I only tried a tiling WM for a few days several years ago. I am ok using the terminal but not everything can be done easily there. In the screenshots of people setups, there are always fancy terminals. Are tiling WM good also for other GUI a part from terminals?
TWM resize your windows automatically as you create windows or move them around. This is the key: TWM’s work best with applications that work well in a variety of sizes. Usually this means text based applications: terminals, IDE’s, browsers, chat apps, etc. GIMP for example didn’t really work well for me unless I used it on its own workspace. It comes down to this: how much of the time do you use text based applications? For me, that’s almost always. I rarely touch something that is not a terminal or a browser. For you it might be different. Good luck.
I don’t have extensive experience, but I have been using the tiling in pop os consistently for a year and have really found it to improve my productivity and oganization on tasks I need many windows open for. Its not perfect and I’m starting to consider looking for options that give me more layout control, but was an excellent first option. It has a toggle right in the task bar to switch between windows or tiling, but once I spent an hour learning the keyboard shortcuts for the filing, the windows mode just feels so slow to set up good layouts in.
check through the hotkeys of your current window manager – you won’t get the full dynamic features of a tiling window manager, but most of them have keys for snapping windows to top-half, bottom-half, left-half, right-half (as well as sometimes offering by quarter as well)
DistroTube argued that the killer feature of tiling window managers is the workspaces, not the tiling
non-tiling window managers can also have different workspaces, or even DEs such as KDE Plasma. IIRC even Windows has those (although with inconvenient keybindings imo)
I think they’re talking about the tandem of tiling and workspaces, as usually you can customize your tiling per-workspace. Some TWMs have tags instead of workspaces, making it even better.
Not at all. I use a tiling WM, and most of my time is spent in text editors or a browser. I just like having everything visible and spaced out automatically for me.
I think tiling WMs just have a lot of overlap with the terminal-heavy crowd. They tend to require some manual set up, and they tend to be very keyboard shortcut heavy. Both things also popular with people that tend to like using terminals.
Also keep in mind most screenshots advertising someone’s set up are to show off, not their regular workflow. It’s like looking at someone’s professional head-shots and wondering if they usually dress like that.
It can be used for other stuff. I use dwm and find that on occasion some programs aren't nice in dwm or don't work well. So, i suggest having both a tiling and a floating.
You might have some GUI nonsense happen, but for the most part you’ll be okay. I have exclusively used i3 for my Linux stuff over the past few years and have only run into a few problems with misc apps
In the screenshots of people setups, there are always fancy terminals.
Ha, they’re just showing off their hacker side for the screenshot, plus terminals resize nicely. Tiling window managers work well for most apps. The only GUI issues I’ve had are some pop-up windows being tiled instead of floating, but that’s an easy fix. They’re not for everyone, but they work great with GUI apps.
Yup. Main issues I’ve had are GIMP (seriously, what’s with that floating toolbar) and weird pop-ups in browsers.
I forget why I switched away from them because I was annoyed at games messing stuff up, but it really wasn’t that bad. I currently don’t use it because my kids use my computer and I’m not interested in teaching them my shortcuts.
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