Comment by nchmy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nchmy | Hacker News Reader

I tried Omarchy 10 months ago. I liked how easy it all was, like the PWAs installed, etc...

But I was completely lost with, and even offended by, how the tiling window manager worked. Windows were just moving around all over the place, changing sizes etc... It was by far the worst computing experience that I've had in a very long time. And it was particularly awful on a small laptop screen where you REALLY need to make the most of how your windows are arranged.

After a couple days, I installed Pop!_OS and, despite its new COSMIC desktop having tiling-like features, I've been happy with its normal Windows-like UI, where I can just use windows/super key + arrow keys to move and resize windows to the side or corner of the screen, and they stay there.

Yet, so many people are raving about tiling window managers. Surely it cant be as awful of an experience as I had. What was I doing wrong? Is there some configuration that I wasn't using in order to set preferences for applications or profiles or something?

> What was I doing wrong?

Nothing. Tiling managers just have a bit of a steep learning curve. That said, I'd argue they're better about using space on small screens (no title bar, everything tiled efficiently, etc).

The Omarchy Manual does a good job of covering it, but again, there's a learning curve. I was a late adopter to tiling, but now I can't do without it. I even use macOS and Windows tiled.

I just read the relevant Navigation doc and it sounds as hellish as i remember. I'm happy that folks are happy with it, but I'm sticking with traditional windows (in linux).

https://omarchy.org/manual/navigation/

Sounds like a good plan. Like I said, it's not for everyone, and if it doesn't appeal to you, don't use it.

I no longer use a tiling window manager, used to use AwesomeWM for a decade or something before though, tiny disclaimer.

What exactly is the "hellish" parts of that documentation page? It seems to be explaining the main concepts you need to understand, how to access them, doesn't have any fluff, and doesn't have anything out of the ordinary really, but again, I might be reading it with very rose-colored glasses, so curious to hear what sticks out as "hellish" from that page.

There's nothing wrong with the docs. It's the entire tiling experience, config, hotkeys etc that sounds hellish. I can't fathom why anyone would like it, but evidently many people do - great! I'm glad that there's various options available to everyone.

Aha, I see. Yeah, I guess it's like any desktop environment preference, some people like to switch applications with CMD+TAB, others with ALT+TAB and some with CMD+$NUMBER, some people like their task bar in the bottom, some in the top, or whatever, very subjective in the end :) Not much to fathom I think, it's like eating fish as food, makes no sense to me, but whatever floats your boat!

eating seafood with lots of bones in it makes no sense to me, but is otherwise great. Tiling managers are full of bones, as far as I can see. But evidently lots of people are talented surgeons with it!

I have had a similar experience regarding tiling window managers. Been trying i3, but everything becomes just super complicated, and I learned I somehow actually appreciate having a feel for windows moving around, and having the freedom to open a small mini terminal above all the others for some quick tasks etc.

For me, XFCE (On Linux Mint currently) turned out to be the answer. Has configurable keyboard shortcuts for pretty much anything you need, like tiling to top/right/bottom/left, corners, moving or resizing windows etc.

To me, that is the best of both worlds - a normal window manager with keyboard shortcuts for tiling the windows when you want.

I love XFCE, but I switched to KDE as it supports Wayland (and I want to use WayDroid). KDE has a similar window + shortcut philosophy.

I think tiling makes much less sense on a laptop and more sense when you use a large display.

I had a similar experience initially. I disliked many of the defaults. But it's quite easy to use an agent to customize everything to your liking. And I haven't really run into a situation where I couldn't accomplish what I wanted.

I'm still deciding how I feel about hyprland. I use a unique hyperkey shortcut to focus each app and I usually want that app (chrome, ghostty, etc) to take up the entire screen rather than caring about having tiled splits in a workspace, so I'm generally putting each app to its own workspace. I'm sure there's more to learn about hyprland and I can imagine it being superior to what I'm used to (macOS with some hammerspoon binds for window management/layouts).

> tiling makes much less sense on a laptop

Definitely disagree. I feel a laptop is the sweet spot for wanting each app to take up exactly half the screen.

Same, the smaller screen I'm at, the more I feel the need for automatic proper tiling that is easily controllable. Meanwhile, at my desktop with a huge display, I just use Gnome3 and almost no windows are fullscreen, they just hang around and are slightly visible, no need to care much about available space at all.

For me, it just clicked. For a secondary laptop where I don't want to run anything extra and want to stay clear on what I'm running, it just worked, even while its MASSIVELY different from how I run my main machines.

Separately from using it on a secondary laptop, I have no idea if I could actually make it a daily driver though. Usually I have literally 50 windows, 200+ chrome tabs open, and use that state to "extend" my forgetful mind. Whole different approaches.

It's come a LONG way in user friendliness in 10 months. Combine Omarchy with a LLM and you can literally change any behavior you want in minutes. I have heavily customized mine, but have been able to remove some of those customizations on Quattro because upstream incorporated similar features.

If it helps: memorize the shortcut for displaying the keyboard shortcuts which also has fuzzy search. That helped me whenever I was stuck due to lack of experience with tiling WMs.

Agreed. I might be showing my age, but I remember the days of LightStep and associated window managers that did the same thing. This looks more like a highly connected techie raising a slush money fund of $8 million to put out his opinionated re-skin of Ubuntu and window manager settings file. The "year of the linux desktop" has nothing to do with some UI preferences but it probably sold well in whatever room he was in.

It must be nice to enter the blowhard stage of life where you can share your bash profile at a cocktail party in SF and go around the table collecting $1 million checks from all your yuppie friends.

He is also committing 1 million

His business partner Jason also committed 1 million.

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