We do have them.
Most popular DEs already support tiling with extensions (Gnome and KDE).
KDE actually added native support, although pretty limited so far.IMO the tiling support in KDE and with gnome extensions does not look great. It cannot replace someones workflow that has been on a true tiling window manager. It is a benefit to those that have been using floating window managers for their whole life but I cannot now go back to them. Cosmic is the first desktop environment that looks like it has true tiling support (that can rival a tiling window manger) and not just drag a window to a side/area of the screen. Though I have yet to really try it out.
This. It’s not well-advertised in KDE – I accidentally discovered it through a key combo – but it was good enough (i.e., Win 11-level) in KDE 5 to make the switch painless on desktop. Where both have issues is apps insisting there are arbitrary dimensional minimums for functionality and refusing to adhere to positioning. This is most egregious in messaging programs.
On KDE you can try out Polonium, which integrates with the native tiling support and makes it awesome!
I’m currently using KZones, actually, it’s not automatic, but it works pretty great.
https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite
This looks quite nice as well
If you’re still on X11. Krohnkite didn’t support Wayland all that well last time I checked.
Makes sense. I am using Bazzite, and while it uses Wayland by default, I saw that some games refuse to run on Wayland (F.E.A.R 2 in my case). So I just went back to X11.
I want to like Wayland but it’s making it difficult for me. Oh, I am using Nvidia, so that could be a reason as well.
Heh, I was confused because I switched full-time to Wayland a while ago and that was never an issue for any game… but then you mentioned Nvidia. RIP
I saw they switched recently to partially open source drivers, so hopefully it’s gonna be better for you soon.
Only the kernel module is open source, and it’s just a wrapper for closed source blobs.
In actuality the open source drivers just kill all support for the 10 series, and otherwise do nothing to fix Nvidia’s utterly fucked up driver problems.
I got this card for free so didn’t really have a choice. My next purchase will highly be an AMD GPU, unless Nvidia does some magic (which I highly doubt)
After I switched and got used to a tiling WM, it’s really painful to have to use a floating one.
Cosmic in 2 years?
Cosmic - both the GNOME extension and Epoch 1 - is my favorite tiling DE. It just makes the most sense to me, in a way that no other tiling environment has.
Or: Tiling Window Manager distributions instead
I think what this guy need are more distributions with a pre configured setup of a tiling window manager, like a desktop environment. Some distributions have such i3 spin in example. I wouldn’t mind if we had more of those. It would definitely make it easier for people to try or get into one. Such as the theme and their applications, shortcuts and widgets setup in a consistent way to all their other desktop environments.
Before I switched to EndeavourOS, I was a Qtile user. Back when EndeavourOS still had a community maintained Qtile spin, I thought to myself, why not? So I tried it. What can I say? It was Qtile, but with all the stuff that makes up an EndeavourOS. It was ready to use. I still reconfigured a few stuff, but it was a nice and pleasant experience right from the start. It was an eye opening experience, in which I believe such a tiling window manager spin makes sense.
Switching a whole distro is an extreme way to try out a tiling window manager. It would be far better if desktop environments supported it so it is a simple toggle a user can turn on or off and not having to upend everything to get into.
It’s not an extreme way at all. I was thinking along the lines like testing in a virtual machine in example. Also one does not have to switch whole distribution each time they try. Installing a distribution is often easier than installing the tiling window manager and configuring it hours and hours, finding out details how to do stuff, to get it into a state that is comparable and styled the same way as the other distribution spins.
This dos not mean one has to use that, you are still free to install and configure it from scratch. Some distributions have it and its great.
I have been working on a Wayland Tiling WM and have thought about expanding more into the DE space. While it’s finally starting to get to a good spot, it’s pretty daunting to consider all of the other items that need to be developed for a fully-featured DE. Especially when it’s something I’m doing as a side project after my day job. I think for anything bigger it’d require financial backing, for which open source projects are still struggling to find a good solution.
Couldn’t tiling just be done with an app like how PowerToys FancyZones does it on Windows? That way anyone could just install it when wanted.
Those always feel like a half baked hack when compared to a true tiling window manager. At least all the ones I have tried on my work mac I have not found any that are good enough and all have weird edge cases or break in weird ways.
It would need some sort of way to hook into the compositor. PowerToys has it easy because they can just add the necessary APIs to the Windows compositor if it doesn’t already have them. And I feel like compositors would just implement it directly instead of designing an API for it because that’s less complex.
I want a good tiling DE solution so much. I really hope COSMIC will fill in that gap.
