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While reading it, I kept wondering why he thinks there hasn't been much innovation in the Linux WM space. And amusingly, tiling managers are one of the shining points of Linux WMs. I can't get a good one to work on Windows or Mac OS the way I can with AwesomeWM. To me, those OS's are quite behind.

Stuff like compiz was first on Linux. Woefully underused - even on Linux!

Enlightenment was amazing in the old days.

> Why would I want to change anything?

You don't need to change anything, but others do! Suppose the world decided tiling WMs were the way to go, and you could no longer run Gnome the way you currently do. Would you be happy?

The ideal is to have more features/capabilities, while not breaking existing users like you and me.

For the last year or so I have used Niri window manager exclusively. It's out there, even by Linux tiling window manager standards, and it's the most delightful window management experience I've ever had. I'm guessing there isn't anything remotely like it on Windows or MacOS.

As you say, there is incredible variety and innovation to be found in Linux desktops. The post would make more sense if it mainly concerned itself with the UX stagnation on MacOS IMO.

Tiling window managers aren't new though, I went through my tiling phase 25 years ago (Ion). My Mac experience today is not uniformly better than it was 30 years ago and in some ways much worse. It's true that much of the infrastructure is way better now, we have pretty good multilingual support everywhere, protected memory, better color, much better networking, but as someone who often just wants to sit down and grind through the e-mail queue that experience has been getting worse for around a decade.

I'm not saying they're new. I'm saying they were innovative in the Linux space, as opposed to MacOS or Windows.

Tiling window managers predate Linux (and Mac and Windows). Not to diminish the work people are doing to make the desktop better, in general I think on the Linux side things have gotten pretty good, but it's hard to come up with very many widely used substantial UX changes. Comparing to say Windows or Mac drawing an arbitrary line at 1990, networked hypertext, desktop search... What else? The infrastructure underneath is all way more advanced but the overall experience is pretty similar.

They appeared before in OSes like Oberon, Lillith, predating Linux.

Once again, I'm not talking about who invented them. I'm talking about the innovations in tiling managers in Linux WMs. I somehow doubt you'll find something as good as AwesomeWM in pre-Linux WMs.

What innovations?

In AwesomeWM, you don't have workspaces, you have tags. Each tag can have its own window layout. A given window can have multiple tags. As an example, I can have my terminal on tag 1, Firefox on tag 2, Emacs on tag 3. The tags appear like your typical workspaces.

Then I consult Firefox and need to type a command into the terminal. I can quickly assign tag 4 to both Firefox and the terminal. When I click on tag ("workspace" 4), I have both FF and the terminal tiled. If I go back to tag 1, it's just the terminal - or tag 2 and it's just Firefox.

If you want to think in terms of workspaces, it's the equivalent of having your window in multiple workspaces.

But even better: Instead of assigning tags 4 to both of them, I can just say "Let's temporarily combine tags 1, 2 and 3", and I'll have a (transient) view with all 3 windows, tiled. Very handy if I just need to do it for a short period of time - no need to untag 4 from all of them.

This way you can quickly do the "union" and "difference" of different tags as needed - really quickly. Say I've got both FF and Emacs in one tag. Then I need to quickly run a terminal command and copy/paste the output. I just say "Hey, let's do a union with tag 1, run the command, and undo the union."

Once you get used to it, you miss it in any window manager that doesn't have it.

no, you were among that day's lucky 10k when someone told about tiling GUI, and that day was the date it was invented in your mind. and it's not. awesomewm itself is like 20 years old and it was a competitor to other 10 years old tiling WMs at the start of that project.

I don't know what you're reading into my comments to give you the idea that I don't know how old tiling WMs are. I used them in the 90's.

> Tiling window managers aren't new though, I went through my tiling phase 25 years ago (Ion).

Me too! Never moved off of it: https://notionwm.net/

He did praise tiling managers as being better for large screens, though.

>Stuff like compiz was first on Linux. Woefully underused - even on Linux!

Compiz/compositing I think kinda was us going down on the wrong path. Generally it meant every app needed a texture (more like 2/3) to draw into, and compositing itself has increased latency.

We blinded ourselves with flashy effects only to give up on frugal resource use and display latency (as well as power use).

This whole thing is only just being fixed with Display Planes on Wayland, which are kinda poorly supported right now, requiring the right combination of HW/compositor/DE

> I can't get a good one to work on Windows

FancyZones (part of PowerToys) is pretty good. Maybe not exactly what you're used to (I don't know), but I'm happy with it.

That's how I felt before I discovered tiling window managers. Now my flow is very similar to yours, but since I was wrong before, I can't rule out the possibility that I am still wrong and there might be something better out there. For example, Plan 9 had some interesting UX ideas like making the window manager infinitely nestable and mountable over the network. It also had the neat behavior in acme where to execute a command, you middle-click on some regular text. In the end, I'm not a fan of Plan 9's UI because of the reliance on the mouse, but I think it shows there's still room for novel innovation out there.

What's so interesting about tiling managers? I've been using i3. But my usage is so simple (I guess) that I have just a few windows maximized in tab mode, usually just two: browser and terminal. I rarely need to split vertically. To be fair I like i3 simplicity. But I'm not really "wooed" by i3. I may be missing something?

I think that is the exact benefit to tiles.

For me it the epiphany was that I either want one full screen window, or several windows side by side, I never want one window to obscure another window. And with our modern wide monitors I almost always want several windows side by side. Why do I have to line them up by hand?

The downside is that there are many poorly programmed applications that are unable to adjust themselves as the window manager requires(calling you out steam, or it just may be me but steam was not happy with a tiling wm), and model dialogs, which always suck, suck even more when tiling. But most tiling wms's support a float mode for just that occasion.

Tiles were a common early metaphor, And I think tiles are generally more useful but floats looked cooler in the ad copy and so that is what ended up as the dominant desktop metaphor.

On the subject of one window partially obscuring another window the only tech that makes that halfway tolerable is "don't raise on click" and "point to focus" This lets you look at the upper window while manipulating the lower window. two features not found on the major desktop systems. X11 has it's warts, and is very weird. But it is miles ahead in actual usability over it's peers.

> What's so interesting about tiling managers?

I don't use one, but interestingly, every IDE (or other professional mega-app such as Blender) is essentially its own tiling WM.

So quite clearly they have won as an UI concept for people who want to get things done.

I guess it's pretty much one of the best ways to see multiple things at the same time?

I've used dwm for years and recently switched to niri and really, really like it.

I'm with you, that tiling vertically is not useful. Niri aligns better with my innate mental model: just keep adding new panes to the right offscreen that I can scroll through, then I can swipe up and down for more lanes to do collections of different tasks.

I feel much more productive doing read/write tasks, like viewing tickets + code or PDFs + tickets and so-on

Depends on your screen size. On my laptop, I follow pretty much the same pattern you do, so I actually stopped bothering with XMonad.

But on my desktop with two 27" monitors, I find tiling incredibly useful. It's really nice to be able to quickly arrange a mix of Emacs windows, browsers and random other programs to use all that space. If I need to closely read through some documentation while also looking at code, I can quickly open a browser next to the code window. Later, when I want to focus on just code, I can send the browser to the other monitor or to a different workspace altogether. And I can juggle "side" stuff (chat windows, OBS, music, whatever) just as easily.

The key thing is that XMonad with some lightly customized layouts gives me the operations to do all of this quickly without needing to think about it. It only takes a couple of keystrokes to get to the state that I want at any time and, after a pretty short time, those keystrokes became muscle memory. Using a mouse to drag things around is more intuitive and flexible, but it requires shifting my attention far more than just using a single keyboard command. (And thanks to ADHD, that kind of distraction can be a real drag on my mental energy!)

> What's so interesting about tiling managers?

And of that interesting stuff, how much can't be had just by configuring the window tiling shortcuts in floating window managers to have the best of both worlds?

https://uli.rocks/p/tilling-xfce/

In usability studies, it’s not uncommon for users to report they are faster at doing things one way, but actually timing them they were faster doing those things a different way, which they thought was slower.

So I don’t know about your particular set up. But maybe a usability researcher will come up with a way of working that’s more productive or efficient than what you’re doing now.

If you've settled on Gnome then you don't have to change anything. Gnome will change it for you. Regardless of you. I really miss Gtk3/4 File->open dialogs having the ability to take pasted filepaths without erroring out.

But I will hand it to Gnome: they're the only wayland protocol desktop that supports accessibilty. That's huge. So even if I hate how it behaves right now while mostly sighted Gnome DE may be the only option for me in the future. And I guess I won't have to look at it when my retinas finish falling off.

> I too am in the "it's done, it works well, don't mess with it" camp.

As am I.

One thing I would like to change is that on Linux I can paste text by selecting it and clicking the middle mouse button to paste. This is better than using ^C ^V because I don't have to get off the mousing and onto the keyboard. But unfortunately on some webshites the MMB doesn't work.

Yeah the paste-on-middle-mouse is insanely useful. But I have an uneasy feeling it will be going away soon.

Does it even work on Wayland? I always thought this was a feature of X. I really like it too but the inconsistent support seems to catch me more and more often these days.

Works on Wayland. Doesn't work in some assclown programs; e.g. claude attempts its own copy-to-clipboard feature, which goes around primary.

Yeah, it's an X thing. But on X, the highlight/middle-click clipboard is separate from the ctrl-c/ctrl-v clipboard, so you can hold two things at once when moving text around. IIRC this was just a historical quirk rather than any intentional design, and I think in Wayland they duplicated the controls but also combined them into a single clipboard.

you can 100% do that with autohotkey

TBH IMO the Gnome is pretty much done software except that some of the desktop Idioms they can borrow from Apple (like swipe three fingers to switch the workspace) if they're not patented and they could be in settings if someone wants to opt into those otherwise yes.

Gnome is "done software" already and I like it very much.

FWIW I am using gnome 49 and 3 finger swipe works out of the box on my asahi macbook linux.

From somebody who has been through this 3 times before: the moment gnome becomes “done software” is the moment they decide they need to throw out everything and start fresh.

learned it all from Microsoft

I think it's a combination of it's done to a degree and comfort + habit.

Let's say there are areas to improve still, but introducing anything new requires investment of time to learn it, breaking habits and giving discomfort. Even if it eventually starts paying off, it can cause a push back naturally. So it's really hard to do it right, may be only very gradually? Surely not like Gnome tried to do it.

Some direct comparison with such idea could be let's say a suboptimal keyboard layout and more optimal ones that are barely used.

I personally stick with KDE exactly because "it just works well enough" and its flexibility at the same time.

> I've tested everything. Xfce, tiling window managers, kde. Eventually I settled on Gnome

did you check cinnamon? Imo its the most user friendly and boring + batteries DE..

Same... ish. 2D grid of desktops. Can add/remove them with a hotkey, but I normally have a 3x5 grid. Hyper+Arrows to navigate them. Hyper-s to stick/unstick a window, which also works for moving a window to a different desktop. Hyper-g to group/ungroup windows into a single shared frame with tabs. Hyper+Alt+Arrows to move a window, Hyper+Shift+Arrows to resize, Hyper+PgUp/PgDn to raise/lower, Hyper+Tab to change tabs in the current frame, etc. Lots of other keys, mostly Hyper+something.

Each desktop has a project or something, a related group of windows which I leave open until I'm done with it. Some desktops have remained more or less the same since the 1900s since they've been relevant and useful for that long.

Over time, my desktop hasn't gotten fancier... it has gotten simpler. Bells and whistles are inversely proportional to useful life span. Similarly, over time I've relied less and less on big, full-featured, specialized applications and databases... and more on plain text files, a text editor, short scripts, clean filesystem organization, and a whole lotta terminals.

I have a very similar setup on kde. I used to run the tilling window manager i3, but since using more manufacturing software (kicad, freecad, slicers, etc), I wanted more traditional window management. kde with custom shorcuts gives me enough tilling management. I also like asign a sticky topic to numbered desktops.

> Why would I want to change anything?

I predict when a xterm comes along that behaves like tmux, ie makes all its panes available to all login sessions and does the reverse - makes your ssh sessions available to your favourite xterm and other ssh sessions, you will change.

:D

The only thing I'm missing with the workspaces or tiling WM is slide in Windows for cross cutting concerns...

Want a terminal on the exact screen/workspace without minimizing windows or switching workspaces?

Want to drag a file from a file manager into an open Window?

Want to lookup something in your contacts or calendar?

I thought of something like quake-mode [1]/ guake as global overlay triggered by a shortcut like super+t for terminal etc. Would be a nice Addition to cosmic with tiling i think. Did not find the time for a PR yet.

1: https://github.com/repsac-by/gnome-shell-extension-quake-mod...

Spectrwm(rather obscure, but I like it) has a free window mode for things like this. where free windows are in all workspaces. Define some hotkeys for the special app invocation and perhaps add a protected region to keep normal windows out.

https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

And a rendered manual https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/spectrwm/spectrwm.1.en.ht...

I had fun figuring it out one day, but the way I use the computer it did not provide much utility. so my config stays rather stock.

Yes! I do pretty much the same in Mac.

Multiple desktops(spaces) each with one window of browser (Zen) and one window of cmux and an Emacs frame. One desktop for one task.

CMux has good native AI Agent notifications. So it works well in that capacity too.

Sometimes I wish there is some automatic tiling, but there is nothing good in Mac for that (I tried a couple of 3rd party software, but didn't work out)

I also agree that the desktop is pretty much perfected at this point. I'm not saying UX researchers shouldn't try things - by all means, try new things. But don't expect that most of the ideas will land, because the paradigm we have really is quite good.

The Windows 95-7 paradigm was good. After that it went downhill. OSX was already downhill (probably just due to different conventions) and Linux can't stop digging deeper.

the Gnome that came with Debian Trixie is certainly worse than my stable Linux previous desktop, including eye-candy desktop effects coupled with remarkable fails on simple GUI features that have been stable for thirty years.