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Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

>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.

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

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.

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