I’ve been using linux for about 20 years and have never used a tiling WM. What are the benefits? What am I missing out on? My current daily driver is Mint with Cinnamon.
Years ago I had tried a tiling wm on a personal computer. It’s cool if you’re working with a lot of windows at the same time, also I like the idea of one workspace per software as it makes it very simple to switch from one to the other.
However, I never felt those to be a good fit for when I work. At work I need a bunch of software open and I always felt having actual windows to be a bit simpler as you can easily move them around. A tiling WM always splits your screen, so you have to be careful where you open software and be moving it around.
As such, I’ve been most time using KDE and have little complaints with it. Pretty much completely vanilla setup.
However, recently I have heard of sliding window managers. I decided to try as it appeared cool, just to play with it a little bit.
So far I’ve been using niri at my job for 4-5 months and I never felt I needed to switch back to KDE.
It makes it simple to split the screen like a tiling wm, but you’re not limited to the screen space and you can have more windows in the same workspace that you easily scroll through.
In the meanwhile you can have several workspaces and easily switch through them.
One simple thing it allows me to do is: two terminals splitting the screen vertically for local/remote and besides a full screen IDE for coding. I can easily switch to test locally, remotely and adjust the code as I am testing without having to alt tab and find the correct window all the time.
Give it a try, it’s pretty cool and quite simple to setup: it took me no more than half an hour to have the configuration I’m still using to this day using the noctalia shell. https://github.com/niri-wm/niri
Tiling WM is great when you love sitting upright at a desk all day and are crystal clear in the tasks you want to accomplish using only keyboard shortcuts for pure speed.
Me….i like slightly reclining, using one hand to navigate my mouse to do nothing productive.
never been a fan of them myself, but then i don’t sit in a terminal (or rather, multiple terminals) all day, either. those days are long behind me. i very much prefer a traditional stacking wm, and also one that remembers window geometry and locations, too–a trick windows has done since forever, but gnome and kde still require addons to pull off.
Eh, Windows still needs PowerToys (mainly FancyZones) for a better experience. I like around a 30/70 split between Windows Terminal (for PowerShell and WSL) on the left and some primary application like a browser on the right. It does have keybinds for shuffling through a stack of windows but only on the side that has focus. It still really needs a way to swap focus between zones that isn’t Alt-Tab’ing until you’re on the desired one or grabbing a mouse to click a program in another stack.
I wouldn’t say they are for everyone. Personally, I love them. Once I’ve learned about them, I just saw a better/faster way to use my computer. I use a dynamic tiling window manager, that way I just don’t have to think about placing windows, they are placed automatically in a pattern I want. They also can be quite lightweight.
There are many types of window managers, manual tiling, dynamic tiling, scrolling. I even saw a mouse focused WM at some point. In the dynamic tiling there are even more subdivision with the different layouts offered or the different way workspaces are.
I tried a few on X11 before chosing qtile, then moved to Wayland, tried sway, but was more into hyprland which is arguably the most popular one on Wayland. Now I have Niri on my laptop and Mangowm on my desktop. Mango is by far my favourite now. It combines dynamic tiling and scrolling. There are even plans to add manual tiling too. A jack of all trade.
I like it because even when i was still using windows i would always snap two windows next to each other, the tiling window manager takes care of that for me so the only thing i have to do now is just open my apps. That’s what got me into it initially, but now i also really like the keyboard driven workflow, and try to get as many parts of my system controllable with the keyboard as possible.
i would counter that customizing one’s desktop keeps more than a few users from switching (back) to something else. they enjoy it. let 'em do it. doing so will get them on the terminal at some point anyway and they’ll learn by doing.
Might be just my experience but what actually keeps people from switching is a proper support time line. Long-term and rolling releases can keep people using them for years after which they actually know what they want, what they can get used to and they don’t wanjt. Most distros however screw up something at the inevitable upgrade long before that, which then leads to “well, guess I could reinstall and try something else anyway”.
Fully understand your current distro/tools, before distrohopping/installing new stuff, so you know what you are looking for, instead of getting new things you don’t need.
Presentation is huge, at least for me. The thing that pulled me over to the Linux side was people posting screenshots of their tricked-out desktops with cooling-looking terminals. It made learning the terminal look fun, not intimidating.
Clickbait title. Anyone know what this is actually about?
My takeaways:
I’ve been using linux for about 20 years and have never used a tiling WM. What are the benefits? What am I missing out on? My current daily driver is Mint with Cinnamon.
Years ago I had tried a tiling wm on a personal computer. It’s cool if you’re working with a lot of windows at the same time, also I like the idea of one workspace per software as it makes it very simple to switch from one to the other.
However, I never felt those to be a good fit for when I work. At work I need a bunch of software open and I always felt having actual windows to be a bit simpler as you can easily move them around. A tiling WM always splits your screen, so you have to be careful where you open software and be moving it around.
As such, I’ve been most time using KDE and have little complaints with it. Pretty much completely vanilla setup.
However, recently I have heard of sliding window managers. I decided to try as it appeared cool, just to play with it a little bit. So far I’ve been using niri at my job for 4-5 months and I never felt I needed to switch back to KDE.
It makes it simple to split the screen like a tiling wm, but you’re not limited to the screen space and you can have more windows in the same workspace that you easily scroll through.
In the meanwhile you can have several workspaces and easily switch through them.
One simple thing it allows me to do is: two terminals splitting the screen vertically for local/remote and besides a full screen IDE for coding. I can easily switch to test locally, remotely and adjust the code as I am testing without having to alt tab and find the correct window all the time.
Give it a try, it’s pretty cool and quite simple to setup: it took me no more than half an hour to have the configuration I’m still using to this day using the noctalia shell. https://github.com/niri-wm/niri
Tiling WM is great when you love sitting upright at a desk all day and are crystal clear in the tasks you want to accomplish using only keyboard shortcuts for pure speed.
Me….i like slightly reclining, using one hand to navigate my mouse to do nothing productive.
never been a fan of them myself, but then i don’t sit in a terminal (or rather, multiple terminals) all day, either. those days are long behind me. i very much prefer a traditional stacking wm, and also one that remembers window geometry and locations, too–a trick windows has done since forever, but gnome and kde still require addons to pull off.
Eh, Windows still needs PowerToys (mainly FancyZones) for a better experience. I like around a 30/70 split between Windows Terminal (for PowerShell and WSL) on the left and some primary application like a browser on the right. It does have keybinds for shuffling through a stack of windows but only on the side that has focus. It still really needs a way to swap focus between zones that isn’t Alt-Tab’ing until you’re on the desired one or grabbing a mouse to click a program in another stack.
I wouldn’t say they are for everyone. Personally, I love them. Once I’ve learned about them, I just saw a better/faster way to use my computer. I use a dynamic tiling window manager, that way I just don’t have to think about placing windows, they are placed automatically in a pattern I want. They also can be quite lightweight.
There are many types of window managers, manual tiling, dynamic tiling, scrolling. I even saw a mouse focused WM at some point. In the dynamic tiling there are even more subdivision with the different layouts offered or the different way workspaces are.
I tried a few on X11 before chosing qtile, then moved to Wayland, tried sway, but was more into hyprland which is arguably the most popular one on Wayland. Now I have Niri on my laptop and Mangowm on my desktop. Mango is by far my favourite now. It combines dynamic tiling and scrolling. There are even plans to add manual tiling too. A jack of all trade.
I like it because even when i was still using windows i would always snap two windows next to each other, the tiling window manager takes care of that for me so the only thing i have to do now is just open my apps. That’s what got me into it initially, but now i also really like the keyboard driven workflow, and try to get as many parts of my system controllable with the keyboard as possible.
The creator believes the
“better way” to use Linux is to spend time learning how the distro and its package management works before customizing.
i would counter that customizing one’s desktop keeps more than a few users from switching (back) to something else. they enjoy it. let 'em do it. doing so will get them on the terminal at some point anyway and they’ll learn by doing.
Might be just my experience but what actually keeps people from switching is a proper support time line. Long-term and rolling releases can keep people using them for years after which they actually know what they want, what they can get used to and they don’t wanjt. Most distros however screw up something at the inevitable upgrade long before that, which then leads to “well, guess I could reinstall and try something else anyway”.
Terminal is good BTW
Fully understand your current distro/tools, before distrohopping/installing new stuff, so you know what you are looking for, instead of getting new things you don’t need.
Presentation is huge, at least for me. The thing that pulled me over to the Linux side was people posting screenshots of their tricked-out desktops with cooling-looking terminals. It made learning the terminal look fun, not intimidating.