Fully featured tilling window managers (like DEs) for lazy people
Fully featured tilling window managers (like DEs) for lazy people
I love WMs but sometimes I wish there was also a fully featured WM (like a DE) for lazy people.
Because sometimes I can't be bothered customizing the configs and I would just rather have a slightly more bloated setup but with faster customization and some features out of the box without to much researching.
But in my perspective, in terms of work flow WMs are just the way to compute efficiently.
Do you have any suggestions of projects that might be out there that do fill this niche?
KDE plasma has a tiling feature and there's the System76 shell for Gnome. They both work, but I've always felt like they feel like an afterthought.
But System76 is currently working on their Cosmic Desktop, which promises cool tiling features with a desktop feel to it. Many people are quite excited for i. :)
Definitely going to keep my eyes on it 👀👍
The tiling feature in KDE is really subpar, to be honest.
Very interesting, but I do wish there was a equivalent but based on a dynamic tilling WM
Regolith + autotiling (https://github.com/nwg-piotr/autotiling)
You use the autotiling script to make i3 dynamic
I do not understand the mystique of applications that don't come with a reasonable working config. I don't want to invest hours just to try something and see if it is vaguely suitable. Anyone who wants to delete the default config can easily do so.
I guess people get pulled with sunk costs because by the time you get it working you've spent so much time on it.
When "reasonable" deviates on every major setting then it's not possible to provide a sane default. Both i3 and hyprland have example configurations - I have yet to see two identical configs in the wild.
You have it the other way around: it is aimed at people for whom there can't be a sane default because of the highly individual wants.
If you don't intend to adjust your environment to your workflow that's fine - there's KDE and gnome for a reason.
It doesn't matter if no one ends up with the same configuration. No one ends up with the same configurations on KDE or Gnome either. Having a reasonable starting place is courteous and doesn't diminish the experience for those who wish to delete it immediately.
But I guess it does serve some emotional needs for their communities. So I'm glad it's there for those who need it.
Could be the case 🤔, I think if there was a more accessible WM with no tinkering in config files needed we might see a bigger adoption to the WM workflow (cause it really is more productive)
For me this is Gnome with the pop shell extension. It's so much better than plain i3 in usability and just as good with tiling. Using i3 for years made me appreciate the value of a proper modern desktop environment.
i've used kde with bismuth for a long time. now it's dying... polonium is it's successor but still a long way ahead.
i have high hopes for cosmic
- there’s the “add tiling features to a DE” path – Pop Shell / Cosmic DE is the best known, but KDE has some pretty decent options and there’s a couple Python scripts (at various stages of readiness) for Xfce
- or the “add a DE to a tiling window manager” – Regolith is the best known here (basically swapping i3 for Mutter), but along those lines it’s “relatively” easy to swap out window managers in the desktop of your choice (i3 + Xfce being an easy choice)
If there was a regolith but based on river or dwl I would definitely do the switch, cause i do like a more dynamic tilling workflow compared to the manual tilling
Have you tried the PopOS DE? That may scratch what you're looking for
Cosmic DE right? I might give it a go and see how it goes 👍
Cosmic DE is currently in Alpha and not being used in Pop!_OS yet. ATM, Pop!_OS uses tweaked-out GNOME 4 with a custom tiling WM called pop-shell.
Cosmic will probably release with the next major release of Pop!_OS, which is usually just after the next major release of Ubuntu every April.
Are you asking for a gnome extension like g Forge https://github.com/forge-ext/forge or https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM ?
More like traditional dynamic tilling WM
There's wayblue https://github.com/wayblueorg/wayblue which sounds like what you want
After trying i3 and sway for a bit I've landed on just using Forge and Gnome. I really would recommend trying it. It's my daily driver for work.
It's a fully dynamic tiling solution and on top of a traditional DE.
labwc is the best wl wm I've tried
In KDE Plasma, Super + T brings up a built in tiling feature. It's super basic, but allows you to set static window snap zones on any display.
Each zone can be split horizontally or vertically, and you can adjust the zone-gaps to the exact pixel you want.
It's not dynamic as far as I know, but for me it's all I need.
Once you go back into regular desktop mode, you can use the zone snaps by holding shift while you drag a window. Releasing the window while holding shift will snap the window into the current snap zone it's closest to.
I came here to make a similar comment. In KDE just use.. I could swear it was ctrl+alt+arrow key but a quick search tells me it's meta+arrow key (currently on my phone) to tile windows if I want. Quarter or half sceen tiling works for me so I'm content with that. OP didn't specifically say dynamic tiling so perhaps one of these methods will be sufficient for OP?
I'll check out that tiling feature mentioned above, I wasn't aware of it and am curious!
Gnome with the gTile extension is quite nice.
Plasma lets you change WM: https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/Using_Other_Window_Managers_with_Plasma
I tried with bspwm and it works well, you can also disable Plasma's keyboard shortcuts if you want to use sxhkd.
Am important gotcha is:
Other window managers are only available when using X.org. These changes cannot be made for Wayland sessions yet.
Permanently Deleted
Once you get it set up hyprland is amazing.
If you want just boot your system and not have to worry about setting up keybindings, my best suggest is ArcoLinuxB i3 Edition and Garuda Linux i3 flavor, you really don't have to worry at all for that, and you can use the i3 reference card to learn the most common keybindigs.
For me the main config difficulty is from the statusbar. Polybar, Eww, are harder to config comparing to the WM. I solved that with Tint2 bar. It can be configured from an GUI, for the basics. The only code I added to config is simple.
execp_command = xdotool getwindowfocus getwindownameIt prints the window name on the bar. It is useful for bspwm windows.
I think most tiling WMs are more for the keyboard based workflows that are less discoverable for the casual user using someone else's config.
True, but it would be pretty nice to have a sort of KDE or gnome type project but WM style
As others have said, that's basically pop shell. Cosmic will be out of alpha at some point this year, but you don't need to wait for that to get started. I've been using pop os on my personal machine, and Ubuntu gnome with the pop-shell gnome extension for many years and it works great. Pretty much zero config and it is super easy to set up and get started.
I think gnome team said they were experimenting with tiling features. I'm looking forward to checking what they came up with.
I would recommend arcolinux hyprland
I think you can get tiling on both KDE Plasma and GNOME. I know it exists for Plasma but not sure about GNOME.
Sadly there is no way around it. The mentioned alternatives like regolith have already been mentioned. There is also some smaller distros with prepared twm configs, but I can't recommend it. Because if you want to customize it, you will have a hard time finding the right ways to do it.
Manjaro Sway.