Tiling Window Managers suck. Here's why

*in my humble opinion

MUSIC:
Intro: Queens of the Stone Age - No One Knows (UNKLE Reconstruction)
Video: Femme en Fourrure - Smell

[jan]

9 months ago: My i3wm Workflow
8 months ago: Virgin i3 vs. Chad BSPWM
2 months ago: Tiling Window Managers suck. Here's why

[georgesmith]

user with 16core cpu, 32gb mem: "I installed wm because it is lightweight"

[saber]

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.

[SohelAman]

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.

[papabones]

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.

[mentalmarvin]

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.

[nobu]

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!

[kyledailey]

*Best are Hybrid of both. Just add an on/off switch from whatever manager you have.*

[someoneunqualified]

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

[vlad.the.impaler.]

0:53 the myth, the man, the legend himself

[EdLrandom]

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.

[MrToxicSausage]

I really like pop-shell with gnome. I get the benefits of a “just werks” desktop environment and the efficiency of tiling windows.

[Keyshooter]

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

[Pakanahymni]

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.

[Dareeude]

7:49 under i3, you can hold down mod and use right-button to resize and the cursor will snap to the edge

[rafajsp]

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 productive with it. Perfect.

[aryanadiazcakasana]

i need that uncensored thumbnail picture..

[iLiokardo]

7:20 You can hold the mod key and drag with left/right click to move/resize the windows.

[DevilDead]

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.

[vit.c.]

Reason 6: - Java and Wine ahave problems in EVERY WM. Not only in TWM. It's becasue funny Java.