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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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    • there’s the “add tiling features to a DE” path – Pop Shell / Cosmic DE is the best known, but KDE has some pretty decent options and there’s a couple Python scripts (at various stages of readiness) for Xfce
    • or the “add a DE to a tiling window manager” – Regolith is the best known here (basically swapping i3 for Mutter), but along those lines it’s “relatively” easy to swap out window managers in the desktop of your choice (i3 + Xfce being an easy choice)



  • “not everything is fully ported yet”

    “There will probably be an awkward period before all of these pieces are in place for all of the people.”

    I think these are the two key takeaways – Wayland is still in development and the bandwagoning are the early adopters – most of us will switch when our distros switch (and will probably be none the wiser)

    the problems (and the reason we’re suffering through sensationalist stuff like “Wayland breaks everything!”) is the fanboy push to switch before it’s ready – not everybody lives on the bleeding edge (just like not everyone runs Arch) and the “switch now or be left behind” attitude does more harm than good (far more likely to alienate than convert) …


    • a big feature of tiling window managers is the auto-placement / auto-adjustment / auto-sizing of windows to fit available space
      • their main focus is always having everything visible (nothing hidden behind overlaps)
      • and most of them take advantage of having a good set of keybinds so everything can be keyboard driven rather than half-and-half with a mouse
    • before jumping feet first into tiling window managers, get an easy introduction with
      • Pop Shell – an extension that adds tiling features to Gnome
      • PaperWM adds linear tiling to Gnome
      • Material Shell – focusing on a more grid based workspace model
    • DistroTube argued that the killer feature of tiling window managers is the workspaces, not the tiling
    • check through the hotkeys of your current window manager – you won’t get the full dynamic features of a tiling window manager, but most of them have keys for snapping windows to top-half, bottom-half, left-half, right-half (as well as sometimes offering by quarter as well)