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.
Even just the key combos (win+numpad) to do basic tiling in XFCE are a huge plus
Is this a thing on all DEs?
to tell you the truth, I don't know! I think I just saw someone asking about tiling window managers in some forum, and a reply suggested trying the xfce functions since they mostly just wanted to use two side-by-side windows occasionally. I do it a good chunk of the time now, but it's not always the most convenient method on small screens & monitors
I use XFCE when not on tiling WMs
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".
Check out Amethyst for MacOS.
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.
Depends how much time you spend in the terminal but if you spend a lot of time there then it can just about replace a tiling VM with a maximised terminal screen. Has full functionality to add workspaces, sessions and split windows horizontally/vertically.
Ohh, so if I want to go full terminal, this might be better.
Well I recently tried Niri, a scrolling window manager and felt the same.
Niri rocks
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.
Like how small? I tile on my 14" laptop screen and still infinitely prefer it over floating. Workspaces exist so you don't clutter up one screen too much. Maybe people aren't familiar with or used to taking advantage of multiple workspaces? I started using them more when i3 introduced me to a simple super+number hotkey system to switch quickly.
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
TIL. Thanks
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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!
And PaperWM is a gnome plugin I thought was developed by System76 as a prototype for Cosmic.
Edit: seems i just made that up too lol
I guess I meant scrollable tile system. I thought the horizontal ones were called river. TIL.
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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.
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.
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.
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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
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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)$).
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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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.
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.
Sway is wayland. I've never used anything else. People rave about hyprland. Others in this thread have recommend plugins for the usual desktops. Probably easy enough to try one for whichever desktop you use now.
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 :(
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@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)
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