I’ve been using tiling WMs for some years now (mostly sway, but also tested cosmic a bit). I really love them: you theme workspaces and organize everything into them, and no window is ever hidden, which makes finding them trivial. But the cost of having every window displayed in that workspace is that they start getting way too small when you have a lot of them. This is usually not a big deal, since you can create tabs or just open new generic workspaces.

But what has been bugging me are windows that need to be big, otherwise they are unusable (like gimp, kdenlive, libreoffice, sometimes firefox). Tabbing them in fullscreen messes with the workspace layout, and if you dedicate an entire generic workspace for them, you surely will lose it.

That’s where scrollable WMs enter the scene. They respect window sizes at the cost of their visibility.

niri.gif

NGL, this is not a good idea. It’s easy to lose windows that are off-screen. But what if you only use it sometimes? Think of it as a regular tiling WM, but when you need it, it creates more space off-screen.

To achieve this, I’ve been using Niri with the tilemod script. It helps make Niri behave more like a regular tiling.

tilemod.gif

It’s been a good experience over the last week. My workflow is mostly unchanged, but when I need to work with a window in fullscreen, it’s always a relief that I’m using Niri.

Has anyone else here tried scrollables? I’m in this excitement phase so I want to read more about it (even from people who tried and didn’t like them) :)

  • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
    43·
    1 day ago

    I’ve worded it like shit before, but :

    Standalone WMs are basically Gnome3 for neckbeards.

    • SoftBun@lemmy.mlOP
      5·
      1 day ago

      haha, not false :) I mean, in the end, I think Linux is mostly for neckbeards.

      I started using window managers to reduce resource usage (I had a really shitty PC back then) and to stay organized. It worked for both. I really don’t like how much time you have to invest in configuring them (which is why I tried cosmic, it’s much easier to set up), but I think it’s worth it in the end.

      • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 day ago

        well, here’s the shitposty thread I made last time I tried to voice the opinion and got got by gotchas in terminology :

        https://lemmy.world/post/51030053?scrollToComments=true

        Basically, some people are making interfaces for the operating systems that only have a windows manager, and isn’t a complete desktop environment, so it’s basically one step above a terminal. Things like i3 or dwm, as opposed to more fleshed out things like KDE or Gnome.

        Gnome3 basically encourages the user to launch their programs as fullscreen things and scroll between them. The WM based UIs also do this, but call it “desktops” and tile the windows you have in each desktop.

        I went through a craze of shoving different ones into VMs and felt that things like i3 and dwm behave similarly to the way I dislike Gnome3.

        • Zangoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 day ago

          I feel like that’s by design. Tiling WMs generally make 2 assumptions and if they aren’t true for you then you’re probably better off with a regular desktop:

          • Most apps you use are one window and are either fullscreen or splitscreen with another app.
          • You have a lot of different Fullscreen apps open at once

          For a lot of people that makes sense because Workspace-based WMs let you switch between full screen apps a lot quicker than pressing alt-tab 10 times. e.g. when I’m doing work I’ll usually have these Fullscreen windows open:

          • browser
          • chat app (teams/outlook at work, discord/matrix at home)
          • IDE
          • window for whatever I’m testing/working on
          • miscellaneous things (file explorers, random text files, etc. which can all be splitscreen)

          For me at least, every extra second it takes me to move between apps snowballs because I have to pause my thought just to find the app I’m looking for in the alt tab menu or the task bar

          • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
            2·
            23 hours ago

            Yeah, it doesn’t vibe with me because I’m constantly moving windows from one place to another, comparing shit side by side and needing one thing as an edit then as a reference, keeping some things smaller and etc. I am starting to be maybe interested in trying out transparancy in my dropdown console and maybe a launcher that’s more central instead of “windows like” coming in from the bottom left. But I like my taskbars, especially with having different ones for different physical monitors.