Sway has some reverse compatability via XWayland. I am curious, is there any feature in particular keeping you on a native X11 desktop?

I had various bugs when I used Material Shell, but I did like several things about it, and I should probably give it another try. The Pop! OS shell extension is another good choice for mixing tiling with GNOME.

With a tiling WM (like i3), most of the time the whole screen is used. So, currently I have Firefox open full screen. But if I do decide to open another window in this workspace, it'll nicely cut the screen in half and put them side-by-side. So, if you are a mostly-fullscreen person, then the tiling WM workflow might do what you want automatically, more often.

Sometimes it feels sort of like using tmux full screen in a terminal, but some of the panels can be firefox or a PDF reader, haha.

It strongly depends on your workflow. If you generally have a single thing maximized on your primary display then a tiling WM will be a big upgrade. i3 (or the Wayland equivalent: Sway) are a great gateway.

I can't say much about floating WMs, as the above paragraph applies to me. They do exist, Hikari seems to be doing some interesting stuff.

As a NixOS, Magit and i3wm user, I think you should give it a try. I also like to have windows maximized most of the time, but it's nice to have i3 precisely for when I don't want that.

This is the workflow I have in MacOS and I hate it. To each their own. Instead of swiping back and forth I can tile more of what I use on a single monitor. And I can use hot keys to jump to my numbered workspaces.

they're terrible when you need to float windows (like plots, or gui apps, or gui system utilities). i used to think about how i could merge the two and have floating vs. tiling desktops.

then i realized i could just run a full screen terminal on one desktop and run tmux within it. it can be a little annoying with just one screen but otherwise great.

(incidentally, i also used to be a window maker person, and an actual nextstep person... after those two i ran something extremely lightweight, with small thin window decorations and that's it. i cannot remember the name)

I tend to ping-pong between (one of my employers for ~5 years was a Mac shop; still use Windows for gaming etc.), but even almost 2 decades since I first used XMonad, nothing else feels like home. I use Sway on Linux these days because I have a mix of DPIs in my displays, so Wayland is semi-mandatory, and _man_ I miss XMonad.

I did. Used i3 for a while, but between how slow adjusting window sizes were (I opened new windows often as part of my workflow), and how you can’t hide windows behind others I ultimately found it too limiting.

I did love the fact that all shortcuts started with the superkey though. That meant no overlap with any ide (I am looking at you, gnome).

I did. I used i3wm for a long time, but I always missed having a more comprehensive desktop environment. I didn't like having to install a lot of basic utilities separately. Things like screen shot, network management, display management, audio device management, compositing, etc. Add to that the fact that I mostly have the same handful of windows open, and I didn't feel like I needed a tiling manager. I use 1 terminal window with tmux where all my dev work happens, 4 browser windows, and a discord window. As long as I can have work spaces that I can bind to keyboard shortcuts, I am good. KWM is very customizable too, more than I need honestly.

Mostly I like i3wm and sway.

I used whatever the default Ubuntu DM is (gnome, not sure the version) for a while, because I got a new computer and didn't feel like messing around with .config stuff. Tuned it a little -- actually the gnome tweaks and plugins system is pretty nice! I had an applet that could control my smart-bulbs, and there's one that will invert a window color (I'm sure this is possible in sway but it would probably involve come obscure program I might need to compile).

But in the end the draw of proper keyboard controls over my WM is too appealing, switched back to sway.

IIRC, one thing that kind of kept me on the floating WM was Zoom. I think the general Zoom workflow depends on drawing a lot of windows of various random sizes, closing and opening them automatically, etc etc. It is a pretty dumb application (but it was mandated from on high, so...).

I still use a non-tiled wm for specific use cases.

Openbox is extremely minimalist and customizable. I use it for games, gimp, and occasionally gui application development. You can add directional selection keybindings etc. so it keeps a tiled-esque feel.

I dumped a shellscript in my ~/.zprofile where I can easily switch wms and X configurations without logging out (keep mounts, music, etc). It makes it really painless to switch.

I’m never going back. And I’ve used them all.

I used XMonad for about 1 year. Back at FVWM since ca. 8 years, but XMonad influenced the setup quite a bit. The WM is barely noticeable, it manages 2 full screen rxvt/ssh/screen windows, Firefox, Zoom and little else. Keybindings + integration with a self written Plan9 plumber-like tool (edit/modify selection, link to bug db, jira, ... based on selection contents) are the real productivity boosters.

I don't really feel a difference in productivity. It's usually browser/vscode/terminal with tmux on full screens anyway. The biggest difference for me are the aesthetics and a distraction-free minimalist design. I like to have my pixelspace used with close to no waste.

I've switched to windows because of laziness and need to reconfigure my dotfiles after like 6 years of using i3. This week I'm getting a new m2 disk and will be installing arch to finish my rice.