I wish someone would make a tiling desktop environment instead of only a window manager to make them easy to use for all without tweaking because they are the future of the DEs.
Looking forward to Cosmic DE from Pop!OS, they’re integrating tiling functionality in it.
https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-de-tiling-redesign-and-libcosmic-rebasing
If you use a distro based on Ubuntu or Debian (like PopOS and others) I recommend Regolith Desktop. You can install it on an existing setup and it’s ready to go out of the box. You can choose it from the login screen like any other desktop environment like GNOME or KDE. The next version will also bring Sway/Wayland support since obviously X is on its way out in the long term.
I really like popOS auto tiling+stacking on gnome, it’s very acessible, you can disable at any time and control most of it just dragging and dropping, even when it fails i usually just pres the key combination two times to reset it, and it organizes itself pretty well.
On KDE side there where some Kwin scripts that did the same, but they always broke on me, i left kde a while ago, so the scenario may be better now.
You can do this yourself very easily. I use xfce with bspwm for example, you just have to remove xfwm from the startup applications and replace it with your wm of choice.
That only works on Xorg though, doesn’t it? /g
xfce and bspwm are both still xorg only afaik. I imagine you should be able to do something similar with wayland and a different de/wm, but I’m not really familiar with wayland.
There is an extention of Gnome called pop-shell that does exactly what you want
Theres a gnome extension for tiling. You can also use i3 with xfce (I like wayland so I stopped using that)
Not perfect, but flakey in places, but it does a lot of what you want, it’s tiled gnome.
It is also a bit ancient, isn’t it?
You can use qtile with gnome
You can use your favorite windowmanager with your favorite Desktop. That said, KDE has tiling capabilities.
You may want to adjust your keyboard
KDE has pretty good tiling functionality these days, not much need in using another WM unless you have a very specific workflow in mind
I once saw a video which showed off the built-in Plasma tiling feature and complained that it could not have been developed by a tiling WM user, since it was very inflexible and mouse focused. He could not use it with a keyboard, which kind of defeats the purpose of tiling in the first place.
I really got my hopes up there because I love how customizable kde is and combining it with i3wm would blow me away
Everyone’s workflow is different and it could very well be that the plasma tiling features weren’t a good match for the author of that video.
My tiling needs are pretty simple and I rarely use anything more complicated than a vertical split.
There were also major changes in the plasma tiling earlier this year so if that video predates the concerns no longer apply.
You’d probably have to give it a try to see if all the features you need nicely work with a keyboard.
I’m using Pop_Os! Since 1.5 years and I basically fell in love with it. I was super annoyed with Gnome not having it and KDE being overkill for my personal use. I’m now using Pop_OS! At home and at work and patently waiting for the coming changes that they’re doing using Rust :)
You can add the same feature to gnome…
