Acutally yes! This is true! You've pinpointed exactly my system: r7 2700 w/ 32gb of ram. I was working today and noticed that my ram usage was a little high at 25 fucking GB... Because yes, I indeed have a few firefox tabs opened (usually under 10, I hate having a lot of tabs), well over 10 docker containers and a full Windows VM. Without the use of i3, my ram usage would be closer to 26 or 27. It's not THAT important now that I upgraded to 32gb at the start of the quarantine, but during the time that I didn't have the extra ram, i3 was a life saver. 1gb of ram can make a huge difference when you're nearing the top of your ram usage.
@@sagniknandi3781 oh fuck! I'll tell my job that they need to fire me then! I'm not good enough since I misread things sometimes! I must be lacking basic education then! But yeah, I'm sorry, I saw 16 and assumed threads because in my mind, the most popular choice (currently) would be an 8 core 16 thread cpu. Edit: Funny and ironic how you wrote 8 core **12** "thread" at first. I just hope your message was meant to be a joke.
What was your available memory? Just because programs are using memory doesn't mean that it's not available. That's really the only number that matters on Linux. The 'free' number is useless for most people because that even subtracts the drive cache, which is based on files you routinely access. However that is always available to other applications. Browsers will be the biggest hog and many times it's a garbage add-on that's leaking memory. WMs are drops in the bucket even with DEs as they don't really do a whole lot. But if going the WM route it's important to think of the entire software ecosystem that you use. If going with a basic vanilla, no composition, DWM setup and then have 5 tabs of YT open then minimalism was just some sort of virtue signaling. Also, these days in the post-Moore's law era, resources optimization is important. It takes more lines of code and implementing more tools to achieve better hardware optimization. Not that that's really a big deal for a WM as it just tells X what to do with windows (see the Xlib C library functions). At the end of the day, resource optimization is more complex than the recent Windows->Linux converts in certain Reddit subs and YT vlogers will have people believe.
@@krozareq available memory was 7gb. I made a custom script for my memory usage, one that uses the MemAvailable result from /proc/meminfo. To be honest, I don't really care about minimalism, I only care about removing as much bloat that I don't use as possible while not slowing down my workflow. For example, I love vim, but not for the minimalism aspect of it since I have over 80 plugins. I have Firefox as my main browser everywhere now, only 2 plugins: ublock origin and keepa (price history on Amazon directly added to the page). I also hate to keep tabs opened, but because of my work, lately I've had to have around 10 tabs opened at all times. The most demanding things on there are Jira and Bitbucket, for some reason they use a lot of memory. Im also running my Sql dev server on a separate dedicated server that I have. It consumes around 8gb of ram when it has been running for a while (although I believe that it has simply cached a lot of informations and wouldn't require as much ram if it was on my computer and therefore restarted every day). The fact that TWMs are less resource demanding is just a bonus for me. If i3 took more resources than gnome to run, I'd still run it.
This. When I first started using i3, I spent a few hours each day tooling with it. but now I only edit the config if I find a new program that I love to use and I just add a quick shortcut instead of dmenu-ing it every time.
A pretty good video, it's only "wrong" by the fact that tiling windows managers are to increase production in coding and data management, not necessarily audio/video production/consumption. Different strokes for different folks, gotta pick the best brush for the job and realize not everyone paints wet on wet.
I've my file manager locked to workspace 1 with window rules and the media players locked to workspace 5 and for one screen to switch to media 5 when (e.g) mpv is launched. Ideal for video consumption.
@@akza0729 I use Vim regularly for coding and sometimes for quick edits nano. Alternatively i use an GUI text editor called geany, which i run in VIM mode. Sooooo... i use VIM technically on daily basis. Just sometimes with an different painting on it. Specially when you work with servers, you should know how to code and work within terminals without the usage of an GUI (Depending on the servers). So it happens relatively often that you meet people in that area that work with VIM, in some cases even privately. And servers are the area in which Linux has the biggest usage share compared to windows, mac and others.
I can't live without tiling WMs now. Operating your entire computer with just the keyboard(aside from using a web browser) is so much more comfortable imho.
@@mitchelvalentino1569 Gnome leave so much of a footprint, I hate it. I'd love it if it didn't change every update and forces me to wait for extensions to work again. In the first place who the hell came up with the idea of getting rid of the system tray? My experiences with gnome were always like this and thus I'll stick to my i3 or if it has to be a DE I'd rather go XFCE.
I still don't entirely understand the hate for GNOME. It, KDE, and Cinnamon are the only DEs that don't look like they're from 2006, and they're considerably more lightweight on equivalent hardware than, say, Windows' native WM and macOS's Quartz compositing layer.
@@mitchelvalentino1569 "macOS especially becoming unusable on older hardware" That being SAID, older MacBooks handle pretty much any system that isn't macOS remarkably well. I've got a friend who thrifted an old black pre-unibody polycarbonate Dual-Core MacBook with a dead graphics card and got it to exclusively run Windows. It's fucking *insane* how well it runs on that thing.
@@mitchelvalentino1569 Oh shit, nice! What distributions did you get working on those machines? The reason I ask is: I've historically had trouble finding a Linux or BSD system that's optimized well for a Mac. I remember trying to install Debian on a 2012 MacBook Pro. I was able to boot into the live CD but not actually *install* it onto the machine? I suppose it's something to do with SIP or some other Apple DRM component, but I'm not entirely sure.
i use tiling window manager to keep my desktop experience fun! i get super bored with full-fledged desktop environments! tinkering with your system and customizing every little thing according to you is just so satisfying!
OlejkaLive after a lot of testing, girls are nowhere as fun as tiling wm’s. Really fun to interact with at first but get tiresome fast due to the amount of bugs and lack of customization.
I agree with you, for the most part. However, you need to consider couple more things. These twms are for developers and sysadmins and not for casual users. Imo, twms for casual and semi technical users would be purely nonsensical. For us, the developers, we do a lot of switching, showing-hiding, swapping, resizing while we work with the keyboard; and everytime reaching the mouse, finding the cursor and moving it can be not only annoying but also a bit more time consuming. I think, muscle memory on your own customization is the key defense for twms. After the initial hiccups and when adjusted, they actually bring faster experience.
This is true. I'm a developer and I'm enjoying i3 on Manjaro. I'm very productive and love that I barely touch my touchpad on my laptop anymore. I think also using twm on my laptop is another plus as sometimes I'm in a spot where I can't really use a mouse.
I'm not å developer. I'm just a casual user - but after more thañ 5 years on twm 's I hate every moment when I'm forced to use a regular DE. For me there are several reasons why I choose to stay on tiling. The tiling itself (The layout of windows) just makes more sense to me. I use bspwm so there are some automatic tiling schemes where windows will open in a predefined layout but personally I prefer to use preselect and manually decide where my next window will open and what split ratio I will use.Using the keyboard for everything have become normal to me. Window navigation is only one part of it - but open programs - move between workspaces and nodes - is really effective once its become muscle memory. And then comes all the aliases and functions we can add to our Shells rc file. Qutebrowser - tmux - rofi - dunst - and vim and I'm golden. Will install some other programs too - but the only time I leave a terminal is whenever I use a browser. If it weren't for those overdesigned websites that make you use a "real" browser - I'd probably never even need x. Tty would do just fine. Minimalism FTW 😁
Yeah, I've been using tiling with tmux for a while and recently started using i3 for when I'm doing software development or writing. tmux is great but twms allow for having documentation up in a browser or a preview up when writing with LaTeX. For text-centric work where you want to glance at a gui for documentation and previews, a twm is perfect. That some gui applications are harder to use can even be a benefit, as it makes me get less distracted. It's also easy to set up multiple types of sessions so you have access to different environments from your DM depending on what you want to work on.
I do see more and more that Tiling WM's are geared towards the power users and to that end the access to customization is greater than in typical desktop environments. And since this channel has a lot about Thinkpads, I want to say for me personally it has made me enjoy using my T430 far more. Coming from a full size keyboard with larger trackpad, it's taken some time for me to get used to the smaller T430 and its different mouse button placement. Awesome WM has been a great boon to that. A regular DE would have been harder for me ergonomically speaking.
Or you can use your desktop environment of choice (mine is Xfce) and swap out xfwm4 (or whichever window manager the environment is using) for i3 or you favorite tiling window manager to have the best of both worlds
@Game Over PopOS uses the Gnome desktop environment, not a window manager. Vit C said that Java and Wine have problems in every Window Manager, that doesn't include desktop environments.
also recently switched from arch + dwm to fedora + gnome + pop-shell and ive really been enjoying it. Coming from DWM I am missing some functionalities / customization but im not bothered by that most of the time.
Nah. You can't call it an actual take over until you start storing your hot sauce in your computer case and go around saying a lenovo laptop is the right laptop.
ironically, I thought most of the issue he mentions specifically AREN'T in i3. Except of course having to use keyboard shortcuts, but that's the whole damn point of using a TWM. If you actually think using the mouse is better, well first of all i'm sorry for you if you use the pc all day like that, but in that case obviously don't install a TWM.
I have been using i3wm for a 2 years (i am programmer) and i enjoy it. Most of a times I use it in home too :-) From your commentary, I conclude that watching this vlog, I will only waste time. Am I right?
@@GreyDeathVaccine YES. As long as you already enjoy it - don't waste time on this. :) He has some good points - but the only point that's important is if YOU like it or not.
As someone with multiple screens one of which is pivoted, tiling works like a dream, i3 is a huge improvement over anything I've ever used, no stacking environment really seems to understand what I want to do with my windows.
Stacking / floating window management is mostly a toy in my opinion. You can of course create nice marketing slides for Windows and MacOS with a lot of stacked windows showing, but useful, REAL work is done on the keyboard, not by doing toy like colourful button clicking.
The first time I saw a tiling wm was in those subreddits, and while yes, it look hella beautiful also all the apps that were running were pure cli apps, and the question rises "what if I want to use programs like Blender or Krita, pretty sure you can but there is no screenshot here with those" and that's were the magic broke
Here's what you can do with Awesome WM: ruclips.net/video/OoSts990-lY/видео.html And yes, out of the box you can run your GUI apps (like Blender or Krita or Gparted, whatever) in fullscreen. You can even work in floating windows mode (no tiling) if you really want.
Or you can assign these to a specific workspaces so they always open there and have a whole workspace for themselves (unless you open something on it) You can also move all windows between workspaces freely
@@xGOKOPx Yeah, good point. In my opinion if you are keen to invest some time in configuration of window manager it will be way more convenient (and less resource heavy) than full desktop environment. But everyone has different taste:)
I use tab mode for those apps, press MOD+w and it's basically like in Windows with fullscreen apps and tab bar, plus I can use the mouse to scroll between apps.
ah yes my productivity is increased by the stress i feel from needing to memorize hotkeys and navigate my tiles during finals studies, only because i realize in that very moment that something is artificially bottlenecking me and now i have to be hyper aware of what im doing.
1. That is actually a plus to me. It's nice to have a standalone window manager instead of a DE because I don't even want everything a DE would install. For example I even wish notifications were completely centralized so I could just make my whole system not support them. But there's always something bringing it's own notification engine. I don't want the DE to set my keyboard layout and do various other things that would clash with my standard Linux setup, like things that are run in my xorg startup script. If I wanted to use a DE with more features, it would be actually more complicated because I'd have to change things that I've done the same for years and years. Tasks would then be done by things the DE has included and if I wanted to change them I'd have to learn how to configure that module (probably a gui config but still). 2. You do have to learn how to use it a bit, but much more you have to think about what you want it to do and set it up to work like this. Make your computer learn your workflow, not the other way around. 3. IntelliJ and other IDEs works fine in tiling WMs. Writing rules is not a waste of time, manually placing windows where you want them (Some of them every day) is when you can have your window manager doing it. But in the end I don't use that many gui apps in Linux. But I didn't learn CLI applications because of Tiling Window Managers, I've learnt them becasue I like them being more punctual than GUIs. (You make a decision and issue a command rather than looking at what options the GUI presents to you and chose one, just like you didn't know what it was you wanted to do. Complicated GUIs actually cna make you forget about that though.) And I never had any shortcut conflicts because I use the Super Key as my mod key, and almost nothing else uses it. The super key is always mapped to something related to the window manager/DE, even in goddamn Windows. 5. Of course you can use the mouse, but what's really nice is having three different shortcuts/modifiers for the shortcut, one resizing the window just by a pixel, one by 5 pixels and one by 10 or 15 or something like that. But the real point not having to move/resitze windows that often in the first place. I have the same layout of windows on my screen every day. I don't just wake up and randomly put my cmus or my browser on a different screen or workspace than yesterday. Of course I don't use the same programs every day, but there is a goto layout for everything I use a computer for and it's usually seperated by workspaces. 6. Only thing that ever made problems was wine, and wine messes up in any WM. 7. Why would you need it when you can see everything already? To go cross-workspace? Just switch the workspace for half a second! 8. In which? It works out of the Box in i3 and dwm which are probably the most profic ones. 9. I think it's stupid to build something into a application that can be centralized. Interesting channel though, I may subscribe.
Reason no7: You can use 'rofi -show window' to get a list of all opened windows and switch to any window on any workspace. I use it to find a window when I have loads of windows opened, though this can be lacking a bit as it is text only, for instance usually all opened terminals will have title 'user@hostname', which can make it hard to find the window you want. Having a GUI overview of all opened apps would be very useful, perhaps would be a good project for someone to do.
Tiling Windows meant to be productive but in the end is just to show our coworkers how nerd we are to look cool. Ps: XFCE user and i sooooooooo productive with it. Perfect.
Programmer's point of view here, I'll go through all the points and explain why I love TWMs (more specifically i3, I intend to try others, but i3 works so well for my workflow that I haven't gotten around to doing it yet) :p DE = Desktop Environment (Gnome, KDE, xfce, cinnamon, budgie, etc.) TWM = Tiling Window Manage (i3, awesomewm, bspwm, xmonad, sway, etc.) 1- That's part of the fun. I hate feeling confined to what my DE gives me, I like being able to customize every inch of my setup. Weirdly enough, if I customize something myself (like setting up shortcuts), I'll remember them more easily. "While this makes the setup very portable, ..." Yeah, that's one of the big things. My setup has worked on all the distros I tried (in order from older to most recent: Arch (Antergos (rip)), Gentoo, Raw arch from scratch, Fedora, Debian (didn't get to install everything and already had issues, god I hate Debian based distros) and now OpenSUSE). 2- You learned to use your tools. GUIs are everywhere so you don't realize it, but if you lived with TWMs first, you'd make the same comments about GUIs now. And yes, I do indeed use the terminal for mostly anything that is not: Web Browsing, Chat clients (Discord + Slack but they have some good shortcuts so it's mostly fine) and my Windows VM. Video? mpv. File management? ls, tree, ranger. Music? mpd + nmcpcpp. Text editor? neovim. 3- GUI apps look like crap in a TWM because they're not meant to be there. Use something else. If you want to use mostly GUI apps, don't use a TWM, it's that simple. "You don't save any screen real estate" I started using TWMs because my laptop's screen was 15" @1080p. Most GUI apps have a lot of extra bullshit like window title, a fucking huge bar (or even 2 in some cases), maybe its own tab management. At the end of the day, if I can replace Chrome by Surf, I gain an insane amount of real estate. Then I replace my GUI based text editor by a more compact TUI one, then I learn to properly use the command line for most stuff and BOOM. I went from barely being able to fit 2 apps and sometimes being forced to have only 1 app running at once to being able to fit 4 apps and therefore 4 tasks at once on my small screen. 4- "Keyboard shortcuts" Well yes, but I'll end up learning a DE's keyboard shortcuts anyway. The only difference is that I didn't set them up, so they might not feel good and I might forget them easily. If I have an issue and configured my shortcuts and didn't save them somewhere, I'll lose time configuring everything again. As someone that switches distros a lot and reinstalls a lot, portability is really important. More so than ease of use thanks to a GUI that doesn't behave the same every time I use it. Also, I never had a single keyboard shortcut overlap with my TWM. But I always have some conflicts once I change to a DE. 5- "managing shore". I don't know, I never manage anything. I use a lot of workspaces instead which divide my work: general terminals, web browsing, programming related terminals, VM remote, chats, music player, email client. That's 8 workspaces already. Alt-tabbing that shit would be an horrible waste of time. 6- Ok? I've had some issues, but nothing groundbreaking tbh. I don't use TWMs for gaming, I still use Windows for that, so I haven't really looked at the situation in years. Linux gaming has come a long way, but it's still nowhere close to being ready (yes, I'm aware of dxvk, proton, lutris. I've tried them and was easily able to find some of my games didn't work). 7- App overview? Why would you want that, why not divide your work properly? Just in case I have a rofi configuration that allows me to have an overview of my current windows across all my workspaces. So that's a need that's already answered I guess. 8- PiP and Drop Down Terminals? I can pop out any window and move it around where I want. So that answers my need for the pip (firefox and opera also have a built-in pip that works really well for videos (at least on i3)). 9- I see this as a con for DEs actually: Why should the APP do the job of the Window Manager? If your window manager can have splitting and tabs, why should your apps have tabs? Then you end up with 10 different apps with 10 different ways of handling spliting and tabbing. That's not a good thing to me. Why can't the DE directly include that under its window title? Why does a window HAVE to only contain ONE instance of the app? Then I'll have to learn 100 different shortcuts (let's say 10 per app), which sounds weird and contradictory when you said that TWMs needed a lot of shortcuts. To conclude, use whatever feels right to you! If you feel more comfortable using a DE, go ahead! I've had a blast trying to use gnome every time I install a new distro, I really like it, but it still doesn't feel right to me.
agree with a lot of that but... debian tho... ive been using a debain based distro for the past 2 years since i first used Linux have i seriously been on the more problematic side of Linux?
also btw i use a tiling window manager called qtile and i use kde apps with gui cause that boosts my productivity a bunch honestly can't do anything without dolphin and as for the app overview thing you mensioned, i probably use the same rofi config nice
@@RenderingUser the fact that you even ask the question already means you have an answer. I've been using Linux for at least 10 years and switched to it for school and then work, so that would be around 6 years of pretty consistent use. Debian has never worked for me. I have terrible luck I think. But Debian, Ubuntu, PopOS, Elementary and another one that has Z in the name but that I never remember have always broken in a month. Even Arch has been more stable. And nowadays I use OpenSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed depending on what I need and recently switched to Nixos for my server. I'm of the opinion that it doesn't hurt to try something else, but at the same time, if you're not curious and don't have any blatant issue with Debian, the there's no reason to switch :p
@@DevilDead13820 well i dont really have any issue with distros im kind of really used to apt most my problems lie in window managers currently using qtile but im looking for better alternatives heard i3 was great so currently checking that out edit: decided to stick with qtile because python
I've never felt more demotivated to try a window manager after reading this comment. Recently I've started to feel like this pride to spend a bunch of time configuring things and learning this niche UX is just a waste of my productivity and time. I could easily become a better developer spending time developing than figuring out the perfect way to configure all the things and finding **the one** setup.
In all fairness, I've never given them much effort. With tiling built into most DEs (XFCE, KDE, etc...) I just don't see it being worth the trouble when I mostly use GUI apps. Not gonna go so far as to say they suck, but for my workflow, yeah... nah, I'm good.
Most wm can do that even wm in DEs, it's almost a standard. A Gentoo user didn't know that is blowing my mind. Nobody, literally nobody resize window in tiling wm like he mentioned in the video.
6:23 well this is just bs, I get more songs in my player list, I get more files on the screen if there are more files in the folder, my working area in inkscape is bigger, I get more settings in blender panels, I do less scrolling in browsing, there is no perfect window size. For most programs the bigger your screen the better. The point about the setup is good, we should have some kind of noob friendly desktop with tilling by default for not geeky users.
@@EdLrandom You can package i3 config with distros to make it easy but the main problem nobody ever seems to cover when talking about tiling window managers. the target audience. Which is not the user who is uncomfortable editing config files. Look at the mess regolith had with trying to change config locations in their i3 setup just confused those people who had been using i3 elsewhere.
@@EdLrandom I was wondering if using Blender with its quadrillion keyboard shortcuts makes configuring a suitable twm setup harder ? What wm are you using ?
@@parityviolation968 Funny enough I use gnome now (use to hate it a lot) but I been using i3wm for a year or so, I don't know why twm should be hard with blender, most key bindings I used in i3 involve a win key (I had both left and right win keys on my old keybord) blender does not use win keys.
Honestly, I won a lot in productivity with some tiling wm, and in fact you can use usual tiling wm with common DE (like KDE+i3), in which case it requires minimum configuration (see the arch wiki for an how to)
I disagree on the configuration portion. I love the way i3 is configured. Everything is in one easy to read list. Where as on gnome or another DE the gui settings are categorized in into different parts.
well, if you're more interested in installing desktops than actually coding something useless, creating something useful. Then a tiling window manager is perfect for you. It gives you this sense of accomplishments much more easily than trying to code something to solve a real world problem!
@@afonsosalbrecht I don't know what you mean by that. I use Qtile now and configure it by coding in Python. And in general, your argumentation seem not to make sense for me. Installing a Tiling Window Manager does not exclude coding and solving real problems. But if you feel a sense of accomplishment by not installing a software you like, then it is the way to go for you. To me, Qtile is one of the best things happened to me in recent years. It is really useful and is so much better than traditional window managers. I wish I had switched to such a tiling window manager earlier. Same goes for Vim as an editor. But that is another story for another time.
Just to correct you on one thing, you CAN easily resize the windows in i3 by hoding the mod key and click/drag as long as you're within about 200px of the border, so that works pretty well.
I'm a heavy keyboard user who mainly uses openbox and saw no major benefit when tried i3. Like you said your last segment, most of the useful functionality is present in stacking wms as well, especially if you take something customizable like ob and add some keyboard shorcuts to manage window locations (namely moving active window to the next window border on screen in a certain direction)
Let’s be honest. Tiling window manager is the new ‘arch linux’ if you know what i mean. Most people use it just so they can feel superior (which is ridiculous). The moment they make tiling window managers more accessible and easy to configure, these guys will move on to their next difficult thing.
Basically all the reasons I moved away from tiling WM. There is one big thing that is missing from this video, that is a big reason I moved away from wiling window managers: Sometimes (often) the best use of screen space is to have windows overlap. Most GUI applications have some parts of it's UI that you don't need to use for the most part, and can be obscured by another window just fine. This allows the other window to be bigger, and gives you more space for the parts that actually matter. This is trivially supported in stacking window managers. Another reason: low resolution screens (1366x768 screens should be banned in laptops...). Aside of terminal, most thinks just become too small in at least one dimension. All those meant that I effectively ended up with all windows stacked, each in separate workspace, with the exception where I needed 2 windows visible at once. Which is just easier with stacking window managers, and you don't feel restricted by your window manager when you want to do something slightly different.
@Rafael Lopes Except that floating windows are always above all non-floating windows. Resizing them is also not as easy as with standard WMs. And there is just no point using tiling WM if I'm going to be constantly switching to floating mode.
Nigga I'm on a 1024x768 monitor and I can tile 3 different applications comfortably. If an application needs more space just put it in another workspace.
For a general user, perhaps wm are not worth it, but for a developer/sysadming they definitely are. Yes, they require investment, but it is a concept of investing time to save time later, and you do save time and more importantly your brain effort. Constant context switching between mouse and keyboard takes it toll and makes getting in the flow much harder (which is paramount for developers to get a job done). For me it took about a month or so to get into WMs and choose the proper one. I started, unsuprisingly, with i3 and in the end stopped at dwm, because the basic concept of it's tiling system is very much what i need. It took me around month or two of small tinkering with it in background to get a set up that i like and didn't touch wnything since (excvept changing colorscheme a couple of times). Not only do i have anything i need at a distance of a couple of keystrokes, i can create this setup on any machine in terms of minutes (depending on download speed). I it already came handy several times. In browser i use keys too mostly, it least when i'm at work, cVim is pretty good (though sometimes a bit buggy).
Also, for people who are more familiar with cli tools, WM are definitely a much better choice. Same concept of investing some time to learn the tools, to save time when doing your job.
I think you are missing a point about keyboard and mouse. The goal is not to NEVER use the mouse, but to avoid constantly switching between keyboard and mouse, because context switch for a brain is a pretty expensive operation and breaks the flow of the work, which makes you tire faster. That is also the reason of why i use vim and not some gui IDE.
Nice video, really like how you pointed weaknesses of tiling WMs. However, I'm still on i3 because I use tiling very rarely: all my apps are fullscreen and i switch them like tabs with mod left mod right. Super convenient, and honestly most apps are best fullscreen anyway. And multimonitor support is really great in i3. Also, you mentioned mouse centric apps contrast - my most prevalent app in this department is Chromium. This one has cVim extension, which gives me OPTION to control with keyboard. With this setup, everything flies so fast. Ticket in browser, terminal to fix, ticket reply, new ticket, terminal ... All with keyboard, bam bam bam - done :)
5 years later and still 100% relevant. Tried awesomewm today, firefox pop out player doesn't work, it will tile with other windows instead of going in front of them, so you literally can't watch a video while working on anything. We're in the age of AI, computers once the size of a room can now fit in our pocket, and they can't muster up a draggable window, and this is better than KDE or Gnome? Window rules didn't fix it at all or made things even more broken. Then tried to be able to manage folders, not a single file manager exists that supports both hjkl keybindings and graphical folder previews). Literally the most common thing to do with a computer doesn't integrate with them. "If you don't like them then don't use them" Yeah well every major Linux community is filled with people who both use them and subsequently make the people around them feel inferior for using KDE or GNOME, and it's not a vocal minority, this is ultimately the real issue. Idc that the software doesn't do what Plasma or GNOME can, the problem is the significant misinformation and outright lying to new users, cherry picking the good qualities and completely masking the severe issues with them
@@skymer7471 Subjectivity doesn't exist when there's a clear cut end goal. You gotta sacrifice productive hours for nerd cred when you put value in nerd cred.
"subjectivity doesn't exist when there's a clear end goal" What the fuck is the clear end goal? What the fuck are productive hours? "hours" in the grand scheme of things is not particularly long to pick up a twm. The configs are not abstract or confusing if you even want to do it yourself instead of using a community build. Besides, if someone do goes go down the tinkering route, they might pick up some valuable information about how their system works that they wouldn't have otherwise known. quantifying productivity like a meme lord to own the twms
@@TheAsymmetrical I don't need to see 100% of my windows 100% of the time. The fact I can't layer tiles is a good enough reason to say TWMs are inefficient and useless.
@@MisakaMikotoDesu I'm not sure if you might be misunderstanding twms or if I'm misunderstanding your comment but; the general principle isn't to have 20 windows open on one workspace at any given time. It's to be able to navigate through different work-spaces or views quite easily. I rarely have more than 4 windows open on a workspace and the average is 1 or 2. You can also layer tiles quite easily at-least in i3 (and also make it so that certain programs always run in a floating mode) You seem to have already made your mind up and as long as you're happy with the setup you use then that's great. Power to you, and look; I also get it. It boils down to the reputation that these communities tend to build because the loudest among them are/or can come across as self-satisfied narcs. Arch folk will narc on everyone else for not using arch, vim folk will narc on anyone who uses a more conventional text editor, linux users in general vs mac/windows. I find it great but I'm under no illusion that widespread adoption of TWMs would usher in a new era of computing "productivity", I personally find them great for a great deal of what I use them for, I'd maybe argue that my "productivity" is higher because I can blitz through different workspaces on my multi monitor setup. But for me it's more enjoyable to use and curbs distractions (Struggle massively with ADHD so having easy control over where windows are and are not is amazing) I also use Gnome on my laptop and I love that also (can not understate how great gnomes touch screen support is) If ya ever feel like dipping your toes in (again if you've already tried) Check out Manjaros i3wm community build, comes with pretty great prebuilt configs, amazing documenation and a lot of quality of life features that might help ease you in. But again, you do you. If ya do have any q's or doubts hit me up at NIXON#9431 on discord and I'd be glad to help. sick sony pvm btw
TWM are more for people who do not use a lot of GUI apps in their workflow. Mostly geard for developers and sysadmins. TWM is by no means targeted to the average user to begin with. Great thing about linux is you can have a desktop environment and a TWM depending on what you are doing that day. You can have multiple window managers installed at the same time.
I like having a window manager installed alongside my desktop environment, you get all the benefits of imagining you will manage to finally reach the perfect configuration while always being able to safely fall back to something less keyboard friendly but also something that doesn't inspire lengthy and distracting customization sessions.
I've got so infatuated with the VIM's approach to shortcuts, and it was so revolutionary to me, that I needed it in my normal UI experience. I've configured the crap out of AwesomeWM, and after using it for about 5 years, the shortcuts are just second nature - I don't think how to go to a certain workspace (well, tags in the awesomewm world) - the fingers just do the job. In my mind, the only downside during 5 years - there were some breaking updates in awesomeWM were i had to rewrite large chunks of the configs. Also - you don't necessarily have to configure the stock tiling wm. if you find something close to what you want (and there are a crapton of them) - just use the default.
Switching from DEs into customized window managers is changing into a new paradigm, that emphasizes freedom. Much like when you build your own house in which YOU want to live, when you individuate and leave your parents house. Yes, building your own house takes a little time and effort, but that is YOUR house adjusted to YOUR preferences and values. And you do it once.
> And you do it once. Actually no. As well as with house which you built yourself, you continue to build it all the time you live in it. But that's a part of pleasure :)
I think this depends a lot on the use case. For someone whose workflow primarily involves programming (particularly through the terminal through bash/vim/etc.), tiling window managers are a lot more efficient, since you pretty much don't need to use a mouse. I particularly like that Alt+j/k on i3 allows you to shift context to an open window on another monitor without you ever having to take your hands off the keyboard. EDIT: The learning curve for me was nonexistent because I was very comfortable with Alt+j/k and Alt+Arrow Keys from having used vim and terminator for pretty much as long as I can remember. For someone without this background, the time to adapt to this environment will obviously be longer. I think it's a case of using the right tool for the job. I would not want to edit a video/image using a tiling WM, since I'm mainly using my mouse. But for terminal-heavy workflows, I think they make a lot of sense. EDIT 2: It is possible to have multiple WMs/DMs. Yes, sometimes they conflict, but I've had a backup XFCE environment for a long time whenever I'm giving a talk/presenting something. Just use the most appropriate environment for the job.
I'm a developer and when I'm developing my i3 environment is perfect for my productivity. Most of IDE, Terminal, Text Editors ... I can control using the keyboard and with multiples workspaces, it's absolute awesome. However, when I'm not coding but just using the computer for other things I like to switch for my normal desktop environment.
I can recommend the desktop environment Regolith as a DE with a tiling windows manager that is easy to install and does not require configurations. It uses Ubuntu and i3/rofi and ubuntu settings menus, and it is preconfigured, as in it is not ugly and everything works. This is exactly the reason i started using it, as i just needed a quick OS to install on my new pc before university. It has been working out for me, and i have pushed it onto 4 other people who are all very happy with the tiling windows manager experience. They haven't had to configure anything at all, so for them as new users it has been a great.
I don't know man, I love this channel but this feels like an april fools video. I still use bspwm since you made a video on it (before that, i3-gaps) At work i even just use tmux over a remote ssh session. I dont know about your computer usage, but for me most things I do are usecases that work perfectly well in tiled terminal windows: neovim for text editing, weechat for irc, cmus for music, mpv for videos, both vifm and shell commands (cp/mv/rm/etc) for file management and finally I still stick with qutebrowser for webbrowsing (which is probably where I spent most of my time on the home computer, it's not perfect but it works well enough). But I must say it seems ironic that all the tiling wm people on unixporn for example typically put their neofetch on a floating window :v) but yeah sure can t get fucking steam to work on my void linux so i still dual boot but games are degenerate anyway.
I know a lot of people would think the same way, but I thought it was important that someone criticized tiling WMs (apart from Xahlee, whose critique was basically "i used a tiling wm for an hour and they're shit). I still think they're great for when you mostly use command line (devops, sysops, text editing).
I have same thoughts, Wolfgang! I've found the look of the tiling wm tidy. I went for i3wm but at the end I felt somewhat limited. Then I've found that I can easily tile on KDE with Super+arrows or PgUp, use multiple desktops for different workflows (Super+F1:F4), _plus_ I can use the mouse whenever I want. Whatever I wanted a tiling WM for, I've found key bindings in KDE and in the apps themselves. I know that there might be some for whom that might be insufficient, but that's why we love Linux - everyone can find a distro and window manager they personally like.
Apparently some people have gotten Plasma to work with i3. I'm not sure how much effort it takes or if it's still possible but it seems like it would be pretty cool
I used KDE for a while, and the ease of customization was great. But one thing I never got over was that you cannot change workspaces on only one monitor at a time with KWin.
When I first heard about tilers my first thought was “wait you mean that thing I always try to force my computer to do anyways”. the tiling in floating WMs/DEs is at best limited to halves and quarters of the full screen and is a massive pain to use compared to using a tiling wm. If you're mostly going to be using tiled windows anyways, it makes sense to use a window manager that's built to do that. Additionally, in most tilers moving/resizing windows can be done easily with the keyboard, or by holding the mod key (either alt or super usually) and left or right clicking and dragging for moving and resizing respectively. I know for a fact this works in i3, which you specifically said was difficult to resize windows due to the hit box, but if you had used mod+rclick that problem would have gone away.
In glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. Initially when I first found out about standalone tiling window managers I though, well this is great, you have everything in front of you and you can utilise screen space better. But I quickly realised, especially now I'm getting into emacs the usage can be horrific without mouse, worse most GUI applications assume you have a certain amount of screen space to use and won't put and effort into crushing and contracting down menus and sidebars that are bigger and more in depth with the icons and text. What you're left with is a tiny box of the part of the app you will use most, extremely difficult to read and use comfortably, and you end up just wanting to close other Windows or expand the current one further. It's also complicated by the fact that the ruling assumes a comfortable regular grid where everything is either a split of the main or a sub window or something that fills empty space. This makes it horrific to manage non regular grids because there is no way without first focusing the window you want to modify with your mouse or if you are lucky enough a text jumper like easy motion or ace jump. Plus the fact that many desktop environments natively support a light form of tiling at least on a temporary basis but not the other way round means why should you ever make the switch. If you even consider the switch the likes of tmux and emacs will probably be your go to first... The more and more I think about a GUI applications and window managers the more I think we really need a scalable GUI that can be expanded with features of 3rd party apps instead of standalone apps with standalone windows. That way we would have less need for either window manger...
7:15, fortunataly i know this clip, and was able to turn the volume down... I also live in a russian speaking country, I don't have a door, use speakers and my parents are home. Can you please put on a loud warning next time.
thanks for the clarification. I was really wondering about GUI applications, since most demos of tiling WM only show you nice arrangements of terminals
@@michaelrose5242 Most daily apps you need to use are mouse-driven, and the shortcut of all of them are totally different from each other. You end up jumping from keyboard to mouse more often. You have to spend too many days configuring every app to standardize the shortcuts. In fact you could tile some windows in Gnome and you have both worlds. Is my opinion, nothing more.
@@hernanpangia7593 lmao, you literally only need to configure your wm once and from now to the end of time you'll have a workflow tailored to your exact specifications
I wish but how can you with one key binding rearrange all open floating apps to a dwm layout for example? I set up many keybindings to change the focused app layout in my openbox but they change only the layout of the focused app, not all at once. Or I missed something on how Openbox keybindings work.
Wanna know something ironic? I use a WM (vanilla i3wm to be exact) because of the embedded capability to configure it to use your whole mouse buttons bindings to control screen (by default: click 1 on bar for focus, click 2 on bar to close, click 3 on bar to toggle floating mode -dock/undock-, scroll - click 4 and 5 - on bar to control tabbed/piled windows. And my modifications: click 8 - back - on screen to toogle border, click 9 - forward - on window to toggle fullscreen, click 8 and 9 on border to take screenshot (of screen or of window respectively). Granted, took me 2 hours of learning and set-up the first time, but I already have my config file ready to go and now I can replicate my whole environment in all distros I tested within 5 to 15 minutes (depending the package manager and my familiarity). Not to mention my setup already include the capability of automatically controlling windows on events (i.e. udev scripts help me open apps and lock/unlock my whole PC), on logs (i.e. a script that monitor a synergy log to change the workspace, window and/or screen when entering or levaing a certain screen, configure it correctly and you can set it up to fullscreen a video, show a certain workspace and/or swap between VMs/RDP/VNC windows seamlessly) and on API calls (i.e. zoiper ready to take focus when I receive a call), something that I found pretty difficult to do in regular stacking DEs due to the lack of direct interfacing with terminal commands (yes, I admit this could be achieved in other DEs, but I never found a straightforward way simply using bash). So with that in mind, here are my counterarguments: Reason 1 - Granted, WMs take too much time and effort *at first* . Once you get the hang of it, you can get to replicate your environment in a matter of minutes by installing some apps and copying (or stright up just modifying) a couple of files (even less if you work in automating this process). And as an extra, *you get to know the background not only on what of everything your WMs - and eventually your PC - does and what it can do* . Reason 2 - Steep learning curve may be a downer to some, but ask a VIM user if it's not worth it in the end. This same principle apply to most (if not all) WMs. And again, about mouse usage, read my first paragraph. Sometimes it can enhance your experience to have a mouse, or even better a touchscreen (integrate a on-screen keyboard - like "onboard" - and "touchegg" with i3msg commands and you're set to have a beautifully organized way to get a tiled tablet experience). Reason 3 - GUI looks like crap *if you don't take the time to configure your display properly* . Get to read how to manually set DPI using xrandr (and in your DM if any), how to set to floating mode alert screens (or even better, how to tile them to use a section of your screen) and you'll eventually get to script any layout your want to use to your needs (i.e. 4K monitors looks great with a 192 dpi, while at 1080p a 96 dpi, at 1366x768 (a laptop monitor) a 72 dpi, and at 720p a 64 dpi basically maintain the same aspect ratio and looks practically equivalent, so if your GUI looks like crap, is your own responsibility to get it fixed.. or don't, remember most people that go for a WM do it in the basis of productivity, so looks may not be as important in the end). Also, Reason 4 - Back to my reason 2 counter-argument, the experience can be great with a mouse (and touchscreen, and to add, even with a controller). Also, that apart from the fact there are alternative daily use apps that control great with just a keyboard,a remeber there are usually shortcuts and plugins (i.e. Vimium on Chrome/Chromium) to get use of most apps with only a keyboard. Reason 5 - Window arranging is literally nothing else than a familiarity issue, once you get the hang on how to tile windows you can do it just as (if not more) effectivelly as any other DE (and honestly kind of disappointing on you using this as it'sin principle the same argument most people use for avoiding try Linux in the first place). Reason 6 - Just as in reason 1, granted, but manual intervention is part of the fun. Honestly, to cite an example, Steam Keyboard window integrates and works the best in a properly configured i3wm environment than in any other. Reason 7 - Alt+Tab is literally just a binding and window overview depends entirelly on you. Well configured transparency compositor can make wonders to keep you aware on everything open. Reason 8 - Picture in Picture can be achieved pretty easily *by tiling* , or even better *by floating* certain apps (qutebrowser for PIP functonality scales beautifully). Reason 9 - The very fact you consider tabbing capabilities a weakness because most apps already implement a version of this is certainly a biased observation and a non-argument, so no need to counter-argue this. So yeah, just wanted to leave my input here... You may have a point on me not being more productive by using it though, because to be honest I just get to a point were all my job as an admin can be done in minutes (and even seconds) thanks to scripting alone, but I sure do enjoy using it very much (to the point I migrated all my PCs to i3wm for my default session in all my machines). Oh, and as a final demonstration, let me show you a brief demonstration on how I use i3wm with only a mouse just as described in this wall of text (for borders, fullscreen, media control and window movement): imgur.com/a/GDvyx22 (sorry for the delay between click and action for playback. It's due to overload - VM, obs, chrome and qutebrowser youtube running at the same time in a laptop on battery -. The event basically immediate with obs off -also note that any key that appeared was due to xdotool scripting to control youtube screen-). PD: My here described own DE replacement is still a work in progress, but I feel I may release it in a couple months when I get it to be "mature" enough. Either way, by getting to know bash and i3blocks you may get better results than anything I could have accomplished. -Watched from a qutebrowser windowed fullscreen under i3wm controlled with a custom i3bar block.
For newbies, yes it's difficult at first, I remember my first experience, it was difficult, especially coming from the latest macbook with the huge trackpad, ahh bliss, but then I slowly got used to it and now I can't do regular GUI anymore... I'm more productive on a tiling window manager, I use i3-gaps, gives me a zen like feel. You mentioned the main issue is to do with configuration, when I install arch + i3-gaps + compton + oh-my-zsh, it takes me around 20 minutes, and you can easily spend more than that with gnome-tweaks and so on. It all varies really, I mean I've been doing this for 2 years now, so a newcomer might find it difficult. But always remember, the best GUI/wm/DE is the one that you like.
The paradigm of being able to control your computer with keyboard only is the one thing that Linux has sadly stepped away from - while Windows, to this day, can be fully controlled via keyboard without ever touching a mouse.
1. "Configuration is difficult" I configured it once, put my configs up on github, and now I just git clone to get my entire desktop environment set up. These configs only require a couple basic extra programs that I can install in once command. With other DEs, I need to spend more time setting them up. 2. "to even benefit from keyboard features you have to learn all the other console/keyboard driven apps" The benefit from keyboard shortcuts on your window manager isn't lost the moment you have to switch to your mouse. It's not all or nothing. Lots of apps already have keyboard driven navigation that you could learn that are entirely separate from i3. I have bad RSI in my wrists and it's a life-saver for me. 3. I don't have keyboard shortcut conflicts because I use the super key for the WM.
I watched the video because I honestly had a very great time using i3 so far (one and a half years, I'd say). There are a lot of valid points made (especially considering that I for example only rarely edit the config, and do some of the same stuff again and again), however, I do think that the basic idea is worth further extending. For example, the tiling wm should not put the new application in a predetermined place, but should rather both take optimal window sizes (as requested by the applications) and recorded user actions ("user put that kind of window into floating mode last time") into consideration. In general, most of what I use is the terminal (I don't use a graphical file manager, `ls`, `cd` and friends are usually more than enough) and my web browser, which in turn has a vim keyboard mapping add on installed, which works very well for most non-app pages, or simpler app-pages. It also feels nicer to have vim be more application like, because I can do the splits the same way I do them everywhere else (of course syncing everything with the X clipboard)
If you don't want to learn a ton of keyboard shortcuts, there's no point on trying out a tilling window manager. That's the whole central idea of using them instead of the floating ones.
@@aneeshprasobhan To be clear, I was joking but it does come from a true place. I don't know what it's like for everybody else but I know C; and dwm (and a lot of other software with a similar "too hard to learn reputation") has amazingly written C so setting it up and getting used to it took about a day for me iirc. I understand the argument of investing too much time not being worth it but I'm pretty sure most people (and definitely everybody who is tech inclined enough to have heard of a tiling window manager) spends enough time on a computer for the learning investment to be worth it in the long run (long being pretty relative here anyway)
Regard to learning a bunch of keybinding for all programs, that's not true, you only have to learn the specific keybindings you set for you WM and the vim keybindings, everything basically works around those keybindings. Also, I agree with you that WM users still have to use the mouse but the time saving using keybindings for a lot of tasks is huge. On the other hand, I think programs like sxhkd could bring a lot of benefits of the keybinding to DE users without the headaches of editing a lot of config files.
Fair video. I still wholly prefer a tiling wm to a DE, but the points presented were fair. The point most important seems to be convenience. I think it boils down to a degrees of control a user wants over their desktop experience. More control means the user is going to have to devote more time to their desktop. Less control ootb, means more convenience. In a standard DE you use the system how someone (that wasn't you) intended it to be used. You can change it, ofc, but then that would mean spending _time_ configuring again. This is all stuff you know though, I'm sure;) Def thought your point on power management was important. Something that has always been somewhat spotty for Linux, in general, but so much more noticeable in a tiling wm. I generally always pull in Xfce4 suite of settings and their power manager with whatever I run , because it seems to work best. Much better than just using dpms and xset alone. Also, I use bspwm and alt-tab works for me there (changing window size and placement is also easy with bspwm). Rofi, also can show you what windows you have open and quickly change to them. Anyways, great video man. Really is good food for thought. Much appreciated. Cheers🙂
it wasn't a "fair video" he compared apples to oranges, the fact that at the beginning he he said that we dont really have TWM based DE -s, and then has done the comparison anyways, would be analogous to I know that this v12 engine is just an engine, ..., I cant travel with this v12 engine as with my porsche
for a long time i would have strongly disagreed with this video. recently i have come to a conclusion, that no matter how hard i try to configure my window manager, i will never come close to creating a desktop experience better than team of UI developers who actually know their stuff.
That's actually a point that I never thought about! I tend to have only the applications I use currently opened, so it makes absolute sense for me to use a lot of different workspaces instead of minimizing anything. If I really need to minimize something, I'll put it in a stack of a tab, that way it's still here, but still hidden away. Or I'll even keep whatever in the background and have the main application in a floating window instead.
I'm perfectly fine with config files if there's a benefit to using them. For me the amount of tinkering you have to do to set everything up is not worth the output.
1. With regard to screenlock, on a DE I can have to spend 10 minutes on finding how to disable all that automatic screenlocking nonsense! I do that myself when I want it. 2. The downside of a GUI-app is that you have to do it every time again, a lot of work. You set a tiling window manager once and then you are done with it. Advantages and disadvantages to both. I am waiting for something in between. How I use KDE gets close to how you use a tiling window manager. Hell, I even use SpaceFM which basically is a tiled file-manager. By far the best overlooked filemanager, more people should look at it. I think that tiling window managers can be very nice for people who need to use a lot of windows on a multiple monitors. For example for video-editing, coding or engineers who have to read papers and write articles at the same time and then have some screen-estate to write some code...It is convenient when you can set up sessions that programs open on the same workspace on the same monitor every time, isn't it?
In my experience the learning curve for a TWM doesn't seem to be that bad. I find it effective to learn features of the wm as you use them instead of trying to brute force memorize the shortcuts. Now that it's just muscle memory for me, I'm not thinking about the shortcuts as I'm moving windows around. It feels more like I just think how I want my windows laid out, and they just do it. Besides, we're linux users. We're all about learning curves haha
I've found that a stacking window manager with some very basic tiling functions activated with a keyboard shortcut is the best of both worlds. Most of the time I work in a maximized window of something or another, and every now and then it's nice to automatically tile a bunch of terminals for viewing diagnostics of running processes. FWIW IceWM is my go-to example of this type of system.
Okay, Straight up answer: Tiling WMs aren't for everyone, and that is fine. I use both - xfwm on desktop, and i3 on laptop. I love tiling WMs on laptops, because i don't have to move my hand back and forth in order to do stuff, it's right there, on the keyboard, however my mouse is near my desktop keyboard, so it isn't that much of an issue on the desktop.
You can still get a keyboard driven workflow with a DE. It was a while ago, but back when I had my old thinkpad, I had it setup so I could do everything with the keyboard in xfce.
I completely agree with the video. Keyboard centric is a myth. You are mostly on your browser these days, which means that you are using your mouse all day.
Small counterpoint to Reason 5: I actually agree that re-arranging, moving, and resizing windows is a chore. That is precisely why I prefer my window manager to make those decisions for me, rather than have a floating mess of windows all over the place that I need to manipulate myself. It is, of course, possible to run every app in fullscreen. In such a case, it does not matter too much whether you do app switching with workspaces or by clicking on a dockbar icon. In fact, I use Sway on my laptop with Waybar, and I can do both of those things. What I like more is that I can define which programs can open on which workspaces, and I can even make them autostart there. My swayconf contains exact instructions on where windows should be opened. When I login to Sway, all my windows are already laid out in the appropriate workspace. And some workspaces have tiled layouts to let me view multiple windows (again pre-defined). I would think that such a setup actually saves me a LOT of time. :) Also Sway makes window resizing and rearranging with mouse easy. The hitbox is not tiny like i3. You can also set whatever border size you want, if you want an even bigger hitbox. I will say, however, that I use XFCE on my desktop because I am dealing with multiple monitors, and am still using X11 there because of Wayland issues with stuff like screen recording (as my desktop is used for streaming via OBS, this can be a dealbreaker).
I don't agree with "any real gain in productivity". When i first switched to MacOS from Linux (i was using sway tiling wm), my wrists started hurting after a couple days. Installing Amethyst worked like wonders. I find it tiring to move windows with a mouse and press ALT+TAB multiple times to find the window i am trying to focus. By the way you can make Alt+Tab work in i3. No overview functionality though. (they both work flawlessly on mac with amethyst obviously) I find gui apps look a lot better and aesthetic in tiling wm's without their top bar and they aligned perfectly. Lastly learning to use i3 just took 10 minutes or so for me. One shortcut for switching workspaces, one for moving windows between workspaces, one for bringing up dmenu and one for closing windows. That's mostly enough. * You can set closing windows to CTRL+W or ALT+F4 so no need to remember that. * Moving/Switching is just ALT+(number) and ALT+SHIFT+(number). It becomes second nature after a couple minutes. So i guess i don't agree with any of these points :D But it was good to hear why people might not enjoy a tiling wm from someone who tried it.
Define life. Some people like to waste their time getting shitfaced in a pub and call that life, while others like to spend time and money in malls and call that life. Life is very subjective. One man's food is another man's poison.
user with 16core cpu, 32gb mem: "I installed wm because it is lightweight"
Acutally yes! This is true!
You've pinpointed exactly my system: r7 2700 w/ 32gb of ram.
I was working today and noticed that my ram usage was a little high at 25 fucking GB... Because yes, I indeed have a few firefox tabs opened (usually under 10, I hate having a lot of tabs), well over 10 docker containers and a full Windows VM. Without the use of i3, my ram usage would be closer to 26 or 27. It's not THAT important now that I upgraded to 32gb at the start of the quarantine, but during the time that I didn't have the extra ram, i3 was a life saver. 1gb of ram can make a huge difference when you're nearing the top of your ram usage.
@@sagniknandi3781 oh fuck! I'll tell my job that they need to fire me then! I'm not good enough since I misread things sometimes! I must be lacking basic education then!
But yeah, I'm sorry, I saw 16 and assumed threads because in my mind, the most popular choice (currently) would be an 8 core 16 thread cpu.
Edit: Funny and ironic how you wrote 8 core **12** "thread" at first. I just hope your message was meant to be a joke.
What was your available memory? Just because programs are using memory doesn't mean that it's not available. That's really the only number that matters on Linux. The 'free' number is useless for most people because that even subtracts the drive cache, which is based on files you routinely access. However that is always available to other applications. Browsers will be the biggest hog and many times it's a garbage add-on that's leaking memory. WMs are drops in the bucket even with DEs as they don't really do a whole lot. But if going the WM route it's important to think of the entire software ecosystem that you use. If going with a basic vanilla, no composition, DWM setup and then have 5 tabs of YT open then minimalism was just some sort of virtue signaling.
Also, these days in the post-Moore's law era, resources optimization is important. It takes more lines of code and implementing more tools to achieve better hardware optimization. Not that that's really a big deal for a WM as it just tells X what to do with windows (see the Xlib C library functions).
At the end of the day, resource optimization is more complex than the recent Windows->Linux converts in certain Reddit subs and YT vlogers will have people believe.
@@krozareq available memory was 7gb.
I made a custom script for my memory usage, one that uses the MemAvailable result from /proc/meminfo.
To be honest, I don't really care about minimalism, I only care about removing as much bloat that I don't use as possible while not slowing down my workflow.
For example, I love vim, but not for the minimalism aspect of it since I have over 80 plugins.
I have Firefox as my main browser everywhere now, only 2 plugins: ublock origin and keepa (price history on Amazon directly added to the page).
I also hate to keep tabs opened, but because of my work, lately I've had to have around 10 tabs opened at all times. The most demanding things on there are Jira and Bitbucket, for some reason they use a lot of memory.
Im also running my Sql dev server on a separate dedicated server that I have. It consumes around 8gb of ram when it has been running for a while (although I believe that it has simply cached a lot of informations and wouldn't require as much ram if it was on my computer and therefore restarted every day).
The fact that TWMs are less resource demanding is just a bonus for me. If i3 took more resources than gnome to run, I'd still run it.
@@DevilDead13820 actually same with r7 2700x / 32gb ram / 1080 ti. And arch + bspwm powered on it.
9 months ago: My i3wm Workflow
8 months ago: Virgin i3 vs. Chad BSPWM
2 months ago: Tiling Window Managers suck. Here's why
Alternative titile: Why tmux is The One True Tiling WM.
@@y__h That is the right answer right there.
@@y__h tmux is bloated.
Unaboomer's impact on the society is effing enormous
Coming soon: How to plan your video content for maximum views
If you like Tiling window managers use them. If you don't, don't use them. I don't think it's really that complex of a debate
Don’t let Distrotube find you!
@DistroTube *runs*
Jokes aside, I don't think he'll care all that much.
*angry haskell sounds in the distance*
Distrotube: "Linux Elitists Are Frauds - Making Their Linux Life Harder To Look Cool"
vim diesel wants to know your location
Same goes for LanDuke.
You don't really spend time re-configuring your setup unless it's your hobby. I've been on the same theme for 3-4 years now.
This. When I first started using i3, I spent a few hours each day tooling with it. but now I only edit the config if I find a new program that I love to use and I just add a quick shortcut instead of dmenu-ing it every time.
This.
I just use the defaults in xmonad
i do the same on gnome
And do not forget about backups! The main reason I am not using i3 is because I lost my config and did not have the time to re-configure it.
A pretty good video, it's only "wrong" by the fact that tiling windows managers are to increase production in coding and data management, not necessarily audio/video production/consumption. Different strokes for different folks, gotta pick the best brush for the job and realize not everyone paints wet on wet.
I've my file manager locked to workspace 1 with window rules and the media players locked to workspace 5 and for one screen to switch to media 5 when (e.g) mpv is launched. Ideal for video consumption.
If you're using something like Vim or it's forks, Yes. But that's also a rare case.
Enter the pop-shell.
If some is playing games all day and then talks about about _productivity_ that's disingenuous. Fix thyself before seeking _nirvana_ .
@@akza0729 I use Vim regularly for coding and sometimes for quick edits nano. Alternatively i use an GUI text editor called geany, which i run in VIM mode. Sooooo... i use VIM technically on daily basis. Just sometimes with an different painting on it.
Specially when you work with servers, you should know how to code and work within terminals without the usage of an GUI (Depending on the servers). So it happens relatively often that you meet people in that area that work with VIM, in some cases even privately.
And servers are the area in which Linux has the biggest usage share compared to windows, mac and others.
I can't live without tiling WMs now. Operating your entire computer with just the keyboard(aside from using a web browser) is so much more comfortable imho.
@@mitchelvalentino1569
Gnome leave so much of a footprint, I hate it. I'd love it if it didn't change every update and forces me to wait for extensions to work again. In the first place who the hell came up with the idea of getting rid of the system tray?
My experiences with gnome were always like this and thus I'll stick to my i3 or if it has to be a DE I'd rather go XFCE.
Papa Bones I hated Gnome for years, so I understand.
I still don't entirely understand the hate for GNOME. It, KDE, and Cinnamon are the only DEs that don't look like they're from 2006, and they're considerably more lightweight on equivalent hardware than, say, Windows' native WM and macOS's Quartz compositing layer.
@@mitchelvalentino1569 "macOS especially becoming unusable on older hardware"
That being SAID, older MacBooks handle pretty much any system that isn't macOS remarkably well. I've got a friend who thrifted an old black pre-unibody polycarbonate Dual-Core MacBook with a dead graphics card and got it to exclusively run Windows.
It's fucking *insane* how well it runs on that thing.
@@mitchelvalentino1569 Oh shit, nice! What distributions did you get working on those machines?
The reason I ask is: I've historically had trouble finding a Linux or BSD system that's optimized well for a Mac.
I remember trying to install Debian on a 2012 MacBook Pro. I was able to boot into the live CD but not actually *install* it onto the machine? I suppose it's something to do with SIP or some other Apple DRM component, but I'm not entirely sure.
*Best are Hybrid of both. Just add an on/off switch from whatever manager you have.*
i use tiling window manager to keep my desktop experience fun! i get super bored with full-fledged desktop environments! tinkering with your system and customizing every little thing according to you is just so satisfying!
Completely agree! I spent last winter basically just tinkering with i3
you need a girl
You must be the most unproductive computer user in the world if you're "bored" with a desktop environment.
Not everyone has time and enough knowledge to do it manually
OlejkaLive after a lot of testing, girls are nowhere as fun as tiling wm’s. Really fun to interact with at first but get tiresome fast due to the amount of bugs and lack of customization.
I agree with you, for the most part. However, you need to consider couple more things. These twms are for developers and sysadmins and not for casual users. Imo, twms for casual and semi technical users would be purely nonsensical. For us, the developers, we do a lot of switching, showing-hiding, swapping, resizing while we work with the keyboard; and everytime reaching the mouse, finding the cursor and moving it can be not only annoying but also a bit more time consuming. I think, muscle memory on your own customization is the key defense for twms. After the initial hiccups and when adjusted, they actually bring faster experience.
Exactly!
This is true. I'm a developer and I'm enjoying i3 on Manjaro. I'm very productive and love that I barely touch my touchpad on my laptop anymore. I think also using twm on my laptop is another plus as sometimes I'm in a spot where I can't really use a mouse.
I'm not å developer. I'm just a casual user - but after more thañ 5 years on twm 's I hate every moment when I'm forced to use a regular DE. For me there are several reasons why I choose to stay on tiling. The tiling itself (The layout of windows) just makes more sense to me. I use bspwm so there are some automatic tiling schemes where windows will open in a predefined layout but personally I prefer to use preselect and manually decide where my next window will open and what split ratio I will use.Using the keyboard for everything have become normal to me. Window navigation is only one part of it - but open programs - move between workspaces and nodes - is really effective once its become muscle memory. And then comes all the aliases and functions we can add to our Shells rc file. Qutebrowser - tmux - rofi - dunst - and vim and I'm golden. Will install some other programs too - but the only time I leave a terminal is whenever I use a browser. If it weren't for those overdesigned websites that make you use a "real" browser - I'd probably never even need x. Tty would do just fine. Minimalism FTW 😁
Yeah, I've been using tiling with tmux for a while and recently started using i3 for when I'm doing software development or writing. tmux is great but twms allow for having documentation up in a browser or a preview up when writing with LaTeX. For text-centric work where you want to glance at a gui for documentation and previews, a twm is perfect. That some gui applications are harder to use can even be a benefit, as it makes me get less distracted. It's also easy to set up multiple types of sessions so you have access to different environments from your DM depending on what you want to work on.
I do see more and more that Tiling WM's are geared towards the power users and to that end the access to customization is greater than in typical desktop environments. And since this channel has a lot about Thinkpads, I want to say for me personally it has made me enjoy using my T430 far more. Coming from a full size keyboard with larger trackpad, it's taken some time for me to get used to the smaller T430 and its different mouse button placement. Awesome WM has been a great boon to that. A regular DE would have been harder for me ergonomically speaking.
Unless you're Luke Smith
Or you can use your desktop environment of choice (mine is Xfce) and swap out xfwm4 (or whichever window manager the environment is using) for i3 or you favorite tiling window manager to have the best of both worlds
Reason 6: - Java and Wine ahave problems in EVERY WM. Not only in TWM. It's becasue funny Java.
export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1
export _JAVA_OPTIONS='-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on'
*PAIN*
What? What issue?
@Game Over PopOS uses the Gnome desktop environment, not a window manager. Vit C said that Java and Wine have problems in every Window Manager, that doesn't include desktop environments.
I really like pop-shell with gnome. I get the benefits of a “just werks” desktop environment and the efficiency of tiling windows.
pop os shell bro found🤜
also recently switched from arch + dwm to fedora + gnome + pop-shell and ive really been enjoying it. Coming from DWM I am missing some functionalities / customization but im not bothered by that most of the time.
i need that uncensored thumbnail picture..
7:12 Меня не проведёшь! Я то знаю что там звучит!!11!
на аве natalie mars?
Михайло Шевченко да
@@khakiviper6154 aww, I see you're a Man of Culture as well
Very strange. I know who is N.Mars and where from that scream ( russian kid played Minecraft and something going wrong)
when /g/ takes over ur life...
You are forever here
Nah. You can't call it an actual take over until you start storing your hot sauce in your computer case and go around saying a lenovo laptop is the right laptop.
0:53 the myth, the man, the legend himself
YES!
A lot of your issues aren't window managers issues but I3 issues.
And some of them aren't even issues, for instance the window resizing hit-box; try shift+mod+RMB!
@@colinjacobs176 I'm not an i3 user, i use bspwm and all the shortcuts issue, are i3 issue, you don't have those problems with sxhkd
@@alkeryn1700 I use i3 with sxhkd :p
@@VictorRodriguez-zp2do That's what i'd do if i used I3
ironically, I thought most of the issue he mentions specifically AREN'T in i3. Except of course having to use keyboard shortcuts, but that's the whole damn point of using a TWM. If you actually think using the mouse is better, well first of all i'm sorry for you if you use the pc all day like that, but in that case obviously don't install a TWM.
This video boiled to this. "It's just a window manger, not a full desktop environment, I don't like all the tweaking."
These in itself are already two different complaints.
I have been using i3wm for a 2 years (i am programmer) and i enjoy it. Most of a times I use it in home too :-) From your commentary, I conclude that watching this vlog, I will only waste time. Am I right?
@@GreyDeathVaccine YES. As long as you already enjoy it - don't waste time on this. :)
He has some good points - but the only point that's important is if YOU like it or not.
@@PerJohanHalsli Thank you for taking your time to respond.
@@GreyDeathVaccine np :)
7:20 You can hold the mod key and drag with left/right click to move/resize the windows.
As someone with multiple screens one of which is pivoted, tiling works like a dream, i3 is a huge improvement over anything I've ever used, no stacking environment really seems to understand what I want to do with my windows.
Stacking / floating window management is mostly a toy in my opinion. You can of course create nice marketing slides for Windows and MacOS with a lot of stacked windows showing, but useful, REAL work is done on the keyboard, not by doing toy like colourful button clicking.
The first time I saw a tiling wm was in those subreddits, and while yes, it look hella beautiful also all the apps that were running were pure cli apps, and the question rises "what if I want to use programs like Blender or Krita, pretty sure you can but there is no screenshot here with those" and that's were the magic broke
Here's what you can do with Awesome WM:
ruclips.net/video/OoSts990-lY/видео.html
And yes, out of the box you can run your GUI apps (like Blender or Krita or Gparted, whatever) in fullscreen. You can even work in floating windows mode (no tiling) if you really want.
Or you can assign these to a specific workspaces so they always open there and have a whole workspace for themselves (unless you open something on it)
You can also move all windows between workspaces freely
@@xGOKOPx Yeah, good point. In my opinion if you are keen to invest some time in configuration of window manager it will be way more convenient (and less resource heavy) than full desktop environment. But everyone has different taste:)
Hey guys!!! Thanks for the comments!!! I will check them out for sure!!!
I use tab mode for those apps, press MOD+w and it's basically like in Windows with fullscreen apps and tab bar, plus I can use the mouse to scroll between apps.
ah yes my productivity is increased by the stress i feel from needing to memorize hotkeys and navigate my tiles during finals studies, only because i realize in that very moment that something is artificially bottlenecking me and now i have to be hyper aware of what im doing.
i feel for ya
1. That is actually a plus to me. It's nice to have a standalone window manager instead of a DE because I don't even want everything a DE would install. For example I even wish notifications were completely centralized so I could just make my whole system not support them. But there's always something bringing it's own notification engine. I don't want the DE to set my keyboard layout and do various other things that would clash with my standard Linux setup, like things that are run in my xorg startup script. If I wanted to use a DE with more features, it would be actually more complicated because I'd have to change things that I've done the same for years and years. Tasks would then be done by things the DE has included and if I wanted to change them I'd have to learn how to configure that module (probably a gui config but still).
2. You do have to learn how to use it a bit, but much more you have to think about what you want it to do and set it up to work like this. Make your computer learn your workflow, not the other way around.
3. IntelliJ and other IDEs works fine in tiling WMs. Writing rules is not a waste of time, manually placing windows where you want them (Some of them every day) is when you can have your window manager doing it. But in the end I don't use that many gui apps in Linux. But I didn't learn CLI applications because of Tiling Window Managers, I've learnt them becasue I like them being more punctual than GUIs. (You make a decision and issue a command rather than looking at what options the GUI presents to you and chose one, just like you didn't know what it was you wanted to do. Complicated GUIs actually cna make you forget about that though.) And I never had any shortcut conflicts because I use the Super Key as my mod key, and almost nothing else uses it. The super key is always mapped to something related to the window manager/DE, even in goddamn Windows.
5. Of course you can use the mouse, but what's really nice is having three different shortcuts/modifiers for the shortcut, one resizing the window just by a pixel, one by 5 pixels and one by 10 or 15 or something like that. But the real point not having to move/resitze windows that often in the first place. I have the same layout of windows on my screen every day. I don't just wake up and randomly put my cmus or my browser on a different screen or workspace than yesterday. Of course I don't use the same programs every day, but there is a goto layout for everything I use a computer for and it's usually seperated by workspaces.
6. Only thing that ever made problems was wine, and wine messes up in any WM.
7. Why would you need it when you can see everything already? To go cross-workspace? Just switch the workspace for half a second!
8. In which? It works out of the Box in i3 and dwm which are probably the most profic ones.
9. I think it's stupid to build something into a application that can be centralized.
Interesting channel though, I may subscribe.
Love your comment! :)
Reason no7:
You can use 'rofi -show window' to get a list of all opened windows and switch to any window on any workspace.
I use it to find a window when I have loads of windows opened, though this can be lacking a bit as it is text only, for instance usually all opened terminals will have title 'user@hostname', which can make it hard to find the window you want.
Having a GUI overview of all opened apps would be very useful, perhaps would be a good project for someone to do.
7:48 don't you know? mod + right mouse key is default for i3 (maybe i3 gaps)
@dr?w No you dont need
@@meyimagalot9497 Aw that helped me
Tiling Windows meant to be productive but in the end is just to show our coworkers how nerd we are to look cool.
Ps: XFCE user and i sooooooooo productive with it. Perfect.
Programmer's point of view here, I'll go through all the points and explain why I love TWMs (more specifically i3, I intend to try others, but i3 works so well for my workflow that I haven't gotten around to doing it yet) :p
DE = Desktop Environment (Gnome, KDE, xfce, cinnamon, budgie, etc.)
TWM = Tiling Window Manage (i3, awesomewm, bspwm, xmonad, sway, etc.)
1- That's part of the fun. I hate feeling confined to what my DE gives me, I like being able to customize every inch of my setup. Weirdly enough, if I customize something myself (like setting up shortcuts), I'll remember them more easily.
"While this makes the setup very portable, ..." Yeah, that's one of the big things. My setup has worked on all the distros I tried (in order from older to most recent: Arch (Antergos (rip)), Gentoo, Raw arch from scratch, Fedora, Debian (didn't get to install everything and already had issues, god I hate Debian based distros) and now OpenSUSE).
2- You learned to use your tools. GUIs are everywhere so you don't realize it, but if you lived with TWMs first, you'd make the same comments about GUIs now. And yes, I do indeed use the terminal for mostly anything that is not: Web Browsing, Chat clients (Discord + Slack but they have some good shortcuts so it's mostly fine) and my Windows VM. Video? mpv. File management? ls, tree, ranger. Music? mpd + nmcpcpp. Text editor? neovim.
3- GUI apps look like crap in a TWM because they're not meant to be there. Use something else. If you want to use mostly GUI apps, don't use a TWM, it's that simple.
"You don't save any screen real estate" I started using TWMs because my laptop's screen was 15" @1080p. Most GUI apps have a lot of extra bullshit like window title, a fucking huge bar (or even 2 in some cases), maybe its own tab management. At the end of the day, if I can replace Chrome by Surf, I gain an insane amount of real estate. Then I replace my GUI based text editor by a more compact TUI one, then I learn to properly use the command line for most stuff and BOOM. I went from barely being able to fit 2 apps and sometimes being forced to have only 1 app running at once to being able to fit 4 apps and therefore 4 tasks at once on my small screen.
4- "Keyboard shortcuts" Well yes, but I'll end up learning a DE's keyboard shortcuts anyway. The only difference is that I didn't set them up, so they might not feel good and I might forget them easily. If I have an issue and configured my shortcuts and didn't save them somewhere, I'll lose time configuring everything again. As someone that switches distros a lot and reinstalls a lot, portability is really important. More so than ease of use thanks to a GUI that doesn't behave the same every time I use it. Also, I never had a single keyboard shortcut overlap with my TWM. But I always have some conflicts once I change to a DE.
5- "managing shore". I don't know, I never manage anything. I use a lot of workspaces instead which divide my work: general terminals, web browsing, programming related terminals, VM remote, chats, music player, email client. That's 8 workspaces already. Alt-tabbing that shit would be an horrible waste of time.
6- Ok? I've had some issues, but nothing groundbreaking tbh. I don't use TWMs for gaming, I still use Windows for that, so I haven't really looked at the situation in years. Linux gaming has come a long way, but it's still nowhere close to being ready (yes, I'm aware of dxvk, proton, lutris. I've tried them and was easily able to find some of my games didn't work).
7- App overview? Why would you want that, why not divide your work properly? Just in case I have a rofi configuration that allows me to have an overview of my current windows across all my workspaces. So that's a need that's already answered I guess.
8- PiP and Drop Down Terminals? I can pop out any window and move it around where I want. So that answers my need for the pip (firefox and opera also have a built-in pip that works really well for videos (at least on i3)).
9- I see this as a con for DEs actually: Why should the APP do the job of the Window Manager? If your window manager can have splitting and tabs, why should your apps have tabs? Then you end up with 10 different apps with 10 different ways of handling spliting and tabbing. That's not a good thing to me. Why can't the DE directly include that under its window title? Why does a window HAVE to only contain ONE instance of the app? Then I'll have to learn 100 different shortcuts (let's say 10 per app), which sounds weird and contradictory when you said that TWMs needed a lot of shortcuts.
To conclude, use whatever feels right to you! If you feel more comfortable using a DE, go ahead! I've had a blast trying to use gnome every time I install a new distro, I really like it, but it still doesn't feel right to me.
agree with a lot of that but...
debian tho...
ive been using a debain based distro for the past 2 years since i first used Linux
have i seriously been on the more problematic side of Linux?
also btw
i use a tiling window manager called qtile
and i use kde apps with gui cause that boosts my productivity a bunch
honestly can't do anything without dolphin
and as for the app overview thing you mensioned, i probably use the same rofi config
nice
@@RenderingUser the fact that you even ask the question already means you have an answer.
I've been using Linux for at least 10 years and switched to it for school and then work, so that would be around 6 years of pretty consistent use.
Debian has never worked for me. I have terrible luck I think. But Debian, Ubuntu, PopOS, Elementary and another one that has Z in the name but that I never remember have always broken in a month.
Even Arch has been more stable. And nowadays I use OpenSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed depending on what I need and recently switched to Nixos for my server.
I'm of the opinion that it doesn't hurt to try something else, but at the same time, if you're not curious and don't have any blatant issue with Debian, the there's no reason to switch :p
@@DevilDead13820 well
i dont really have any issue with distros
im kind of really used to apt
most my problems lie in window managers
currently using qtile but im looking for better alternatives
heard i3 was great so currently checking that out
edit: decided to stick with qtile because python
I've never felt more demotivated to try a window manager after reading this comment. Recently I've started to feel like this pride to spend a bunch of time configuring things and learning this niche UX is just a waste of my productivity and time. I could easily become a better developer spending time developing than figuring out the perfect way to configure all the things and finding **the one** setup.
In all fairness, I've never given them much effort. With tiling built into most DEs (XFCE, KDE, etc...) I just don't see it being worth the trouble when I mostly use GUI apps.
Not gonna go so far as to say they suck, but for my workflow, yeah... nah, I'm good.
7:49 under i3, you can hold down mod and use right-button to resize and the cursor will snap to the edge
Most wm can do that even wm in DEs, it's almost a standard.
A Gentoo user didn't know that is blowing my mind.
Nobody, literally nobody resize window in tiling wm like he mentioned in the video.
You have just improved my life greatly.
every time i get the urge to switch back to a tiling wm i watch this video.
6:23 well this is just bs, I get more songs in my player list, I get more files on the screen if there are more files in the folder, my working area in inkscape is bigger, I get more settings in blender panels, I do less scrolling in browsing, there is no perfect window size. For most programs the bigger your screen the better. The point about the setup is good, we should have some kind of noob friendly desktop with tilling by default for not geeky users.
I think there's pre-configured Manjaro with i3 but I've never used it so I'm not sure.
@@xGOKOPx well you still need to use a config file for i3 settings, for some people that would be weird.
@@EdLrandom You can package i3 config with distros to make it easy but the main problem nobody ever seems to cover when talking about tiling window managers. the target audience. Which is not the user who is uncomfortable editing config files. Look at the mess regolith had with trying to change config locations in their i3 setup just confused those people who had been using i3 elsewhere.
@@EdLrandom I was wondering if using Blender with its quadrillion keyboard shortcuts makes configuring a suitable twm setup harder ? What wm are you using ?
@@parityviolation968 Funny enough I use gnome now (use to hate it a lot) but I been using i3wm for a year or so, I don't know why twm should be hard with blender, most key bindings I used in i3 involve a win key (I had both left and right win keys on my old keybord) blender does not use win keys.
thoroughly unconvincing but thank you for the video. It's very helpful to see the downsides of tiling managers can be helpful to evaluates the cons
Honestly, I won a lot in productivity with some tiling wm, and in fact you can use usual tiling wm with common DE (like KDE+i3), in which case it requires minimum configuration (see the arch wiki for an how to)
I disagree on the configuration portion. I love the way i3 is configured. Everything is in one easy to read list. Where as on gnome or another DE the gui settings are categorized in into different parts.
The funny thing is, this video made Tiling Managers more interesting to me. :-)
well, if you're more interested in installing desktops than actually coding something useless, creating something useful. Then a tiling window manager is perfect for you. It gives you this sense of accomplishments much more easily than trying to code something to solve a real world problem!
@@afonsosalbrecht I don't know what you mean by that. I use Qtile now and configure it by coding in Python.
And in general, your argumentation seem not to make sense for me. Installing a Tiling Window Manager does not exclude coding and solving real problems. But if you feel a sense of accomplishment by not installing a software you like, then it is the way to go for you.
To me, Qtile is one of the best things happened to me in recent years. It is really useful and is so much better than traditional window managers. I wish I had switched to such a tiling window manager earlier. Same goes for Vim as an editor. But that is another story for another time.
Just to correct you on one thing, you CAN easily resize the windows in i3 by hoding the mod key and click/drag as long as you're within about 200px of the border, so that works pretty well.
I'm a heavy keyboard user who mainly uses openbox and saw no major benefit when tried i3. Like you said your last segment, most of the useful functionality is present in stacking wms as well, especially if you take something customizable like ob and add some keyboard shorcuts to manage window locations (namely moving active window to the next window border on screen in a certain direction)
Where did you find the background image used in the thumbnail?
Let’s be honest. Tiling window manager is the new ‘arch linux’ if you know what i mean. Most people use it just so they can feel superior (which is ridiculous). The moment they make tiling window managers more accessible and easy to configure, these guys will move on to their next difficult thing.
I use the mouse to manipulate my tiling WM. Took like 20 seconds to learn. But okay.
Basically all the reasons I moved away from tiling WM.
There is one big thing that is missing from this video, that is a big reason I moved away from wiling window managers:
Sometimes (often) the best use of screen space is to have windows overlap. Most GUI applications have some parts of it's UI that you don't need to use for the most part, and can be obscured by another window just fine. This allows the other window to be bigger, and gives you more space for the parts that actually matter. This is trivially supported in stacking window managers.
Another reason: low resolution screens (1366x768 screens should be banned in laptops...). Aside of terminal, most thinks just become too small in at least one dimension.
All those meant that I effectively ended up with all windows stacked, each in separate workspace, with the exception where I needed 2 windows visible at once. Which is just easier with stacking window managers, and you don't feel restricted by your window manager when you want to do something slightly different.
@Rafael Lopes Except that floating windows are always above all non-floating windows. Resizing them is also not as easy as with standard WMs. And there is just no point using tiling WM if I'm going to be constantly switching to floating mode.
Nigga I'm on a 1024x768 monitor and I can tile 3 different applications comfortably. If an application needs more space just put it in another workspace.
For a general user, perhaps wm are not worth it, but for a developer/sysadming they definitely are. Yes, they require investment, but it is a concept of investing time to save time later, and you do save time and more importantly your brain effort. Constant context switching between mouse and keyboard takes it toll and makes getting in the flow much harder (which is paramount for developers to get a job done).
For me it took about a month or so to get into WMs and choose the proper one. I started, unsuprisingly, with i3 and in the end stopped at dwm, because the basic concept of it's tiling system is very much what i need. It took me around month or two of small tinkering with it in background to get a set up that i like and didn't touch wnything since (excvept changing colorscheme a couple of times). Not only do i have anything i need at a distance of a couple of keystrokes, i can create this setup on any machine in terms of minutes (depending on download speed). I it already came handy several times. In browser i use keys too mostly, it least when i'm at work, cVim is pretty good (though sometimes a bit buggy).
Also, for people who are more familiar with cli tools, WM are definitely a much better choice. Same concept of investing some time to learn the tools, to save time when doing your job.
I think you are missing a point about keyboard and mouse. The goal is not to NEVER use the mouse, but to avoid constantly switching between keyboard and mouse, because context switch for a brain is a pretty expensive operation and breaks the flow of the work, which makes you tire faster. That is also the reason of why i use vim and not some gui IDE.
Nice video, really like how you pointed weaknesses of tiling WMs. However, I'm still on i3 because I use tiling very rarely: all my apps are fullscreen and i switch them like tabs with mod left mod right. Super convenient, and honestly most apps are best fullscreen anyway. And multimonitor support is really great in i3.
Also, you mentioned mouse centric apps contrast - my most prevalent app in this department is Chromium. This one has cVim extension, which gives me OPTION to control with keyboard.
With this setup, everything flies so fast. Ticket in browser, terminal to fix, ticket reply, new ticket, terminal ... All with keyboard, bam bam bam - done :)
3:16 GNOME has Pop Shell and KDE Plasma has Kwin tiling scripts
what wallpaper is that?
tiling wm's were what saved me from mouse induced RSI. i personally will keep using them.
@@luca5678 4 years of using i3 and my rsi went away, i doubt it's going to happen.
This. It saved me too.
Luca get a good keyboard like an Ergodox and use proper keyboard placement and posture...
Saved me too
Ive heard good things about Trackballs.
Every few months I get the itch to try out a tiling WM *once again*. Your video is a necessary antidote
or you could just think for yourself lol
5 years later and still 100% relevant. Tried awesomewm today, firefox pop out player doesn't work, it will tile with other windows instead of going in front of them, so you literally can't watch a video while working on anything. We're in the age of AI, computers once the size of a room can now fit in our pocket, and they can't muster up a draggable window, and this is better than KDE or Gnome? Window rules didn't fix it at all or made things even more broken. Then tried to be able to manage folders, not a single file manager exists that supports both hjkl keybindings and graphical folder previews). Literally the most common thing to do with a computer doesn't integrate with them.
"If you don't like them then don't use them" Yeah well every major Linux community is filled with people who both use them and subsequently make the people around them feel inferior for using KDE or GNOME, and it's not a vocal minority, this is ultimately the real issue. Idc that the software doesn't do what Plasma or GNOME can, the problem is the significant misinformation and outright lying to new users, cherry picking the good qualities and completely masking the severe issues with them
Glad there are some sane people out there.
Subjectivity
@@skymer7471 Subjectivity doesn't exist when there's a clear cut end goal. You gotta sacrifice productive hours for nerd cred when you put value in nerd cred.
"subjectivity doesn't exist when there's a clear end goal"
What the fuck is the clear end goal?
What the fuck are productive hours?
"hours" in the grand scheme of things is not particularly long to pick up a twm. The configs are not abstract or confusing if you even want to do it yourself instead of using a community build.
Besides, if someone do goes go down the tinkering route, they might pick up some valuable information about how their system works that they wouldn't have otherwise known.
quantifying productivity like a meme lord to own the twms
@@TheAsymmetrical I don't need to see 100% of my windows 100% of the time. The fact I can't layer tiles is a good enough reason to say TWMs are inefficient and useless.
@@MisakaMikotoDesu I'm not sure if you might be misunderstanding twms or if I'm misunderstanding your comment but; the general principle isn't to have 20 windows open on one workspace at any given time. It's to be able to navigate through different work-spaces or views quite easily. I rarely have more than 4 windows open on a workspace and the average is 1 or 2. You can also layer tiles quite easily at-least in i3 (and also make it so that certain programs always run in a floating mode)
You seem to have already made your mind up and as long as you're happy with the setup you use then that's great. Power to you, and look; I also get it. It boils down to the reputation that these communities tend to build because the loudest among them are/or can come across as self-satisfied narcs. Arch folk will narc on everyone else for not using arch, vim folk will narc on anyone who uses a more conventional text editor, linux users in general vs mac/windows.
I find it great but I'm under no illusion that widespread adoption of TWMs would usher in a new era of computing "productivity", I personally find them great for a great deal of what I use them for, I'd maybe argue that my "productivity" is higher because I can blitz through different workspaces on my multi monitor setup. But for me it's more enjoyable to use and curbs distractions (Struggle massively with ADHD so having easy control over where windows are and are not is amazing)
I also use Gnome on my laptop and I love that also (can not understate how great gnomes touch screen support is)
If ya ever feel like dipping your toes in (again if you've already tried) Check out Manjaros i3wm community build, comes with pretty great prebuilt configs, amazing documenation and a lot of quality of life features that might help ease you in. But again, you do you. If ya do have any q's or doubts hit me up at NIXON#9431 on discord and I'd be glad to help.
sick sony pvm btw
TWM are more for people who do not use a lot of GUI apps in their workflow. Mostly geard for developers and sysadmins. TWM is by no means targeted to the average user to begin with. Great thing about linux is you can have a desktop environment and a TWM depending on what you are doing that day. You can have multiple window managers installed at the same time.
I like having a window manager installed alongside my desktop environment, you get all the benefits of imagining you will manage to finally reach the perfect configuration while always being able to safely fall back to something less keyboard friendly but also something that doesn't inspire lengthy and distracting customization sessions.
I've got so infatuated with the VIM's approach to shortcuts, and it was so revolutionary to me, that I needed it in my normal UI experience. I've configured the crap out of AwesomeWM, and after using it for about 5 years, the shortcuts are just second nature - I don't think how to go to a certain workspace (well, tags in the awesomewm world) - the fingers just do the job. In my mind, the only downside during 5 years - there were some breaking updates in awesomeWM were i had to rewrite large chunks of the configs.
Also - you don't necessarily have to configure the stock tiling wm. if you find something close to what you want (and there are a crapton of them) - just use the default.
Switching from DEs into customized window managers is changing into a new paradigm, that emphasizes freedom. Much like when you build your own house in which YOU want to live, when you individuate and leave your parents house. Yes, building your own house takes a little time and effort, but that is YOUR house adjusted to YOUR preferences and values. And you do it once.
> And you do it once.
Actually no. As well as with house which you built yourself, you continue to build it all the time you live in it. But that's a part of pleasure :)
Regolith Desktop Environment combines i3-gaps and GNOME, making system management easy.
Nice plug lol. Btw I love regolith its my daily driver keep up the good work!
I think this depends a lot on the use case. For someone whose workflow primarily involves programming (particularly through the terminal through bash/vim/etc.), tiling window managers are a lot more efficient, since you pretty much don't need to use a mouse. I particularly like that Alt+j/k on i3 allows you to shift context to an open window on another monitor without you ever having to take your hands off the keyboard. EDIT: The learning curve for me was nonexistent because I was very comfortable with Alt+j/k and Alt+Arrow Keys from having used vim and terminator for pretty much as long as I can remember. For someone without this background, the time to adapt to this environment will obviously be longer.
I think it's a case of using the right tool for the job. I would not want to edit a video/image using a tiling WM, since I'm mainly using my mouse. But for terminal-heavy workflows, I think they make a lot of sense.
EDIT 2: It is possible to have multiple WMs/DMs. Yes, sometimes they conflict, but I've had a backup XFCE environment for a long time whenever I'm giving a talk/presenting something. Just use the most appropriate environment for the job.
If someone is playing games then they should first stop *playing* before getting into _productivity_ . Fix yourself before seeking _Nirvana_ .
I'm a developer and when I'm developing my i3 environment is perfect for my productivity. Most of IDE, Terminal, Text Editors ... I can control using the keyboard and with multiples workspaces, it's absolute awesome. However, when I'm not coding but just using the computer for other things I like to switch for my normal desktop environment.
I can recommend the desktop environment Regolith as a DE with a tiling windows manager that is easy to install and does not require configurations. It uses Ubuntu and i3/rofi and ubuntu settings menus, and it is preconfigured, as in it is not ugly and everything works.
This is exactly the reason i started using it, as i just needed a quick OS to install on my new pc before university. It has been working out for me, and i have pushed it onto 4 other people who are all very happy with the tiling windows manager experience. They haven't had to configure anything at all, so for them as new users it has been a great.
I don't know man, I love this channel but this feels like an april fools video. I still use bspwm since you made a video on it (before that, i3-gaps) At work i even just use tmux over a remote ssh session. I dont know about your computer usage, but for me most things I do are usecases that work perfectly well in tiled terminal windows: neovim for text editing, weechat for irc, cmus for music, mpv for videos, both vifm and shell commands (cp/mv/rm/etc) for file management and finally I still stick with qutebrowser for webbrowsing (which is probably where I spent most of my time on the home computer, it's not perfect but it works well enough). But I must say it seems ironic that all the tiling wm people on unixporn for example typically put their neofetch on a floating window :v)
but yeah sure can t get fucking steam to work on my void linux so i still dual boot but games are degenerate anyway.
I know a lot of people would think the same way, but I thought it was important that someone criticized tiling WMs (apart from Xahlee, whose critique was basically "i used a tiling wm for an hour and they're shit). I still think they're great for when you mostly use command line (devops, sysops, text editing).
I have same thoughts, Wolfgang! I've found the look of the tiling wm tidy. I went for i3wm but at the end I felt somewhat limited. Then I've found that I can easily tile on KDE with Super+arrows or PgUp, use multiple desktops for different workflows (Super+F1:F4), _plus_ I can use the mouse whenever I want. Whatever I wanted a tiling WM for, I've found key bindings in KDE and in the apps themselves.
I know that there might be some for whom that might be insufficient, but that's why we love Linux - everyone can find a distro and window manager they personally like.
Apparently some people have gotten Plasma to work with i3. I'm not sure how much effort it takes or if it's still possible but it seems like it would be pretty cool
I used KDE for a while, and the ease of customization was great. But one thing I never got over was that you cannot change workspaces on only one monitor at a time with KWin.
@@kraftykactus1028It's still possible but there are better options than changing the Window Manager.
2:46 you have to do that ONLY ONCE!
When I first heard about tilers my first thought was “wait you mean that thing I always try to force my computer to do anyways”. the tiling in floating WMs/DEs is at best limited to halves and quarters of the full screen and is a massive pain to use compared to using a tiling wm. If you're mostly going to be using tiled windows anyways, it makes sense to use a window manager that's built to do that.
Additionally, in most tilers moving/resizing windows can be done easily with the keyboard, or by holding the mod key (either alt or super usually) and left or right clicking and dragging for moving and resizing respectively. I know for a fact this works in i3, which you specifically said was difficult to resize windows due to the hit box, but if you had used mod+rclick that problem would have gone away.
If you have a multimonitor setup, a tiling wm is indispensible. Going to dwm was a sigh of relief.
Love ur channel pic
In glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. Initially when I first found out about standalone tiling window managers I though, well this is great, you have everything in front of you and you can utilise screen space better. But I quickly realised, especially now I'm getting into emacs the usage can be horrific without mouse, worse most GUI applications assume you have a certain amount of screen space to use and won't put and effort into crushing and contracting down menus and sidebars that are bigger and more in depth with the icons and text. What you're left with is a tiny box of the part of the app you will use most, extremely difficult to read and use comfortably, and you end up just wanting to close other Windows or expand the current one further. It's also complicated by the fact that the ruling assumes a comfortable regular grid where everything is either a split of the main or a sub window or something that fills empty space. This makes it horrific to manage non regular grids because there is no way without first focusing the window you want to modify with your mouse or if you are lucky enough a text jumper like easy motion or ace jump. Plus the fact that many desktop environments natively support a light form of tiling at least on a temporary basis but not the other way round means why should you ever make the switch. If you even consider the switch the likes of tmux and emacs will probably be your go to first... The more and more I think about a GUI applications and window managers the more I think we really need a scalable GUI that can be expanded with features of 3rd party apps instead of standalone apps with standalone windows. That way we would have less need for either window manger...
Lol, rant over...
7:15, fortunataly i know this clip, and was able to turn the volume down... I also live in a russian speaking country, I don't have a door, use speakers and my parents are home. Can you please put on a loud warning next time.
thanks for the clarification. I was really wondering about GUI applications, since most demos of tiling WM only show you nice arrangements of terminals
If you use 24 terminal at once is fantastic but for rest of us, they suck.
@@hernanpangia7593 Why?
@@michaelrose5242 Most daily apps you need to use are mouse-driven, and the shortcut of all of them are totally different from each other. You end up jumping from keyboard to mouse more often. You have to spend too many days configuring every app to standardize the shortcuts. In fact you could tile some windows in Gnome and you have both worlds. Is my opinion, nothing more.
@@hernanpangia7593 lmao, you literally only need to configure your wm once and from now to the end of time you'll have a workflow tailored to your exact specifications
Openbox golden mean between tiling WM and DE
I agree
I wish but how can you with one key binding rearrange all open floating apps to a dwm layout for example? I set up many keybindings to change the focused app layout in my openbox but they change only the layout of the focused app, not all at once. Or I missed something on how Openbox keybindings work.
Wanna know something ironic? I use a WM (vanilla i3wm to be exact) because of the embedded capability to configure it to use your whole mouse buttons bindings to control screen (by default: click 1 on bar for focus, click 2 on bar to close, click 3 on bar to toggle floating mode -dock/undock-, scroll - click 4 and 5 - on bar to control tabbed/piled windows. And my modifications: click 8 - back - on screen to toogle border, click 9 - forward - on window to toggle fullscreen, click 8 and 9 on border to take screenshot (of screen or of window respectively). Granted, took me 2 hours of learning and set-up the first time, but I already have my config file ready to go and now I can replicate my whole environment in all distros I tested within 5 to 15 minutes (depending the package manager and my familiarity).
Not to mention my setup already include the capability of automatically controlling windows on events (i.e. udev scripts help me open apps and lock/unlock my whole PC), on logs (i.e. a script that monitor a synergy log to change the workspace, window and/or screen when entering or levaing a certain screen, configure it correctly and you can set it up to fullscreen a video, show a certain workspace and/or swap between VMs/RDP/VNC windows seamlessly) and on API calls (i.e. zoiper ready to take focus when I receive a call), something that I found pretty difficult to do in regular stacking DEs due to the lack of direct interfacing with terminal commands (yes, I admit this could be achieved in other DEs, but I never found a straightforward way simply using bash).
So with that in mind, here are my counterarguments:
Reason 1 - Granted, WMs take too much time and effort *at first* . Once you get the hang of it, you can get to replicate your environment in a matter of minutes by installing some apps and copying (or stright up just modifying) a couple of files (even less if you work in automating this process). And as an extra, *you get to know the background not only on what of everything your WMs - and eventually your PC - does and what it can do* .
Reason 2 - Steep learning curve may be a downer to some, but ask a VIM user if it's not worth it in the end. This same principle apply to most (if not all) WMs. And again, about mouse usage, read my first paragraph. Sometimes it can enhance your experience to have a mouse, or even better a touchscreen (integrate a on-screen keyboard - like "onboard" - and "touchegg" with i3msg commands and you're set to have a beautifully organized way to get a tiled tablet experience).
Reason 3 - GUI looks like crap *if you don't take the time to configure your display properly* . Get to read how to manually set DPI using xrandr (and in your DM if any), how to set to floating mode alert screens (or even better, how to tile them to use a section of your screen) and you'll eventually get to script any layout your want to use to your needs (i.e. 4K monitors looks great with a 192 dpi, while at 1080p a 96 dpi, at 1366x768 (a laptop monitor) a 72 dpi, and at 720p a 64 dpi basically maintain the same aspect ratio and looks practically equivalent, so if your GUI looks like crap, is your own responsibility to get it fixed.. or don't, remember most people that go for a WM do it in the basis of productivity, so looks may not be as important in the end). Also,
Reason 4 - Back to my reason 2 counter-argument, the experience can be great with a mouse (and touchscreen, and to add, even with a controller). Also, that apart from the fact there are alternative daily use apps that control great with just a keyboard,a remeber there are usually shortcuts and plugins (i.e. Vimium on Chrome/Chromium) to get use of most apps with only a keyboard.
Reason 5 - Window arranging is literally nothing else than a familiarity issue, once you get the hang on how to tile windows you can do it just as (if not more) effectivelly as any other DE (and honestly kind of disappointing on you using this as it'sin principle the same argument most people use for avoiding try Linux in the first place).
Reason 6 - Just as in reason 1, granted, but manual intervention is part of the fun. Honestly, to cite an example, Steam Keyboard window integrates and works the best in a properly configured i3wm environment than in any other.
Reason 7 - Alt+Tab is literally just a binding and window overview depends entirelly on you. Well configured transparency compositor can make wonders to keep you aware on everything open.
Reason 8 - Picture in Picture can be achieved pretty easily *by tiling* , or even better *by floating* certain apps (qutebrowser for PIP functonality scales beautifully).
Reason 9 - The very fact you consider tabbing capabilities a weakness because most apps already implement a version of this is certainly a biased observation and a non-argument, so no need to counter-argue this.
So yeah, just wanted to leave my input here... You may have a point on me not being more productive by using it though, because to be honest I just get to a point were all my job as an admin can be done in minutes (and even seconds) thanks to scripting alone, but I sure do enjoy using it very much (to the point I migrated all my PCs to i3wm for my default session in all my machines).
Oh, and as a final demonstration, let me show you a brief demonstration on how I use i3wm with only a mouse just as described in this wall of text (for borders, fullscreen, media control and window movement): imgur.com/a/GDvyx22 (sorry for the delay between click and action for playback. It's due to overload - VM, obs, chrome and qutebrowser youtube running at the same time in a laptop on battery -. The event basically immediate with obs off -also note that any key that appeared was due to xdotool scripting to control youtube screen-).
PD: My here described own DE replacement is still a work in progress, but I feel I may release it in a couple months when I get it to be "mature" enough. Either way, by getting to know bash and i3blocks you may get better results than anything I could have accomplished.
-Watched from a qutebrowser windowed fullscreen under i3wm controlled with a custom i3bar block.
For newbies, yes it's difficult at first, I remember my first experience, it was difficult, especially coming from the latest macbook with the huge trackpad, ahh bliss, but then I slowly got used to it and now I can't do regular GUI anymore... I'm more productive on a tiling window manager, I use i3-gaps, gives me a zen like feel.
You mentioned the main issue is to do with configuration, when I install arch + i3-gaps + compton + oh-my-zsh, it takes me around 20 minutes, and you can easily spend more than that with gnome-tweaks and so on. It all varies really, I mean I've been doing this for 2 years now, so a newcomer might find it difficult.
But always remember, the best GUI/wm/DE is the one that you like.
"I mean I've been doing this for 2 years now" must be nice shaving off 2 years for 1 hour gain.
The paradigm of being able to control your computer with keyboard only is the one thing that Linux has sadly stepped away from - while Windows, to this day, can be fully controlled via keyboard without ever touching a mouse.
1. "Configuration is difficult" I configured it once, put my configs up on github, and now I just git clone to get my entire desktop environment set up. These configs only require a couple basic extra programs that I can install in once command. With other DEs, I need to spend more time setting them up.
2. "to even benefit from keyboard features you have to learn all the other console/keyboard driven apps" The benefit from keyboard shortcuts on your window manager isn't lost the moment you have to switch to your mouse. It's not all or nothing. Lots of apps already have keyboard driven navigation that you could learn that are entirely separate from i3. I have bad RSI in my wrists and it's a life-saver for me.
3. I don't have keyboard shortcut conflicts because I use the super key for the WM.
Exactly my thoughts lol
if you use primarily text/keyboard based apps: use text/keyboard centered tools
if you use primarily gui apps: use mouse centered tools
Try Pop_OS! 20.04 LTS.....Desktop environment, BUT with Tiling Windows :)
The only complaint is that nothing else integrates well with tiling window managers and that you spend forever attempting to create the perfect setup.
I watched the video because I honestly had a very great time using i3 so far (one and a half years, I'd say). There are a lot of valid points made (especially considering that I for example only rarely edit the config, and do some of the same stuff again and again), however, I do think that the basic idea is worth further extending. For example, the tiling wm should not put the new application in a predetermined place, but should rather both take optimal window sizes (as requested by the applications) and recorded user actions ("user put that kind of window into floating mode last time") into consideration.
In general, most of what I use is the terminal (I don't use a graphical file manager, `ls`, `cd` and friends are usually more than enough) and my web browser, which in turn has a vim keyboard mapping add on installed, which works very well for most non-app pages, or simpler app-pages.
It also feels nicer to have vim be more application like, because I can do the splits the same way I do them everywhere else (of course syncing everything with the X clipboard)
If you don't want to learn a ton of keyboard shortcuts, there's no point on trying out a tilling window manager. That's the whole central idea of using them instead of the floating ones.
There are dynamic window managers.
@@MarkHobbes Yeah
This is the reaction of everyone who can't bother to learn dwm
or people who don't have time to waste.
@@aneeshprasobhan To be clear, I was joking but it does come from a true place. I don't know what it's like for everybody else but I know C; and dwm (and a lot of other software with a similar "too hard to learn reputation") has amazingly written C so setting it up and getting used to it took about a day for me iirc. I understand the argument of investing too much time not being worth it but I'm pretty sure most people (and definitely everybody who is tech inclined enough to have heard of a tiling window manager) spends enough time on a computer for the learning investment to be worth it in the long run (long being pretty relative here anyway)
Regard to learning a bunch of keybinding for all programs, that's not true, you only have to learn the specific keybindings you set for you WM and the vim keybindings, everything basically works around those keybindings. Also, I agree with you that WM users still have to use the mouse but the time saving using keybindings for a lot of tasks is huge. On the other hand, I think programs like sxhkd could bring a lot of benefits of the keybinding to DE users without the headaches of editing a lot of config files.
Fair video. I still wholly prefer a tiling wm to a DE, but the points presented were fair.
The point most important seems to be convenience. I think it boils down to a degrees of control a user wants over their desktop experience. More control means the user is going to have to devote more time to their desktop. Less control ootb, means more convenience. In a standard DE you use the system how someone (that wasn't you) intended it to be used. You can change it, ofc, but then that would mean spending _time_ configuring again. This is all stuff you know though, I'm sure;)
Def thought your point on power management was important. Something that has always been somewhat spotty for Linux, in general, but so much more noticeable in a tiling wm. I generally always pull in Xfce4 suite of settings and their power manager with whatever I run , because it seems to work best. Much better than just using dpms and xset alone.
Also, I use bspwm and alt-tab works for me there (changing window size and placement is also easy with bspwm). Rofi, also can show you what windows you have open and quickly change to them.
Anyways, great video man. Really is good food for thought. Much appreciated. Cheers🙂
it wasn't a "fair video" he compared apples to oranges, the fact that at the beginning he he said that we dont really have TWM based DE -s, and then has done the comparison anyways, would be analogous to
I know that this v12 engine is just an engine, ..., I cant travel with this v12 engine as with my porsche
for a long time i would have strongly disagreed with this video.
recently i have come to a conclusion, that no matter how hard i try to configure my window manager, i will never come close to creating a desktop experience better than team of UI developers who actually know their stuff.
7:50 mod key plus right click drag
The one thing I missed when I used i3 was not being able to minimise windows, which is something I always use on windows.
That's actually a point that I never thought about!
I tend to have only the applications I use currently opened, so it makes absolute sense for me to use a lot of different workspaces instead of minimizing anything. If I really need to minimize something, I'll put it in a stack of a tab, that way it's still here, but still hidden away. Or I'll even keep whatever in the background and have the main application in a floating window instead.
How can you say something so controversial yet so brave
for views and comments
@@yoshi314 Well thats a little ridiculous to claim
@@yoshi314 speaking about Linux and window managers.... For clicks and views... Sure because half the people on the internet is always consuming that
@@Keyshooter i meant, having a controversial opinion is what always begets attention.
Where is the controversy in not liking something? You should go to r/woosh
You can also mix and match a tiling WM with a DE for the best of both worlds if you don't like the limitations of standalone WMs.
Number one reason to not use tiling WMs: You can have the same functionality with stacking WM without having to read any documentation.
ummm... don't want to deal with config files or learning how to configure things the way you like it best.... phh.. might as well use Winblows...
I'm perfectly fine with config files if there's a benefit to using them. For me the amount of tinkering you have to do to set everything up is not worth the output.
i use a tiling wm purely because i enjoy it :)
1. With regard to screenlock, on a DE I can have to spend 10 minutes on finding how to disable all that automatic screenlocking nonsense! I do that myself when I want it.
2. The downside of a GUI-app is that you have to do it every time again, a lot of work. You set a tiling window manager once and then you are done with it.
Advantages and disadvantages to both. I am waiting for something in between. How I use KDE gets close to how you use a tiling window manager. Hell, I even use SpaceFM which basically is a tiled file-manager. By far the best overlooked filemanager, more people should look at it. I think that tiling window managers can be very nice for people who need to use a lot of windows on a multiple monitors. For example for video-editing, coding or engineers who have to read papers and write articles at the same time and then have some screen-estate to write some code...It is convenient when you can set up sessions that programs open on the same workspace on the same monitor every time, isn't it?
In my experience the learning curve for a TWM doesn't seem to be that bad. I find it effective to learn features of the wm as you use them instead of trying to brute force memorize the shortcuts.
Now that it's just muscle memory for me, I'm not thinking about the shortcuts as I'm moving windows around. It feels more like I just think how I want my windows laid out, and they just do it.
Besides, we're linux users. We're all about learning curves haha
I've found that a stacking window manager with some very basic tiling functions activated with a keyboard shortcut is the best of both worlds. Most of the time I work in a maximized window of something or another, and every now and then it's nice to automatically tile a bunch of terminals for viewing diagnostics of running processes. FWIW IceWM is my go-to example of this type of system.
Okay, Straight up answer: Tiling WMs aren't for everyone, and that is fine.
I use both - xfwm on desktop, and i3 on laptop.
I love tiling WMs on laptops, because i don't have to move my hand back and forth in order to do stuff, it's right there, on the keyboard, however my mouse is near my desktop keyboard, so it isn't that much of an issue on the desktop.
You can still get a keyboard driven workflow with a DE. It was a while ago, but back when I had my old thinkpad, I had it setup so I could do everything with the keyboard in xfce.
I completely agree with the video. Keyboard centric is a myth. You are mostly on your browser these days, which means that you are using your mouse all day.
Small counterpoint to Reason 5: I actually agree that re-arranging, moving, and resizing windows is a chore. That is precisely why I prefer my window manager to make those decisions for me, rather than have a floating mess of windows all over the place that I need to manipulate myself.
It is, of course, possible to run every app in fullscreen. In such a case, it does not matter too much whether you do app switching with workspaces or by clicking on a dockbar icon. In fact, I use Sway on my laptop with Waybar, and I can do both of those things. What I like more is that I can define which programs can open on which workspaces, and I can even make them autostart there. My swayconf contains exact instructions on where windows should be opened. When I login to Sway, all my windows are already laid out in the appropriate workspace. And some workspaces have tiled layouts to let me view multiple windows (again pre-defined).
I would think that such a setup actually saves me a LOT of time. :)
Also Sway makes window resizing and rearranging with mouse easy. The hitbox is not tiny like i3. You can also set whatever border size you want, if you want an even bigger hitbox.
I will say, however, that I use XFCE on my desktop because I am dealing with multiple monitors, and am still using X11 there because of Wayland issues with stuff like screen recording (as my desktop is used for streaming via OBS, this can be a dealbreaker).
I don't agree with "any real gain in productivity". When i first switched to MacOS from Linux (i was using sway tiling wm), my wrists started hurting after a couple days. Installing Amethyst worked like wonders. I find it tiring to move windows with a mouse and press ALT+TAB multiple times to find the window i am trying to focus.
By the way you can make Alt+Tab work in i3. No overview functionality though. (they both work flawlessly on mac with amethyst obviously)
I find gui apps look a lot better and aesthetic in tiling wm's without their top bar and they aligned perfectly.
Lastly learning to use i3 just took 10 minutes or so for me. One shortcut for switching workspaces, one for moving windows between workspaces, one for bringing up dmenu and one for closing windows. That's mostly enough.
* You can set closing windows to CTRL+W or ALT+F4 so no need to remember that.
* Moving/Switching is just ALT+(number) and ALT+SHIFT+(number). It becomes second nature after a couple minutes.
So i guess i don't agree with any of these points :D But it was good to hear why people might not enjoy a tiling wm from someone who tried it.
And the upvotes? What about them?
UPDATE: Ive ditched GNOME behind, now i use qtile
I've heard that WindowMaker screenshots get a lot of them too
Tiling Window Manager helped me a lot on my programming life.
If you have no life and want to take control of your system, then the time invested in configuring your system is worth imo.
Define life. Some people like to waste their time getting shitfaced in a pub and call that life, while others like to spend time and money in malls and call that life. Life is very subjective. One man's food is another man's poison.
@@ashwinrawat9622 Better than be antissocial.
For most tiling wm users, it's all about the fun of it, not about usability and productivity. It's for fun.
Well. Actually if you want to save a lot of configuration time with tiling wms, there is Manjaro i3. Really great stuff
Ah, this is the comment I didn't know I was looking for. Thanks!
@@hugofontes5708 enjoy the best distro I've ever come across!