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Comment by vesak | Hacker News Reader

I'm so ready to jump from my i3 setup to Gnome if they get the tiling even half as good as i3's is. Why? Because of Wayland (which gives me proper (Hi)DPI support for multiple monitors) and integration that I don't have to tweak myself in order to work.

So quite excited about this.

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There is a tiling window manager for Wayland called "Way Cooler" (a pun on the Awesome WM, I suppose). It apparently has an i3 preset.

http://way-cooler.org

Recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14676625

I haven't tested it yet, but bookmarked the HN thread because I want to try a tiling window manager, but decided to make until there's a good one for Wayland.

There is also http://swaywm.org/ which is supposed to be an i3 clone for Wayland

Yeah, I know people are working on cloning i3. Perhaps these attempts will be successful some day, but so far, they are very lacking compared to what Gnome gives.

Personally I think of the lack of features in i3 as a feature (was going to check out sway when I get some time, seems nice).

I like being able to configure my computer my own way.

EDIT: Not that i3 lacks features, I've not found much I couldn't do with it. But it doesn't come packaged with a lot of other software like a DE does.

you're trying to compare a WM (i3) to a DE (GNOME). Of course the DE is going to have more stuff in it..

Never mind the question, do you need all that stuff?

More and more i feel what is needed is not bigger DEs, but more useful, and non-DE oriented, standards.

Same for me. I moved from being a heavy DE user to doing nearly everything in terminal windows over the years. I recently ditched NetworkManager for wpa_supplicant + systemd-networkd, and was surprised by how much faster the laptop now connects to the WiFi when wpa_supplicant is doing everything, rather than having to talk to at least two other processes (NetworkManager and its GUI applet) over DBus.

I migrated over to Gnome and Tilix as a tiling terminal emulator. I find its a little easier to deal with than a tiling WM.

https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix

> Why? Because of Wayland (which gives me proper (Hi)DPI support for multiple monitors)

Don’t expect too much, GNOME considers proper HiDPI out of scope and only supports 96dpi and 192dpi (and other integer multiples)

Everything inbetween is handled by rendering at 192dpi and then downscaling.

So if you have a 144dpi 4K screen, and try to run minecraft, minecraft will run at 6K resolution and be downscaled.

The result is horrible performance.

The only solution for proper HiDPI support for multiple monitors today is Qt, which supports it even on X11.

>Don’t expect too much, GNOME considers proper HiDPI out of scope and only supports 96dpi and 192dpi (and other integer multiples)

Argh. That's depressing. But still, Gnome with Wayland is the only DE I've seen that gracefully handles multiple monitors with different DPIs.

I’ve been using a 144dpi 4K screen and 104dpi 1080p screen together with KDE and QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS and it worked fine.

From elsewhere i have the impression that Gnome on X11 is actually behaving wrongly, the people in charge has been told so repeatedly, the breakage is recent, any they refuse to fix it...

That is correct. Gnome will not ever implement any DPI scaling on X11 again, or proper DPI scaling, they will only do integer scaling, because that allows them to write pixel-perfect layouts. This is the same as macOS and iOS.

All other platforms – Windows, Android, Qt, the web – use the opposite model.

In other words, the worst kind of combo of Windows-isms and Mac-isms...

Somewhat related:

Regarding i3-wm is there such a thing as pre-defined resolution tiling for the sake of UI testing? That would be pretty neat.

Imagine a bunch of windows that were tiled (think mosaic) according to known device resolutions like 320x680 (or something like that for mobile devices) then you could have say a browser open in each tile (with local dev url) and refresh/shows the UI as displayed on every resolution that would be impressive.

You can poke the i3 API to resize windows, but for arbitrary resolutions you need floating windows and that defeats the point of i3.

What is the point of i3?

I use it because the Ubuntu UI uses so much resources (from my experience) and my computers are generally trash.

IMHO, the point of i3 is having tiled windows. As a stacking window manager it's quite bad because it has no compositor.

That's why it's fast, but badly coded applications can be less stable.

Interesting, I don't know what Compositor is but agree with the speed.

I don't know about pre-defined, but i3 lets you define layouts with specifications for how windows should get "swallowed" into each tile, so it should be doable to set something up.

Curious why you say "swallowed"

Yeah I mean I don't think it's a perfect division of say if your laptop/screen has 1920x1080 and you want to divide that by some known resolutions.

Good to know about being able to define layouts. Would be cool to just call it in another tab (number bottom of screen)

> Curious why you say "swallowed"

Because it's the terminology used by i3. You define "placeholders", and which criteria i3 should use to decide which placeholder a given window should open in. Here are more details [1]

> Good to know about being able to define layouts. Would be cool to just call it in another tab (number bottom of screen)

I'm not sure what you mean. You can switch workspaces in a key definition, so you certainly can bring up a layout on whatever workspace you want with a given keypress.

[1] https://i3wm.org/docs/layout-saving.html

I mean for me opening a new window? (unsure of the terminology) ie. start with 1, new panel 2. Anyway use alt + number to open the new panel.

If I could have the predefined tiles and bind it to a key combo and then they would open up in a new panel (like 2)

Anyway thanks for the links/explanation

Sway: http://swaywm.org/

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