Too much people, including some popular youtuber, dont understand how tilling WMs make life easier.
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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I agree. It seems like a genuinely underrated feature, a surprise in today's landscape where everything has its backers.
I partially get around the loss of my tiling WMs on my work PC (macbook) by leaning heavily into tmux. I know there are MacOS tiling managers like spectacles but I prefer using applications that are multiplatform so I have "transferable skills".
100%. Learning a crossplatform thing is always better, especially when using proprietary OS.
How useful is tmux as compared to regular tiling? It might be a bit janky, I suppose.
Even just the key combos (win+numpad) to do basic tiling in XFCE are a huge plus
Is this a thing on all DEs?
I use XFCE when not on tiling WMs
Well I recently tried Niri, a scrolling window manager and felt the same.
Sounds interesting. It is a whole new world
Yeah. I have been using tiling managers for years now but if you tile too much on a single workspace, you make windows too small as you run out of space. Niri allows you to extend the same workforce by scrolling sideways or down, so you can keep windows organized like you want in the same workspace.
I have noticed in comments and other online forums that people with smaller screens don’t like tiling due to this exact thing. This is a solution, sadly not implemented widely.
I was going a long way, until I built a perfect AwesomeWM configuration for myself, and have not changed it for a while now. I am willing to switch to Wayland-based solution now, as it seems to be a bit more performant, but I just can't make myself to do it: my config is really cozy and working
My first experience with window managers was Awesome WM and now I'm back on it and I can't find myself able to go back to Sway(my favorite Wayland window manager) or only use XFCE(my favorite desktop environment). I'm just too comfortable everytime I come back.
I love Linux. You can do this and there is still room for change. I hope some day I too make such a custom thing.
People keep praising twm like a hidden secret. I have tried this multiple times without much attraction. I do not understand something. Maybe everyone has 21" screen.
I have 19" screen. It saves time, especially when you open a tab for minute, then minimise it.
I installed I3 a few times. I did not get it and I was to lazy to look up how to use it. Somehow your post made me install it again. This time I took that moment to look up how to use it. Less than 15 min later I found myself banging my head against the wall. Should have looked it's usage up the first time I installed it. This is what I need like 70% of the time. THNX!
Lol. Same thing happens with me. I always install a popular software, immediately find it unintuitive and badly designed, uninstall it. Then I install it again in a few days, weeks or months and then learn how to use it. Then I rarely uninstall it.
How to make the most of it?
Use workspaces, I almost never used it before because I was set in my ways, but after switching to tiling WM it's a must and increases productivity by a LOT, I've grown so used to it that using windows with a mouse feels super clunky and cluttered.
I have tried using workspaces on Mint (without tiling) and it felt decent. PopOS has a different philosophy about workspaces which I feel makes more sense with tiling. I will give it a shot.
is there a good video demonstrating it? I use Cinnamon on Linux Mint and want to know what I'm missing out on.
You can use gtile on mint. It’s in the extensions settings
Does that auto tile though?
TIL. Thanks
I believe pop does a river style tiling system. Look up videos on Niri, Cosmic, or PaperWM.
There are many other tiling types too. River is however my favorite and I think most intuitive. Other popular ones are Sway, i3, and HyprLand.
Edit: my bad, seems like I misunderstood. PopOS used/is still using GNOME and has a Auto-Tiling plugin that behaves like i3wm (?). I guess this is what OP is talking about!
Not entirely sure what you mean. PopOS, developed by System76, uses the Cosmic DE, which is itself also developed by System76.
River is a dynamic tiling WM which is known for it's customizability among Wayland WMs, as it doesn't distinguish itself with it's "layout generator" (though it does come with a very basic one), but instead let's the user write their own or use an existing, third-party one. This way you can achieve essentially any dynamic tiling behavior with River.
How does PopOS use a system like that? Or do you mean that Cosmic is DWM-style, i.e., dynamic and with tags?
I do agree that River is wonderful though!
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You could try also:
- GNOME PaperWM, a GNOME extension with tiling and endless horizontal scrolling
- niri
- StumpWM, a tiling WM with Emacs-like keybindings (and zero eyecandy and waste of screen estate)
- HerbstluftWM
Yup, came here to mention PaperWM. I used xmonad in the past, but I executed it on top of Mate to have an "easy" desktop environment.
Nowadays Gnome extensions providing tiling is the equivalent "easy" method. Gnome is not for everyone, but it works out of the box- then you add the fancy tiling window management on top.
For people who have bounced off systems that require much more set up, I think they are a good option.
I've used i3wm for a long time now before switching to hyprland. The top useful thing: Workspaces. Even without tiling, workspaces give a massive productivity boost. You can have email clients open on one, monitoring systems on another, browsing on a third, gaming on a fourth. When you combine with tiling, everything is in its own perfect space and nothing overlaps. This is especially useful on single-monitor or laptop setups as you don't need multiple monitors to keep track of everything.
I also see people struggle with notifications tiling.
You probably don't want a bluetooth connected message to take up half your screen, so you'll want to make sure to properly configure those things.
At least in i3wm/hyprland, you can use the window class name to exclude a window from tiling (ex. for_window [class="mako"] floating enable or windowrulev2 = float,class:^(mako)$).
@npdean I used bspwm for some time and really enjoyed it coming from xfce. I also felt a bit stupid to have moved windows around manually.
Briefly tried hyprland and sway.
Currently I am in love with niri.
Tiling WMs are incredibly powerful tools for boosting productivity. Over the years, I've tried several: awesome, i3, and dwm. Eventually, I settled on bspwm, which I’ve used for years. It offers far more than you'd expect from a traditional tiling WM—especially thanks to its excellent IPC. That’s why I couldn’t switch to Wayland for the longest time—none of the available options came close to what bspwm gave me.
But just two days ago, I discovered niri, and it completely changed my perspective. It felt like the first time I ever used a tiling WM—like a whole new world had opened up.
Niri fits into the same category as bspwm but takes window management even further. It introduces infinite horizontal scrolling, a novel approach that complements traditional tiling layouts. Combined with a robust IPC (something essential for my workflow), niri allows you to arrange windows dynamically in ways I’ve never seen before—including tabbed layouts that act as a vertical counterpart to its horizontal scroll.
Here’s a short video that only scratches the surface of niri’s potential, but it’s enough to spark your imagination about how customizable and flexible it really is. Personally, I’m deeply grateful to the developers for giving me a reason—and a way—to finally switch to Wayland. I had been desperately waiting for a reliable, robust, and fully-featured tiling WM for Wayland—and what I got was a unicorn I never even imagined.
I'm seeing several peeps mention Niri and it's causing me to get excited when that Niri config finally gets merged into CatchyOS. I've been waiting for so long for some distro to adopt it. Though, I would of preferred an image based, immutable and atomic distro, CatchyOS Will do. (I tried NixOS but something wasn't working for me)
I was using mint and found Gtile, I loved it, now I've moved to Fedora (KDE Plasma) and can't get anything as good as Gtile :(
I use this for KDE tilling https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite
Edit: It is the active fork of krohnkite, the official repo is dead since 2022.
Yeah, it was a revelation when I discovered tiling. I was always doing work with two windows open, and i'd spend so much time fiddling and resizing the windows. Then i'd open a third window and wouldn't know what to do with it.
I used i3 for many years and switched to sway when migrating to wayland. It does what I need and see no reason to try hyprland or other tilers.
This first paragraph is so me.
Any good wayland implementation? I'm OS hopping to fedora kinoite. I never used tiling now I see the difference from your reply. I'm the dummy.
Pop OS tiling is awesome. What I always try to do on tiling WM: set workspaces and spawn specific applications on specific workspaces. Not sure if Pop OS can do it, but on i3/dwm/sway...etc. you can freely spawn your applications wherever you like.
Try to play around with those DIY tiling environment. You will have a lot of fun if you like tinkering with stuff. Maybe one day you will run EXWM
Yes, I am trying it out. I get it doing what I want for the most part (mostly basic stuff).
I started with pop!_os and still use it (though now with a proper TWM on top), and I can't go back to a non-tiling desktop honestly lol. I can't wait for COSMIC to come out as even in alpha that's my favourite tiling experience
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Buy a large 4k tv (like 48"+) to use as a monitor and use it without scaling. It'll have similar DPI to am average 2.5k monitor, but you'll have way more real-estate.
Window tiling lets you break the large display surface up into reasonably sized pieces.
I don't know how anyone does anything with tiling windows. They must all be sooooo small...
You don't usually have them all open at the same time, you minimize some. Or maybe you add more monitors.
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At most I have about 3 windows open at a time per workspace with 4 workspaces being used at a time for specific tasks. With the combo of tiling and workspaces I have never run into an instance of "clutter" on my desktop. This is off a single monitor setup too that I also use on my laptop.
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