I’ve been mainly using swaywm, but the design of this is unique and charming, so I’m going to give it a try.
I’ve used tiling extensions for Gnome 3 before, and none of them have ever been fully satisfactory, because they have too much fighting to do with the way Gnome wants to do things. But this seems to be a different and more comprehensive approach.
i switched from gnome to xfce just so i could continue to use a proper tiling wm. i’m surprised no one ever made a good tiling extension for gnome, but i guess it just goes against the grain of how gnome is designed or implemented.
This is a really cool idea for a small widescreen laptop, where tiling left-to-right is desirable, but tiling top-to-bottom results in windows too short to be useful.
The first tiling window manager I ever used was Ion, which unfortunately ended up in a debate between the author and distro maintainers over distributing modified and/or outdated versions of the software under the same name. Similar debates keep popping up even today.
After Ion, I tried other alternatives such as awesome and wmii, but it wasn’t the same. Today I just use whatever window manager happens to be installed, with hotkeys to navigate to whichever window is above/below/left of/right of the currently focused window (https://github.com/cout/windowfocus). This works for me on the desktop, but I might have to try PaperWM next time I’m using linux on my laptop (I particularly like the scratch layer – Ion had a separate untiled workspace instead).
iirc PaperWM started as a fork of ion3 and then they rewrote it so you might find some roots there. I’ve personally tried tons of tiling WMs but I couldn’t find a replacement for the joy of manually splitting + tabs that ion3 gave.
Then I migrated to notion which you might enjoy (https://github.com/raboof/notion) as it’s a fork of Ion3 with fixes/improvements after Tuomov dropped development. A new version is going to be released soon without Ion’s licensed code, so hopefuly distros will be willing to adopt it :)
ion3 was a good window manager, but the maintainer was difficult to get along with.
i3wm is an entirely new window manager based on the ion3 model of subdividing windows (as opposed to the awesome/dwm model of automatically resizing all the windows when a new one appears), and it’s pretty great. I personally use it in combination with GNOME Flashback (so I have all the GNOME goodies like volume-control keys and disk automounting).
I really like a lot of i3wm’s features, but I literally can’t live without key chorded full screen zoom and, while I know that integrating compiz or the like is possible, I’m not sure how to achieve it, so I went back to running KDE/Gnome.
Frustrating that the install seems so dicey on Ubuntu though. The solution is basically to create a stock non Ubuntu login session and use that with PaperWM. I think I’m gonna try advocating for Ubuntu to make their desktop icons more easily disabled, because I NEVER use them and find them to be a nuisance anyway.
None of the cited work-arounds actually work on modern Ubuntu. Definitely seems like an awesome project but also very definitely rough around the edges and perhaps not for the faint of heart :)
If you figured it out, they might appreciate your help. It’s possible they added those instructions/workarounds at the behest of others, and don’t actually run ubuntu themselves..
Yeah. This is the kind of use case which will compel me to keep my current laptop when I next upgrade. Short of a full bore system re-install, I get gunshy about experimenting with configuration changes that could potentially be invasive, and this definitely falls into that category.
Sure, ultimately I know it’s all stored in dot files and the like, and if those were ~/.bashrc or ~/.vimrc class dot files I’d feel better about hand managing their state, but they’re not and I don’t, so contributions of this nature will have to wait, and by then maybe some other brave soul with a backup system will beat me to the punch :)
I hope that one day the Linux desktop will move in the direction Fedora SilverBlue has been exploring - desktop userspaces are just a container you can back up , restore, throw away, fork etc.
I’ve been mainly using swaywm, but the design of this is unique and charming, so I’m going to give it a try.
I’ve used tiling extensions for Gnome 3 before, and none of them have ever been fully satisfactory, because they have too much fighting to do with the way Gnome wants to do things. But this seems to be a different and more comprehensive approach.
i switched from gnome to xfce just so i could continue to use a proper tiling wm. i’m surprised no one ever made a good tiling extension for gnome, but i guess it just goes against the grain of how gnome is designed or implemented.
Which tiled wm do you use with XFCE? I’ve heard of people doing that but never figured it out myself.
xmonad - it has an integrate-with-xfce config file you can use. i’ve also used mate + i3 but i prefer xmonad because it has persistent workspaces.
This is a really cool idea for a small widescreen laptop, where tiling left-to-right is desirable, but tiling top-to-bottom results in windows too short to be useful.
The first tiling window manager I ever used was Ion, which unfortunately ended up in a debate between the author and distro maintainers over distributing modified and/or outdated versions of the software under the same name. Similar debates keep popping up even today.
After Ion, I tried other alternatives such as awesome and wmii, but it wasn’t the same. Today I just use whatever window manager happens to be installed, with hotkeys to navigate to whichever window is above/below/left of/right of the currently focused window (https://github.com/cout/windowfocus). This works for me on the desktop, but I might have to try PaperWM next time I’m using linux on my laptop (I particularly like the scratch layer – Ion had a separate untiled workspace instead).
iirc PaperWM started as a fork of ion3 and then they rewrote it so you might find some roots there. I’ve personally tried tons of tiling WMs but I couldn’t find a replacement for the joy of manually splitting + tabs that ion3 gave.
Then I migrated to notion which you might enjoy (https://github.com/raboof/notion) as it’s a fork of Ion3 with fixes/improvements after Tuomov dropped development. A new version is going to be released soon without Ion’s licensed code, so hopefuly distros will be willing to adopt it :)
Edit: typos
Been using notion full time for a while, it’s great. I’ve been using ion since ~ion2’s release. Long lived software is wonderful.
ion3 was a good window manager, but the maintainer was difficult to get along with.
i3wm is an entirely new window manager based on the ion3 model of subdividing windows (as opposed to the awesome/dwm model of automatically resizing all the windows when a new one appears), and it’s pretty great. I personally use it in combination with GNOME Flashback (so I have all the GNOME goodies like volume-control keys and disk automounting).
I really like a lot of i3wm’s features, but I literally can’t live without key chorded full screen zoom and, while I know that integrating compiz or the like is possible, I’m not sure how to achieve it, so I went back to running KDE/Gnome.
Frustrating that the install seems so dicey on Ubuntu though. The solution is basically to create a stock non Ubuntu login session and use that with PaperWM. I think I’m gonna try advocating for Ubuntu to make their desktop icons more easily disabled, because I NEVER use them and find them to be a nuisance anyway.
None of the cited work-arounds actually work on modern Ubuntu. Definitely seems like an awesome project but also very definitely rough around the edges and perhaps not for the faint of heart :)
If you figured it out, they might appreciate your help. It’s possible they added those instructions/workarounds at the behest of others, and don’t actually run ubuntu themselves..
Yeah. This is the kind of use case which will compel me to keep my current laptop when I next upgrade. Short of a full bore system re-install, I get gunshy about experimenting with configuration changes that could potentially be invasive, and this definitely falls into that category.
Sure, ultimately I know it’s all stored in dot files and the like, and if those were ~/.bashrc or ~/.vimrc class dot files I’d feel better about hand managing their state, but they’re not and I don’t, so contributions of this nature will have to wait, and by then maybe some other brave soul with a backup system will beat me to the punch :)
I hope that one day the Linux desktop will move in the direction Fedora SilverBlue has been exploring - desktop userspaces are just a container you can back up , restore, throw away, fork etc.