Qtile is my favorite window manager too and I’m using it at work. I’m using polybar instead of the standard bar and it works smoothly. Office 365 with Outlook and Teams as web apps and PowerPoint in a Windows 11 virtual machines. Made several videos on my channel.
Why would you use polybar instead of the default qtile bar? It must be as good or better than polybar especially because its already there. Just curious. Thanks.
I can't agree more with you on bars, especially about the widgets. I was a DWM fanboy for a long time, probably around 7 years and I just couldn't bother to configure XMonad from scratch, the way I like to work for me, so I tried Qtile. 2 years later - still using it and loving it. Because I work with python a lot at my job, so to me it was an ideal WM. Still is. For variety of reasons. You can make your own widgets and the bar is very customizable. Everything that you need is just there and if it's not there, you can just import stuff and/or write it at your own and it's pretty easy to do all that, because Python is a very easy programming language to learn, understand and work with. Basically - it's pretty Suckless to me. 😅
The thing with Haskell isn't that it's hard, it's more you've got to know all of the functions which exist and the operators which correspond to them i.e. is fmap which maps a function to a list of values and $ is like parenthesis around parameters etc.
I've just switched to Garuda Linux QTile edition and am finding some useful features. I've changed the default colours in the bar from Garuda's multi-colour bar (was hard on my eyes) and went to a fairly basic colour scheme. Before this I've been using and loving XFCE, but have found my favourite feature of QTile is the "workspaces" functionality. While others have workspaces, I like how QTile does it. When a game starts up I move it to another workspace separate from the one where Steam is running. This allows me to easily get back to Steam and stop the game if the game should freeze, assuming the entire system hasn't frozen. Also, QTile seems to manage memory better, currently I have 14 tabs open in Firefox and this video running and I'm only using 3.4 GB of my system ram, while Linux Mint 21.1 XFCE would slowly increase memory use until you have to reboot. Even without any videos running Firefox in Linux mint would eat up ram, forcing me to reboot every other day, haven't seen it use more than 3.5 GB over a few days in Garuda QTile.
downloaded garuda qtile like a month ago and it was mess. when I logged in after installing, it loaded the default qtile config not using the garuda dotfile. then there was no pywal and many other issues. I think do dont actiely maintain other versions except for the plasma one
@@rikxdragneel5290 my download seems to be good for the configuration, don't know about pywal. I agree, they seem to concentrate more on the Plasma version
Qtile is certainly one of those window managers I'll be using, when I'm finally ready to explore using WMs as part of my workflow. I'd certainly be interested in a video where you develop a Qutile widget!
My config for Qtile is embarrassingly massive. I created and completely rewrote several widgets and layouts, and currently trying to figure out how to make interactive titlebars and window borders to make my dream DE. Some of my changes might even make it into the official repo, if I can clean them up to not break existing configs. At this point, I can't even use KDE Plasma properly because I'm missing my bar and keybindings.
I love Qtile. It's my daily driver wm. A lot of that stems from the fact that I love Python, but also the user-friendliness of the bar. It's jus easier to control than Polybar, for me at least. I have a love-hate relationship with the theming though. It's conceptually easy, but it's also tedious in many ways. I created a dictionary-based theming system that works well, but it would be easier if there were builtin global variables for UI design elements (like 'widget_background_color', instead of a 'background' for each widget).
I really want to start using a wm soon (currently using KDE with Garuda Linux) and the main options I've been thinking of were Sway and Qtile. Since you mentioned i3 has great docs, I will consider it too ^^ Ever since I first saw Qtile I always wanted to give it a go, but my Linux noobery is still too strong haha. Thanks for posting another great video! Good to hear about it positively from the perspective of someone who loves another WM. Do you know if HiDPI scaling works well in WMs? That's been my biggest concern due to small laptop monitor with a 4K resolution, which I can't bear to turn down to 1920x1080 because I just love the extra clarity a bit too much... T_T
My one issue with qtile is that I can’t swap windows around with my mouse, like I can in any other tiling window manager I’ve properly used. As far as I can tell dragging can only ever make the window float which is actually just a dealbreaker. Keyboard control is nice when I’m doing actual work, but sometimes I’m just leaning back playing some games or whatever and having that mouse control is crucial then. Actually does make me sad because aside from that, qtile is easily the best thing I’ve used, I just wish I could use my mouse the way I like. Maybe there is a way and I’m just stupid though, who knows.
I looked at every DE, WM and qtile seems like sonething ill use in future, i love how they support both wayland and x11 and not lock you in id you want to use it like most wms
None of above are compelling reasons for me to leave my i3 configuration and start afresh. If you have many workspaces (like me) why would you care how your windows spawn? You have many workspaces to use those and not 10 windows on one workspace. Same for the pop up windows. Surely you get used to not to close those. And the key binding to restart i3 is ... There. Good documentation and community support is another reason i3 works. And polybar is awesome and well documented and supported as well. I would change if something really better for my use case came up. So far it's much of a muchness with config files in different languages and slightly different philosophies. Fun to play around but for production i3 it is. Awaiting your xmonad adventure. Should be good entertainment...😉
ah, a Microsoft KDE guy with Todoist. I also like C++, and I also like "the crazy guy in the woods". Some of his data handling is Alien to most Desktop Linux users.
yea i love awesomeWM i don't really know anything advanced but i got my config to work out the box and it just works. and i know nothing about programming or any of this stuff. yea i made a I3 config finding stuff i wanted to use. and with i3 i used the extension to have the dynamic like layout, lol so for me no reason to use i3 i got hooked on dynamic tilers from watching DT first. i even recently tried open box just cause i figured i'd rather use a window manager instead of xfce and im not a huge fan i don't really understand the key chord thing and the config layout is a little confusing for me to read and having to manually add your aplications to the menu is hard to remember to keep up with.
In Qtile actually you can configure group/workspace names and key maps independently. But discussing it here is a bit too complicated. Also you probably forgot Key Chords too, which Qtile supports out of the box.
Then then being a wm hopper using sxhkd for a wm that has keybinds built in is kind of stupid :) using it so that all your keybinds follow you from wm to wm is the only reason to use it here.
@@TrueWordsOfEternity sxhkd makes only sense to me, if you don't want to reconfigure the keybindings of the new wm. But that also means you would not take advantage of the builtin functionality, especially for a programming language configuration, like calling functions to move windows, custom functions, looping, using variables and such. Without creating a new process for each key binding. So yes, we both seem to agree. 🙂
@@thingsiplay ya i just switched to qtile but keeping i3 and dwm around cus i do like them 2 as well but i just worked out how to get workspaces working super amazing with qtile they work the same way as i3wm now in the bar and when switching to them i love sticky groups in qtile and the ScratchPad support in qtile is out of this world without needed patches like dwm does :)
I'm gonna have to give qtile a try. I've been looking for a wm that does require me to add a bunch of stuff to make it usable. I prefer to have features built it that need minor tweaking. I break my system and reinstall too much.
Qtile is amazing "if you run one monitor" as soon as you get doing 2 or 3 then not so much i3 has that domain with there amazing support for setting workspaces and programs to sticky to a monitor. DWM can also do a good job at it but you need patches and alot of them. Even after 2 weeks trying to do the same thing with qtile I am gonna give up. I don't like that qtile will put a workspace that I said to go to monitor 2 onto monitor 1 just because I did the keybind to switch to it so it bring it to me instead of taking me to it :)
I think you're not entirely correct about i3 scratchpads. I have keepassxc running in a scratchpad and if I close it, the scratchpad stops working, but to get it back i have to restart keepassxc, not i3 (technically sway). But this doesn't really change the point as i understand, since close keybind should ideally only hide scratchpad. Tbh I'm not really sure if i3 should change this because there should still be a way to close the app and it makes sense to hide scratchpad with the same shortcut you open it with edit: it may actually be possible to bind an app launcher and scratchpad to the same keybind to achieve what qtile does, you just have to handle running a single instance if the app itself doesn't do that. Maybe i'll try it at some point edit: another interesing thing about the bar is fedora sway spin ships with waybar (which is not a part of sway) which was pretty surprising since fedora comes with a very minimal vanilla setup
I have a script called i3kill for this reason. It does i3-msg kill but if it's a scratch pad then it will just ignore the command which is really nice I should just make it use xdotools and just run the scratch pad command if it is one but I'm too lazy for that ATM.
I haven't tried Xmonad yet, and your video is like a "warning signal" about it 😂 being said this, I have to say that Qtile is in my top 3 on WM, mostly for the built-in customization options (the bar is amazing, do you know you can create 3D-like bar with color gradients?) and if you are creative, you can have a lot of fun ricing it... But now I use bspwm and that was an instant crush for me 😂❤
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I give you another challenge if possible: convert entirely into wayland (i.e either use sway or hyprland or any other wayland wm of your choice :P)
"Then i realized I'm not a crazy guy in the woods" man that is classic , great definition of LS
Qtile is my favorite window manager too and I’m using it at work. I’m using polybar instead of the standard bar and it works smoothly. Office 365 with Outlook and Teams as web apps and PowerPoint in a Windows 11 virtual machines. Made several videos on my channel.
Why would you use polybar instead of the default qtile bar? It must be as good or better than polybar especially because its already there. Just curious. Thanks.
Love your videos. Have helped me a ton learning about window managers/ desktop environments. Thanks a ton!
I can't agree more with you on bars, especially about the widgets. I was a DWM fanboy for a long time, probably around 7 years and I just couldn't bother to configure XMonad from scratch, the way I like to work for me, so I tried Qtile.
2 years later - still using it and loving it. Because I work with python a lot at my job, so to me it was an ideal WM. Still is. For variety of reasons. You can make your own widgets and the bar is very customizable. Everything that you need is just there and if it's not there, you can just import stuff and/or write it at your own and it's pretty easy to do all that, because Python is a very easy programming language to learn, understand and work with. Basically - it's pretty Suckless to me. 😅
My favorite wm. I finished a little for myself, and it became amazing. I've been using it for more than a year and I'm not going to change it.
He?
Thank You Matt. It's clear for me : I stay with i3wm, multi-monitors is so easy to manage and Polybar is great.
I totally agree i3 is by far out the box the best for multi monitor support.
I didn’t know about scratchpads, i’ll take a look to that, thanks for the vid Matt!
The thing with Haskell isn't that it's hard, it's more you've got to know all of the functions which exist and the operators which correspond to them i.e. is fmap which maps a function to a list of values and $ is like parenthesis around parameters etc.
Great video, thanks!
I've just switched to Garuda Linux QTile edition and am finding some useful features. I've changed the default colours in the bar from Garuda's multi-colour bar (was hard on my eyes) and went to a fairly basic colour scheme.
Before this I've been using and loving XFCE, but have found my favourite feature of QTile is the "workspaces" functionality. While others have workspaces, I like how QTile does it. When a game starts up I move it to another workspace separate from the one where Steam is running. This allows me to easily get back to Steam and stop the game if the game should freeze, assuming the entire system hasn't frozen.
Also, QTile seems to manage memory better, currently I have 14 tabs open in Firefox and this video running and I'm only using 3.4 GB of my system ram, while Linux Mint 21.1 XFCE would slowly increase memory use until you have to reboot. Even without any videos running Firefox in Linux mint would eat up ram, forcing me to reboot every other day, haven't seen it use more than 3.5 GB over a few days in Garuda QTile.
downloaded garuda qtile like a month ago and it was mess. when I logged in after installing, it loaded the default qtile config not using the garuda dotfile. then there was no pywal and many other issues. I think do dont actiely maintain other versions except for the plasma one
@@rikxdragneel5290 my download seems to be good for the configuration, don't know about pywal.
I agree, they seem to concentrate more on the Plasma version
@@themisterchristie they might have updated it then
honestly the true tiling window manager pipeline is to go from kde/gnome, to xfce, to i3, and then you're doomed
Qtile is certainly one of those window managers I'll be using, when I'm finally ready to explore using WMs as part of my workflow.
I'd certainly be interested in a video where you develop a Qutile widget!
My config for Qtile is embarrassingly massive. I created and completely rewrote several widgets and layouts, and currently trying to figure out how to make interactive titlebars and window borders to make my dream DE. Some of my changes might even make it into the official repo, if I can clean them up to not break existing configs.
At this point, I can't even use KDE Plasma properly because I'm missing my bar and keybindings.
I love Qtile. It's my daily driver wm. A lot of that stems from the fact that I love Python, but also the user-friendliness of the bar. It's jus easier to control than Polybar, for me at least. I have a love-hate relationship with the theming though. It's conceptually easy, but it's also tedious in many ways. I created a dictionary-based theming system that works well, but it would be easier if there were builtin global variables for UI design elements (like 'widget_background_color', instead of a 'background' for each widget).
Hey Matt! This setup looks amazing! Just a quick question, what compositor are you using to get those animations here?
@@helloimatapir I mean yeah, but there are so many forks of picom, each with their own features.
I really want to start using a wm soon (currently using KDE with Garuda Linux) and the main options I've been thinking of were Sway and Qtile. Since you mentioned i3 has great docs, I will consider it too ^^
Ever since I first saw Qtile I always wanted to give it a go, but my Linux noobery is still too strong haha. Thanks for posting another great video! Good to hear about it positively from the perspective of someone who loves another WM.
Do you know if HiDPI scaling works well in WMs? That's been my biggest concern due to small laptop monitor with a 4K resolution, which I can't bear to turn down to 1920x1080 because I just love the extra clarity a bit too much... T_T
For good working scaling use Wayland with Hyprland or SwayWM.
Haven't tried QTile with Wayland, so cant comment on that.
Thanks!
"But then I realised I'm not a crazy guy in the woods"
I think I do prefer qtile over i3. Thanks for the content Matt
I keeped hoping between window managers until I found qtile.
I lost any hope too, when I found Qtile. Just joking about your typo. :D
My one issue with qtile is that I can’t swap windows around with my mouse, like I can in any other tiling window manager I’ve properly used. As far as I can tell dragging can only ever make the window float which is actually just a dealbreaker. Keyboard control is nice when I’m doing actual work, but sometimes I’m just leaning back playing some games or whatever and having that mouse control is crucial then. Actually does make me sad because aside from that, qtile is easily the best thing I’ve used, I just wish I could use my mouse the way I like. Maybe there is a way and I’m just stupid though, who knows.
I'm sticking with i3. Don't want to learn another tiling manager.
I looked at every DE, WM and qtile seems like sonething ill use in future, i love how they support both wayland and x11 and not lock you in id you want to use it like most wms
excellent!
None of above are compelling reasons for me to leave my i3 configuration and start afresh. If you have many workspaces (like me) why would you care how your windows spawn? You have many workspaces to use those and not 10 windows on one workspace. Same for the pop up windows. Surely you get used to not to close those. And the key binding to restart i3 is ... There. Good documentation and community support is another reason i3 works. And polybar is awesome and well documented and supported as well. I would change if something really better for my use case came up. So far it's much of a muchness with config files in different languages and slightly different philosophies. Fun to play around but for production i3 it is. Awaiting your xmonad adventure. Should be good entertainment...😉
ah, a Microsoft KDE guy with Todoist. I also like C++, and I also like "the crazy guy in the woods". Some of his data handling is Alien to most Desktop Linux users.
yea i love awesomeWM i don't really know anything advanced but i got my config to work out the box and it just works. and i know nothing about programming or any of this stuff.
yea i made a I3 config finding stuff i wanted to use. and with i3 i used the extension to have the dynamic like layout, lol so for me no reason to use i3 i got hooked on dynamic tilers from watching DT first.
i even recently tried open box just cause i figured i'd rather use a window manager instead of xfce and im not a huge fan i don't really understand the key chord thing and the config layout is a little confusing for me to read and having to manually add your aplications to the menu is hard to remember to keep up with.
Absolutely love your WM videos. But although I gladly used OpenBox and iceWM, I am nowadays way too spoiled by full desktop environments 😅
In Qtile actually you can configure group/workspace names and key maps independently. But discussing it here is a bit too complicated. Also you probably forgot Key Chords too, which Qtile supports out of the box.
I don't use key chords in qtile. I use sxhkd
Then then being a wm hopper using sxhkd for a wm that has keybinds built in is kind of stupid :) using it so that all your keybinds follow you from wm to wm is the only reason to use it here.
@@TrueWordsOfEternity sxhkd makes only sense to me, if you don't want to reconfigure the keybindings of the new wm. But that also means you would not take advantage of the builtin functionality, especially for a programming language configuration, like calling functions to move windows, custom functions, looping, using variables and such. Without creating a new process for each key binding.
So yes, we both seem to agree. 🙂
@@thingsiplay ya i just switched to qtile but keeping i3 and dwm around cus i do like them 2 as well but i just worked out how to get workspaces working super amazing with qtile they work the same way as i3wm now in the bar and when switching to them i love sticky groups in qtile and the ScratchPad support in qtile is out of this world without needed patches like dwm does :)
the woods are calling
its time to libreboot a ThinkPad with artix linux using dwm
the woods are calling
Hyprland also has some amazing documentation
As someone who only works with python I love qtile and its simplicity.
Same, i3 is goated.
GVM.
There’s woods in Michigan
I'm gonna have to give qtile a try. I've been looking for a wm that does require me to add a bunch of stuff to make it usable. I prefer to have features built it that need minor tweaking. I break my system and reinstall too much.
Qtile is amazing "if you run one monitor" as soon as you get doing 2 or 3 then not so much i3 has that domain with there amazing support for setting workspaces and programs to sticky to a monitor. DWM can also do a good job at it but you need patches and alot of them. Even after 2 weeks trying to do the same thing with qtile I am gonna give up. I don't like that qtile will put a workspace that I said to go to monitor 2 onto monitor 1 just because I did the keybind to switch to it so it bring it to me instead of taking me to it :)
I installed Arcolinux with i3 in a VM, but haven't really gotten to mess with it yet. I need to redo it and give it more space
what is the emoji tool you used in the video
Rofi emoji probably
I think you're not entirely correct about i3 scratchpads. I have keepassxc running in a scratchpad and if I close it, the scratchpad stops working, but to get it back i have to restart keepassxc, not i3 (technically sway). But this doesn't really change the point as i understand, since close keybind should ideally only hide scratchpad. Tbh I'm not really sure if i3 should change this because there should still be a way to close the app and it makes sense to hide scratchpad with the same shortcut you open it with
edit: it may actually be possible to bind an app launcher and scratchpad to the same keybind to achieve what qtile does, you just have to handle running a single instance if the app itself doesn't do that. Maybe i'll try it at some point
edit: another interesing thing about the bar is fedora sway spin ships with waybar (which is not a part of sway) which was pretty surprising since fedora comes with a very minimal vanilla setup
I have a script called i3kill for this reason. It does i3-msg kill but if it's a scratch pad then it will just ignore the command which is really nice I should just make it use xdotools and just run the scratch pad command if it is one but I'm too lazy for that ATM.
Herbstluftwm has the best scratchpads, tell me honestly its not so..
Is it me or does the audio feel out of sync ?
I haven't tried Xmonad yet, and your video is like a "warning signal" about it 😂 being said this, I have to say that Qtile is in my top 3 on WM, mostly for the built-in customization options (the bar is amazing, do you know you can create 3D-like bar with color gradients?) and if you are creative, you can have a lot of fun ricing it... But now I use bspwm and that was an instant crush for me 😂❤
oh boy you can't love them all, can you
Matt is a certified chad for this video, Respect.
Jake will be our savior!
!
This is why I stick to xfce, WM lack of newbie friendly documentation or help lol
There isn't anything wrong with xcfe. Simple and to the point.
DWM has the best docs, it's literally the source code.