1d ago

So I tried windows tiling...

And omg! I have slept on this feature for so long. I assumed it was just dragging windows to corners and they snap on to the left or right back or top. Then, I installed PopOS and saw an explicit button to turn on windows tiling but I was already using the drag function, so I was confused. I turned it on and omg! I have not felt more stupid and happily surprised by a piece of tech in a while. It just works. I don’t have to be worry about arranging windows a special way for multitasking or for following guides. So much time saved.

How to make the most of it? Have you had a similar experience with something?

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is there a good video demonstrating it? I use Cinnamon on Linux Mint and want to know what I'm missing out on.
- You can use gtile on mint. It’s in the extensions settings
  
  TIL. Thanks
  
  Does that auto tile though?
- I believe pop does a river style tiling system. Look up videos on Niri, Cosmic, or PaperWM.
  There are many other tiling types too. River is however my favorite and I think most intuitive. Other popular ones are Sway, i3, and HyprLand.
  https://youtu.be/_q8j70wY8wo
- Honestly I am new to this, so I could not find anything for it. But I think YouTube will have a video or two.
- There exists a ton of youtube content creators showcasing all the tiling window managers. It's like one of the most popular topics for linux enthusiast content creators.

I installed I3 a few times. I did not get it and I was to lazy to look up how to use it. Somehow your post made me install it again. This time I took that moment to look up how to use it. Less than 15 min later I found myself banging my head against the wall. Should have looked it's usage up the first time I installed it. This is what I need like 70% of the time. THNX!
- Lol. Same thing happens with me. I always install a popular software, immediately find it unintuitive and badly designed, uninstall it. Then I install it again in a few days, weeks or months and then learn how to use it. Then I rarely uninstall it.

I started with pop!_os and still use it (though now with a proper TWM on top), and I can't go back to a non-tiling desktop honestly lol. I can't wait for COSMIC to come out as even in alpha that's my favourite tiling experience
- Which TWM? What is the advantage over the default one?
  
  I've tried out a bunch, but at the moment I've mainly been playing around with hyprland, cause it's also a dynamic tiler and im used to that layout now
  The main advantage to me tbh is that certain windows don't overflow the assigned tile space like in pop-shell (this is also fixed in cosmic), but there are other things like having all your move/resize actions on the main mod layer instead of needing to enter adjust mode (super + enter is the default keybind on pop-shell), and the fact it uses wayland instead of x11
  Of course there are also things that can be downsides depending on how you see it, like the fact it's a TWM not a desktop, which means if you want to adjust any setting you'll need to manually adjust config files, and that it doesn't come with things like a top bar or app launcher etc. So it can take a while to get up and running
- You do not use TWM, do you?
  
  Not quite hah :3
  It's actually not one of the things I've tried when looking for the best DE/WM for me, though I might at some point just to see if im missing out on anything

You could try also:
GNOME PaperWM, a GNOME extension with tiling and endless horizontal scrolling
niri
StumpWM, a tiling WM with Emacs-like keybindings (and zero eyecandy and waste of screen estate)
HerbstluftWM
- Yup, came here to mention PaperWM. I used xmonad in the past, but I executed it on top of Mate to have an "easy" desktop environment.
  Nowadays Gnome extensions providing tiling is the equivalent "easy" method. Gnome is not for everyone, but it works out of the box- then you add the fancy tiling window management on top.
  For people who have bounced off systems that require much more set up, I think they are a good option.

Yeah, it was a revelation when I discovered tiling. I was always doing work with two windows open, and i'd spend so much time fiddling and resizing the windows. Then i'd open a third window and wouldn't know what to do with it.
I used i3 for many years and switched to sway when migrating to wayland. It does what I need and see no reason to try hyprland or other tilers.

I was using mint and found Gtile, I loved it, now I've moved to Fedora (KDE Plasma) and can't get anything as good as Gtile :(
- I use this for KDE tilling https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite
  Edit: It is the active fork of krohnkite, the official repo is dead since 2022.

Well I recently tried Niri, a scrolling window manager and felt the same.
- Sounds interesting. It is a whole new world
  
  Yeah. I have been using tiling managers for years now but if you tile too much on a single workspace, you make windows too small as you run out of space. Niri allows you to extend the same workforce by scrolling sideways or down, so you can keep windows organized like you want in the same workspace.

I've used i3wm for a long time now before switching to hyprland. The top useful thing: Workspaces. Even without tiling, workspaces give a massive productivity boost. You can have email clients open on one, monitoring systems on another, browsing on a third, gaming on a fourth. When you combine with tiling, everything is in its own perfect space and nothing overlaps. This is especially useful on single-monitor or laptop setups as you don't need multiple monitors to keep track of everything.
I also see people struggle with notifications tiling. You probably don't want a bluetooth connected message to take up half your screen, so you'll want to make sure to properly configure those things. At least in i3wm/hyprland, you can use the window class name to exclude a window from tiling (ex. for_window [class="mako"] floating enable or windowrulev2 = float,class:^(mako)$).

How to make the most of it?
Use workspaces, I almost never used it before because I was set in my ways, but after switching to tiling WM it's a must and increases productivity by a LOT, I've grown so used to it that using windows with a mouse feels super clunky and cluttered.
- I have tried using workspaces on Mint (without tiling) and it felt decent. PopOS has a different philosophy about workspaces which I feel makes more sense with tiling. I will give it a shot.

I don't know how anyone does anything with tiling windows. They must all be sooooo small...
- You don't usually have them all open at the same time, you minimize some. Or maybe you add more monitors.
  
  So you never have >2 windows open?
- At most I have about 3 windows open at a time per workspace with 4 workspaces being used at a time for specific tasks. With the combo of tiling and workspaces I have never run into an instance of "clutter" on my desktop. This is off a single monitor setup too that I also use on my laptop.

Buy a large 4k tv (like 48"+) to use as a monitor and use it without scaling. It'll have similar DPI to am average 2.5k monitor, but you'll have way more real-estate.
Window tiling lets you break the large display surface up into reasonably sized pieces.

People keep praising twm like a hidden secret. I have tried this multiple times without much attraction. I do not understand something. Maybe everyone has 21" screen.
- I have 19" screen. It saves time, especially when you open a tab for minute, then minimise it.

Do popup window notifications also tile? I have a problem with those sometimes appearing under a window and I never see them.
- Most tiling window managers still have floating window capabilities, and notification popups will be on top of tiled windows.

@npdean I used bspwm for some time and really enjoyed it coming from xfce. I also felt a bit stupid to have moved windows around manually.
Briefly tried hyprland and sway.
Currently I am in love with niri.
- Tiling WMs are incredibly powerful tools for boosting productivity. Over the years, I've tried several: awesome, i3, and dwm. Eventually, I settled on bspwm, which I’ve used for years. It offers far more than you'd expect from a traditional tiling WM—especially thanks to its excellent IPC. That’s why I couldn’t switch to Wayland for the longest time—none of the available options came close to what bspwm gave me.
  But just two days ago, I discovered niri, and it completely changed my perspective. It felt like the first time I ever used a tiling WM—like a whole new world had opened up.
  Niri fits into the same category as bspwm but takes window management even further. It introduces infinite horizontal scrolling, a novel approach that complements traditional tiling layouts. Combined with a robust IPC (something essential for my workflow), niri allows you to arrange windows dynamically in ways I’ve never seen before—including tabbed layouts that act as a vertical counterpart to its horizontal scroll.
  Here’s a short video that only scratches the surface of niri’s potential, but it’s enough to spark your imagination about how customizable and flexible it really is. Personally, I’m deeply grateful to the developers for giving me a reason—and a way—to finally switch to Wayland. I had been desperately waiting for a reliable, robust, and fully-featured tiling WM for Wayland—and what I got was a unicorn I never even imagined.
  
  I'm seeing several peeps mention Niri and it's causing me to get excited when that Niri config finally gets merged into CatchyOS. I've been waiting for so long for some distro to adopt it. Though, I would of preferred an image based, immutable and atomic distro, CatchyOS Will do. (I tried NixOS but something wasn't working for me)

Pop OS tiling is awesome. What I always try to do on tiling WM: set workspaces and spawn specific applications on specific workspaces. Not sure if Pop OS can do it, but on i3/dwm/sway...etc. you can freely spawn your applications wherever you like.
Try to play around with those DIY tiling environment. You will have a lot of fun if you like tinkering with stuff. Maybe one day you will run EXWM
- Yes, I am trying it out. I get it doing what I want for the most part (mostly basic stuff).

Windows Tiling is just having specific zones or regions defined on the screen where windows can be placed or configured to open in, correct?
I should try it out. There is a part of me that wonders if it would be worth it on a 1080p 15in laptop screen.
- I don't know anymore. I used to think the same thing but then Popos does it automatically.

I was going a long way, until I built a perfect AwesomeWM configuration for myself, and have not changed it for a while now. I am willing to switch to Wayland-based solution now, as it seems to be a bit more performant, but I just can't make myself to do it: my config is really cozy and working
- I love Linux. You can do this and there is still room for change. I hope some day I too make such a custom thing.

I really like using the PopShell extension on Gnome. I'm hoping it doesn't die out when Pop moves to their new Cosmic DE. So far I still prefer Gnome.
- They will probably gradually change things. A sudden change to the DE can be jarring and confusing to most beginners (to whom it is marketed)

Neigsendoig (my producer) and I have used i3 for a while... and we've probably stayed on that since we first started using WMs.
That said, we've attempted the likes of Xmonad (configured in Haskell), Awesome (configured in Lua), HerbstluftWM, BSPWM, Hypr (not Hyprland), JWM, Ratpoison and even SXWM.
Neigsendoig and I wouldn't recommend any Wayland compositor due to new security risks (despite an attempt to fix X11 security issues), though a lot of people want Wayland to be shoved down our throats. We personally use X11 due to many things that Wayland devs can't/won't fix.
This is also part of the reason why the two of us are excited about XLibre (as much as some will hate the control of IBM, GNOME and FreeDesktop with their Wayland, Systemd and PipeWire push). Sure, its main developer left the project from what we've heard, but otherwise, there are a lot of contributions to it, and it will improve big time.

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