I need to adapt it but I didn't have time to do that so far). Also, Wayland doesn't help: using a desktop environment with other window manager only works on X11. Does someone know what happened to tiling on Plasma 6?

dizhn 2y ago
They ditched the existing stuff which were handled by third party software and started implementing new tiling functionality from scratch. It's a good faith effort to embrace tiling natively but this change meant they caused all existing solutions to break without providing anywhere near the same functionality. Hopefully they or 3rd parties will fix this in the future.
- lucasoshiro 2y ago
  I hope so. I liked my KDE + XMonad setup, but picom really made my PC slow. A 100% KDE solution would be perfect, as I'm not a XMonad power user
  - RealStickman_ 2y ago
    I just switched from sway to KDE + Kröhnkite. That might be an option. According to the reddit comments I've seen, there aren't any plans to expand tiling functionality much beyond what it currently is in KDE.
    - dizhn 2y ago
      Even if that's the case, the tiling "primitives" (I don't know if that's the right word) for 3rd parties to leverage is there. By the way khronkite was forked a bunch of times to create things like Bismuth which isn't supported in plasma6 anymore. Are you sure khronkite itself works? Are you using kde5 ? Or this fork https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite ?

bryanlarsen 2y ago

AFAICT, KDE does exactly what he's looking for; integrating tiling into a full featured desktop manager.

r14c 2y ago
I was upset with the KDE project for some years because they dropped amaroK during the transition from KDE 3 to 4, but after seeing the new work in Plasma and moving on to other music players once amaroK 3 rotted. I really love the work they've done and I'm back to having KDE as my daily driver. Previously I used wmii, dwm, and xmonad on different systems.

codedokode 2y ago

I mostly use full-screen windows (effectively no windows at all). I think that floating windows and tiles are made for those with large expensive 4K monitors, but not for smaller screens.

Vegenoid 2y ago
I work exclusively on the display of a 15-inch laptop, and I frequently have 2, less frequently 3, tiled windows.
bluGill 2y ago
Most applications are designed for full screen on the common displays of their day. 1080p monitors are common enough that everybody still designs their apps for them and so you can use them less than full screen on a 4k monitor. Back when smaller monitors were common apps were designed for them and could be used tiled on 1080p monitors. If you can still find such an app it will work great tiled, but few projects allow for the idea that you might want to work on something else at the same time and so less than full screen is not something they allow UX to think about.
solomonb 2y ago
Same. I've used XMonad forever but 90% of the time I have single applications open full screen. I use XMonad's tabs feature heavily. So in one virtual desktop I have an editor and a few terminals which I tab between, then in another virtual desktop I do the same for web browsing, and another virtual desktop for comms.
JanMa 2y ago
That’s also what works best for me! A single monitor and only one window on fullscreen. When I need to switch applications, I navigate to another fullscreen window. Sometimes I like to joke that my brain is single threaded :-)

flabbergasted 2y ago

I'm surprised there hasn't been any mention of my favorite rust based tiling windows manager - LeftWM (https://github.com/leftwm/leftwm?tab=readme-ov-file#why-go-left https://github.com/leftwm/leftwm?tab=readme-ov-file#why-go-l...)

entropie 2y ago

I use xmonad for well over a decade now. I tried others because ghc is a pretty big payload to maintain on a gentoo system but always came back to xmonad. I invested quite a big time in my config (I dont speak haskell, so it was sometimes pretty hard) but I would say my general config is quite minimal: 3 displays. 9 workspaces, named. Pretty basic tiled layouts. Named "scratchpads" (basicially popups with fixed client/programms; like a fullscreen popup with my terminal emulator with a tmux session a semi transparent pavucontrol and clipboard manager/copyq). Important: one hotkey to send the actual client to fullscreen (I have no idea why this feature seems to be a hard one when testing other tiling WMs). Hotkeys for switching displays. This seems (for me?) pretty basic needs but I found thats not easily reproducible with other tiling wms. Some time ago I introduced my GF to a thinkpad with my xmonad config and she was within a hour absolutely able to use a multi monitor setup comfortable with her keyboard. She really liked it. My config for reference: https://gist.github.com/entropie/c8072585593b784bff9b8af95c187b5d https://gist.github.com/entropie/c8072585593b784bff9b8af95c1...

rout39574 2y ago
XMonad mafia represent! :) My config is koff more involved. I did a lateral from CTWM into XMonad quite a few years ago, so many of my keystrokes bring associated workspaces to their default locations. I've got 44 workspaces, and 6 displays, many of them loosely grouped into "document" pairs for working on different projects, and "monitoring" pairs for different focuses of _looking at_ different things. The monitoring pairs are much less intensively used.
- entropie 2y ago
  I would like to have a look at your config.
MSFT_Edging 2y ago
Feels good to see someone else who can't speak Haskell but struggles their way to a working xmonad config. I really want to just move to wayland and get it over with, but the tiling wm options are slim. I want a dynamic tiling setup, so sway isn't it. I think hyperland can do something similar but I don't want the candy associated with it. I just need the smallest overhead to throw windows into tiles.

jzb 2y ago

For GNOME, the Tiling Shell extension works well for me. I've also used, and liked, gTile. Of course, with an extension there's always the danger that it will break between releases and/or the developer will get bored and stop maintaining it. The nice thing about Tiling Shell is that it's not all-or-nothing tiling. It's tiling when I want it, otherwise just "normal". COSMIC Desktop is promising, but has a lot of maturing to do.

rom1v 2y ago

I think tiling is great for terminals, but not for the whole desktop (I don't want my web browser or video player to be resized because I open a new program). So I use a "normal" floating environment (xfce, but could be another one), and I use Terminator in full screen enabled on a specific shortcut, so that I have tiled terminals.

ihalip 2y ago
Terminator really is great, infinite scroll is what really sold it to me ~9 years ago and I've been a happy user ever since.
anewguy9000 2y ago
this. the uis for different apps have different needs - ex. keeping a video editor wide and narrow. and its not uncommon to want more apps open than would fit into their own tiles or having to move to another desktop workspace. i just wish there was a compositor or window manager for wayland that supported working this way, none really do. without a tiling wm, apps in gnome want to open right in the center of the screen, and don't remember their positions, its comically bad
- 3np 2y ago
  qtile is very flexible, I'd be surprised if it's not configurable to get you to where you want.
Suppafly 2y ago
>I think tiling is great for terminals, but not for the whole desktop (I don't want my web browser or video player to be resized because I open a new program). This, I can't imagine anyone wanting that sort of tiling. Anytime I have a use case for tiling in my own job it ends up being impossible to get things tiled the way I want and also have the things I don't want tiled setup correctly on my other screen.
- rout39574 2y ago
  Years of XMonad use here. Really, it's not the interference you are imagining. Much of the time I have a web browser using a whole portrait-aligned monitor, but sometimes I feel like having it 2-up in a landscape monitor. The win of nice clean window separation, without giving up significant percentage of my display space to window decoration, is -profound-. I have one pixel borders around my shells, and I have it because I fiddled with zero and decided I liked one better. How many pixels do you lose to decoration, so you can mouse over them cleanly? That's a major win.

djaouen 2y ago

I like EXWM because it fits in with my continuing Emacs obsession lol

big-green-man 2y ago

Hard disagree. I'm a Sway user and tiling wm evangelist, I absolutely do not want a suite of preinstalled software to come baked into my wm/compositor. I'm happy to install the software that I need. If someone wants to distribute a complete Linux desktop with a tiling wm as default, that would be interesting, but a generic DE with a tiling wm to me seems like a waste of time.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dicytea 2y ago
No one's saying that they should include a DE into Sway. Your precious WM will still be with you even if someone decides to make a new tiling DE. I'm a Hyprland user and honestly, cobbling together a poor man's DE using half-baked amateur-ish GTK apps and copy-pasting Nerd Font icons no longer spark any joy for me. I'm basically ready to jump at the first sight of a viable alternative. I'm very optimistic about Cosmic DE in this regards.
- subsection1h 2y ago
  > cobbling together a poor man's DE using half-baked amateur-ish GTK apps Do you think that GNOME's web browser (Epiphany?) and KDE's web browser (Konqueror?) are better than Firefox and Chromium? Do you think that GNOME Text Editor and KDE's text editor (Kate?) are better than Emacs?
  - dicytea 2y ago
    By DE, I'm mostly talking about having a cohesive graphical shell, not the random apps that comes pre-installed (who cares about those?). The login manager, lock screen, taskbar, notification daemon, launcher, OSD, workspace overview, etc. In WMs (or WM-like compositors), you either have to cobble all of this together yourself or just give up and convince yourself that you're a minimalist. Doing this kind of stuff was fun for a while, but these days I'm starting to crave for something actually good and polished.
  - 2y ago

autarchprinceps 2y ago

"We need more desktop environments" - Nooo, absolutely not. You need one or maybe two good ones, and it can have tiling as a feature or at worst plugin. The fragmentation and lack of key features and stability testing as a result is already a major reason for people not to adopt Linux desktops. And even if we don't consolidate, there is already an idiotic amount of just different tiling desktop environments, let alone all desktop environments. What on earth do you want even more for? Just add features to existing ones, so that everybody benefits. Competition isn't really needed in open source, since you can just add all of the things to one shared solution. Imagine if everybody suggested making a brand new kernel for each combination of hardware, or the likes.

ebiester 2y ago
If only Gnome was amenable to features... They are a very opinionated group.

bradrn 2y ago

For a while I used XMonad (as a window manager) together with Xfce (as a desktop environment). It had its rough edges, but I really liked the experience. I could easily fit my windows on the screen the way I wanted to, while still getting the integration of a well-designed desktop environment. Alas, I had to drop this setup on moving to Wayland. And I can’t get it back easily, because Wayland compositors generally don’t allow for their window managers to be swapped out. I now use Sway WM, which is perfectly acceptable… but I still miss my tiling desktop environment.

3np 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41364546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41364546

delichon 2y ago

I'm a long time Ubuntu user but not exactly a power user. When I installed i3wm I really liked it but was very handicapped by losing the rest of Gnome. I didn't understand how much "windows manager" encompasses. Suddenly just finding an app and opening it was pain. I ended up getting rid of it because of the constant challenges of replacing this and that from Gnome, but I still miss the tiling desktop. Is there anything out there for those us who need more hand holding?

dingnuts 2y ago
it's been a few years since I've done this, but I used to have the same problem as you and I found that if I ran MATE but replaced the default WM in it, Marco, with i3, I got to have my tiling WM inside a proper DE. It was really great! If you are interested there are a few guides you can find if you search. I'm certainly not the first or only person to do this. I only stopped using it because I eventually got a very large screen and tiling doesn't fit my flow anymore, so I just use KDE now lol
- tacone 2y ago
  Wow, do you have any link with instructions explaining how to do that?
- 3np 2y ago
  IME, same approach works flawlessly in Xfce too (and from what I hear GNOME and KDE).

calvinmorrison 2y ago

increasingly it's not that I need or desire any more features, but shit simply doesnt work if I dont bootstrap my window manager with a service layer desktop environment. My xinitrc includes sillyness to get KDE, gnome, dbus, systray icons to all work juuust right. If you use KDE+i3 as the WM, none of those problems exist. So its more like, other apps expect certain things to work in a certain way so make sure you get all the ducks lined up and then youll be good to go

WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago

https://github.com/leukipp/cortile https://github.com/leukipp/cortile

GuB-42 2y ago

I read the blog post as "everything's fine". Tiling window managers are a niche, wanting to integrate them into a desktop environment is even more so, and the article mentions no less than 3 options for doing it. For me, that's really good for a niche. Personally, I am a lot more worried about the X11/Wayland situation, with the former being more or less deprecated, and the latter still having issues after all these years, and compositors and therefore window managers being a common point of issue.

Gormo 2y ago
> with the former being more or less deprecated Nah, it's not. That's just wishful thinking by Wayland acolytes.
- gabrielgio 2y ago
  It is not wishful thinking from acolytes, it is development effort from the freedesktop group. Most of the effort it is now target wayland. X11 is not deprecated yet but probably won’t get many new features (e.g. HDR).
  - badsectoracula 2y ago
    XWayland isn't going anywhere any time soon and the main difference between XWayland and Xorg (the standalone X server) is the module that talks with the underlying hardware, which is only a small part of the otherwise shared codebase - and said module is basically using the same DRM API like pretty much every Wayland compositor and it isn't really that complicated to keep working (or even that big in size). As for HDR i think the main reason you don't see it on X is because at this point there isn't much of an incentive for anyone who can both work with X11 and has the time to do so and has the necessary hardware. Personally i believe i could work on it, if i had an HDR monitor[0] but chances are even if i had an HDR monitor i'd only be using its HDR mode for games - and at that point it'd be easier to just switch to another virtual terminal and run the game via Gamescope (which already supports HDR). I'd expect HDR to come to X11 much faster once mixed content between HDR and SDR starts becoming common on the Web as that'd require the X server to do the color space transformation for the (otherwise SDR) window regions that display HDR content (and probably need some update to use the atomic modeset API to seamlessly switch between HDR and SDR, something Xorg doesn't do now but again, without the need to mix HDR/SDR there isn't that much of an incentive). [0] ok, i have one but it is one of those "barely HDR" HDR400 monitors, i only tried its HDR mode under Windows when i bought it, saw it looking quite meh and never tried it again since i bought it a few years ago

Retr0id 2y ago

IMHO, a better taxonomy for WMs (and DEs) is "keyboard-centric" vs "mouse-centric" vs "trackpad-centric" (and "touchscreen-centric", but we don't talk about those). Of course you can have all of them at once, but there will always be compromises.

whatever1 2y ago
When I touch the mouse I need to have access to UI that lets me manage my desktop with the pointer. When I am not using the mouse why clutter the screen with unnecessary UI? Same if the system detects that I am about to use my thumb to touch the screen. I think the UI should adapt to the user inputs instead of trying to dictate to the user how to work.
- zzo38computer 2y ago
  I also think that such UI will be unnecessary, unless it displays something that you might want to see even if you are not touching it. Most commands can be entered by keyboard, including many commands for window management; some can use the keyboard and mouse together (e.g. to manually change the position and/or size of a window). However, sometimes it may be helpful to display status indicators, e.g. if you have both tiled and floating windows, it can help to display an indicator for this. Also, an operating system design might involve capabilities, and the status of these capabilities (e.g. audio, network, automation, etc) might also be displayed as window indicators that the user can adjust (mute, redirect, etc).
aidenn0 2y ago
KDE will let you configure keyboard shortcuts for darn-near every WM thing you might want to do. Only a fraction have default shortcuts, but they are still pretty useful. Example: Hit Ctrl-F10, type part of the title of a window, use the arrow-keys to pick the one you want.
zzo38computer 2y ago
I think it would help to be designed to be usable by the keyboard alone but also to be usable by the combination of keyboard and mouse, and to work well either way, and you can do both together if you want to do (they are not different modes so you do not need to switch the mode). Microsoft Windows has some of that; you can push ALT+SPACE and use the menu for move and resize by the arrows, but you can also use the mouse to move/size windows. Microsoft is not the best way, but this specific example is one of the things that can be done. I also think that multiple document interface and tabbed windows could also be implemented in the window manager, that would not need to be the features of specific programs such as a web browser. (Some additional commands for application programs to interact with the window manager would be helpful; a window was created by another one, and is a part of the same program as this one, and some application commands are not specific to this window (but sometimes the user might want to start a separate instance for some windows anyways), etc.)

gabrielgio 2y ago

> but they sacrifice the full-featured nature of a desktop environment. _For me_ it is not a sacrifice, it is conscious choice. I have everything on the tip of my finger and have all (or most) of my config done in a single file, I don't need a heavier DE for no benefit. > increased control over their workspaces and the ability to customize their desktop... Is it even achievable? I don't think you can't have the full-featured nature of gnome and the control of sway. They have antagonistic design. For example, on sway you set up your workflow by composing a lot of software together (with things like wofi, mako etc), while on gnome it is already a cohesive package with everything you need already in place (and trying to change that is uphill battle). Also if the author allow me, the text is quite prolix, you say the same thing over and over again without providing any concrete example. > there is a limited number of desktop environments that offer non-traditional (MS Windows-like) window management. Like what? From those DE you have listed what are they missing? Why do you need more?

sam0x17 2y ago

These tiling environments are great when you can just drag corners with your mouse to change the size of regions. When that isn't a feature, I find it isn't very usable for me at least

colordrops 2y ago

There currently is no tiling window manager that does all of these things, and it's driving me crazy * native tiling (not scripted on top like gnome or kde extensions) * Wayland-based * ability to disable xwayland scaling * screen sharing + window sharing * Good multimonitor support * doesn't crash 3 times a day

skgough 2y ago

One feature of i3 and friends that I really relied on when I was using a laptop as my main computer was the tab mode. Being able to tab between windows on half of your screen while keeping your browser open in the other half was extremely useful. I know BeOS had tabbed windows in the 90s in a floating window manager; it makes me wonder why this idea didn't catch on in the early 2000s. Windows has started to add tabs to individual programs incrementally as part of their rewrites of core applications in the new GUI frameworks. Notepad got tabs and so did Explorer. So they see the utility. Why hasn't tabbing been included as a core feature of the window manager outside of these niche tiling window managers for Linux?

solomonb 2y ago
You can do tabbed windows in XMonad.

boring_twenties 2y ago

Xmonad integrates nicely with xfce and MATE, at least. Probably KDE as well.

BaculumMeumEst 2y ago

I'm still on X because there is no sane way to run a tiling window manager in Wayland using proprietary Nvidia drivers. Sucks because Hyprland is pretty cool, but I am not willing to put up with whatever stupid bullshit is necessary to use it and have access to CUDA.

benterix 2y ago

Am I the only one who gets mildly annoyed by the plural in the title? Singular would be just fine - true, precise, without any vague implications.

dabber21 2y ago

Didn't Gnome want to do add tiling? https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/07/26/rethinking-window-management/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/07/26/rethinking-windo... (hn link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880235) whatever happened to it

TrevorFSmith 2y ago

Fedora has a Sway spin that installs all of the usual applets like volume and network config. Sway can also be installed on any Fedora machine with one dnf command. I just don't have the problems described in the article.

perakojotgenije 2y ago

Quicktile: https://github.com/ssokolow/quicktile https://github.com/ssokolow/quicktile https://ssokolow.com/quicktile/ https://ssokolow.com/quicktile/ Nobody is mentioning it but it is such a great tiling manager, I use it all the time. Just select the window with alt-tab and then tile the windows with Ctrl+alt+numeric keyboards. It's quick and it doesn't need a mouse to tile windows. And it can integrate into any x11 windows manager.

ensocode 2y ago
Cool, thanks a lot. Was looking for something like that without the need of gnome. Works great with XFCE and there is even a maintained package in AUR for the archers.

mgaunard 2y ago

The main applications that I use are a web browser, a terminal, and a text editor. Both my terminal and my text editor support tiling natively, and I assume there are extensions for my web browser to do the same. I'm not sure adding this complexity at the window manager level is really that useful.

Animats 2y ago

I would settle for console windows having a border. I hate that on Ubuntu, when two console windows overlap, there's no visible boundary. That's just stupid.

gigatexal 2y ago

They exist. It’s the one and only reason I use Linux is I fell in love with i3 and now Sway. They’re not just good for terminals. I do like me some tmux but I find tiling and stacking and all the glory of a titling window manager the best part of desktop Linux.

supercheetah 2y ago
I would say those aren't really desktop environments. They provide the bare minimum for window management and compositing, but not much more. Desktop environments encompass much more than that, like managing file type associations, and protocol handling.
- gigatexal 2y ago
  Some users might need that. And even expect it. I don’t need it. I know the tools to open the file types or XDG is configured with default apps.

evnix 2y ago

If your desktop environment requires me to click twice instead of once to switch or choose between two instances of chrome. Then I know you only care about the cool factor and is not going to be a great UX. Stop asking me to use alt+tab and cycle through windows like a caveman or ask me to setup workspaces like its 1980. "Stinky smelly nerds" seem to forget about large touch screen monitors and VR devices and that all icons can fit in one stretch of wide screens.

taeric 2y ago

I like tiling well enough. What surprises me is that I don't have an easy way to script different window setups. Would love to be able to press a function key and have it put specific windows on my various monitors, with overflow placed on a new desktop.

th0ma5 2y ago

PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM is very neat and I've been using it for a while

qwertox 2y ago

I like it how it is on Windows 11, with 6 zones (tl-l-bl and tr-r-br, where t=top, l=left, and top and bottom target that quarter of the monitor while the middle targets the entire height of that side) and maximize/unmaximize windows by dragging the title bar to the center top of the monitor. Then, in addition to this, with Actual Window Manager, map two layouts (2|2, 3|3, so 4 "panes" or 6 panes) via shortcuts where the dragging of the title bar shows these panes as targets for the window to pull it in when pressing shift at the same time. And with Ctrl-Shift Z or X I select one of the two layouts. The 2|2 and 3|3 layouts are useful if I want a grid of terminal windows on the monitor while Windows's native features are good to move windows around quickly. The benefit of having multiple terminal windows in a grid vs one tiled terminal is that I can pin selected terminals to the foreground. I wouldn't want a desktop environment to generate layouts automatically for me, unless it can see what I'm doing and ask me if it should switched to a layout it proposes to me through a preview image on the display.

YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
Mnyeah, for me the Windows 10 tiling was just right. In Windows 11 it's way too fiddly. Like every time I tile a window say to the left half of the screen (WIN + <-) it brings up every other window as an option to tile to the right half even if I already have a window tiled there. There's other fiddlyness but I can't be bothered now. I need to make a list so I can kvetch properly about it, with bullet points and all. And references. But overall I'm sorry to say even Win 11 is still better at tiling windows than almost anything I've tried on Linux (I had Xmonad on a laptop way back when and that was actually quite good). Though of course there's always text mode with Midnight Commander so :P

jethronethro 2y ago

Need? Or is is simply a matter of some people just wanting them?

MainlyMortal 2y ago

I think what most people, including tiling people, would actually want without realising it is Divvy (macOS)/gTile (gnome)/PowerToys (Windows). A regular floating window manager but you can move any floating window into a tiled window based on a grid of potential locations. It's hard to explain in words but look any of them up and it's the best no-compromise solution for everyone.

DrDeadCrash 2y ago
I can confirm for power toys on Windows, I find it essential for making use of multiple 4k screens.
- MainlyMortal 2y ago
  It's honestly the best of the lot but slept on in these parts because of being Windows only. KDE started to clone this as a native feature but it seems to be abandoned. Story of linux I guess. I really, really can't recommend PowerToys enough.
amarant 2y ago
Not so! I'm sure they're great for a bunch of usecases but they don't fit mine, which tbf is probably not very common. I've got an ultrawide monitor, 32:9 aspect ratio, and I like to have three columns, with the middle one being basically 16:9, and the right being fairly narrow, so that the left can be somewhere perhaps slightly wider than 4:3. Regular tiling positions aren't flexible enough for that
- wongogue 2y ago
  Powertoys FancyZones can do that.
  - amarant 2y ago
    Ah, but that's on windows, which rules it out for me
2y ago

zamalek 2y ago

I agree to an extent. Very often people/users ask for things based on what they know because it's hard to imagine what they need. Solving that's really the essence of UX/product management. I don't think a tiling DE is what is needed. Based on my experience, there are some core issues to resolve here: * The notion of a running apps area (dock, taskbar) seems to be essential for users. * Users (myself and people I know) typically have one application maximized at a time. The exception would be when cross-app interaction is required (drag and drop) or when it really makes sense to have multiple apps visible at once (terminal + editor). * When users have multiple apps open, there's typically a pattern to how they accomplish this. * Virtual desktops are hard. You have to dedicate congition/memory to what is running on which desktop. * Most users don't want to spend hours learning+editing config files to get something basic working (i.e. the article is definitely correct about having a DE vs WM here). I consider something along the lines of this to solve all the above: * Typical DE goodies. * An infinite canvas, not virtual desktops. * Presets for window placement, i.e. fancy zones[1] that can be placed anywhere on the infinite canvas. * The camera (current view rectangle) can be translated and scaled/zoomed. Zooming would effectively be alt+tab. * Camera position presets - these would be analogous to virtual desktops. They can be any shape or size, and can overlap. The idea here is that you could have one camera focusing on your editor fancy zone, and another focusing on the editor+terminal. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzones https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...

kkfx 2y ago

We do have some tiling WM, not DE ok, but still enough. Casual users who want DEs are typically former Windows users who have no idea about tiling concept and current sorry state of GNU/Linux DEs it's definitively not good to teach anyone anything except instability, arrogance etc. Bold terms, I know, but the right terms IMVHO when we talk about Gnome or Kde DEs now. Tiling is VERY good for a PROPER desktop, but actually we miss a proper desktop for the masses, we have Emacs/EXWM, but most X11-based apps can't be sane, proper desktop apps being simply widget based or WebVM-based apps. A proper desktop app is something easy to bend by the user, flexible, automatable, not a rigid tool where the user can't do much more than clicking around and have only cut/copy/paste IPCs and even very limited.

lsh0 2y ago

notion, the fork of ion3: https://notionwm.net https://notionwm.net https://github.com/raboof/notion https://github.com/raboof/notion

lofaszvanitt 2y ago

Linux's biggest problem is the multitude of options in every space, all unique, none of them recognises existing systems that work well and none of them borrow the working solutions from the predecessors. Everyone has to offer some mind bending individual solution that are mostly useless. All of these are centered around the heavy gravity of egos that created them. That's why gimp and krita is unusable compared to PS. Watch in awe as the real peepz, who know what works and what not will sweep these fn abominations out of this space when the Linux Desktop's usage stats will climb above lets say 10%... and they will be cheeky enuff to ask money for it :D.

rburhum 2y ago

I have been wanting to look into tiling managers, but I was always putting it off because of tasks I had to do. I read this post, and it made me look into how to use the default tiling manager of my current distro (Using Kubuntu and Plasma). It literally is Cmd-T, pick a default layout (the upper right area has some default ones, too), and then whenever you want to tile, just shift drag the window and it will snap. Been using it all day and I love it. The article does not talk about this one, but man, glad it made me wonder about it.

replete 2y ago

Anyone else smell ChatGPT in this article? This article is calling for something to happen that already is happening. I just came back to the linux desktop and I'm pleased to discover I can pretty build features I like into a normal desktop environment through GNOME extensions. It's unfortunately quite fragmented still at the moment, but looks very promising. I think once COSMIC lands and more people use it we'll see even more of this extensible desktop rather than the all-in elitist desktop approach. It's already there to be honest, but it's hidden in plain sight. And of course if you want to be a cool kid there's hyprland

jrm4 2y ago

It's true that we don't need more distros. It's also true that we don't "more tiling." We can use more Window Managers maybe. We sure as hell don't need more Desktop Environments. What we've always needed is more modularity. (and instead, we got Wayland, which in practice was mostly the opposite of that)

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago

Shoutout to cortile at https://github.com/leukipp/cortile https://github.com/leukipp/cortile which is an app that you install on top of lxde, xfce, gnome etc and enables tiling features. Great alternative to a fulm blown i3wm when ypu are sharing the computer with less savy users

diegolas 2y ago

sounds like a really niche requirement to make such a strong statement. if there are no more tiling desktop environments it is because there are not enough users for them to be in such demand.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago

I use most of my apps "full screen" and tab rapidly between them. Very rarely, I use 2 windows side by side. Most of the times I use 2 screens. I do agree that tiling is better than floating, but I think full screen with good alt tab/virtual desktop is even better

tracker1 2y ago

I really like the direction of System76/Pop/COSMOS is going with this. You have free floating windows along with tiling and multi-application tab views. Add in app location pinning and you've pretty much got all the bases covered. I'm not sure about their light/dark + accent color(s) though, I do hope they (re)generate the icon suite for the color though, at least for system directories and primary apps. I'm also slightly concerned with tray icons/apps, which hae a few different API/formats already.

eternityforest 2y ago

I always think I should probably try out having multiple things in the screen at once, but... I usually forget that feature exists when I'm actually working... I'm kind of amazed by a lot of programmers, it seems like they have multiple threads running in their mind at once, writing code while also optimizing their workflow and laying things out on the screen and keeping track of where different things are, all often while generating ideas for how tools could be better.

hulitu 2y ago

> Linux: We need tiling desktop environments man fvwm2rc

cassepipe 2y ago

I work from my laptop and the smallish screen makes tiling unattractive/overkill. I much prefer a very quick way to change windows which most DEs make surprisingly more difficult than it should be. I use Cinnamon because it's basic yet customizable enough (you can't remap changing windows in both directions in GNOME). I set up Super + J/K to change windows (and turned off animations for that). If using too much windows, I know Super + 1/2 will always be the navigator/terminal (order in pinned apps in the panel)ot I use Ctrl + J/K to change terminal tabs so I can always switch between $TERMINAL_EDITOR and the shell/gdb/etc. I use vim's buffers for the editor and Shift + J/K to move through tabs (I use fuzzy find option when there is many buffers) I use vimium (Shift + J/K) in Firefox to go through tabs (although the Ctrl + L + % feature is great to move between tabs.) It's consistent enought that I dont' forget about it and thus use it

hulitu 2y ago

> Linux: We need tiling desktop environments ? I heard there are some.