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.
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.
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.
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 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’ve been using linux for about 20 years and have never used a tiling WM. What are the benefits?
Depends a lot on what you are doing. For programming:
much better use of screen real estate, more code fits on your display - you need to work less from memory
the above is even more useful if your vision is not perfect.
very fast switching between e.g. terminal and editor. This is very well suited for repetetive workflows like edit - compile - test - read documentation
good for keyboard-centered mode of work, like writing code.
good if you want several screens / workspaces for working on several somewhat separate tasks
For the record, I am using StumpWM, a manual tiling WM. If it isn’t available, I prefer i3wm (or sway) since it is standard. But I like the manual layout control more.
Most of the time, my workflow involves two or three terminal windows, my IDE and a browser. I spread them across three monitors, and tile them using the ctrl+super+arrow shortcuts in cinnamon. Am I basically getting the same thing?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Depends a lot on what you are doing. For programming:
For the record, I am using StumpWM, a manual tiling WM. If it isn’t available, I prefer i3wm (or sway) since it is standard. But I like the manual layout control more.
Most of the time, my workflow involves two or three terminal windows, my IDE and a browser. I spread them across three monitors, and tile them using the ctrl+super+arrow shortcuts in cinnamon. Am I basically getting the same thing?
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.