KDE is highly configurable but its base configuration/experience is worse than Gnome. I think PopOS' tiling WM built on top of Gnome is pretty good but Gnome itself is frustrating trying to configure. It can be enjoyable to a point but it can also just become really frustrating to deal with. You need to configure your login windows. You need to configure how to launch applications through something like rofi or by configuring keybinds in your config. You gotta set up your own notifications daemon. You have to find the individual components like the bar if the WM comes with it and write your own scripts or hopefully find one that someone else wrote to get the things that are built into Gnome and KDE and work out of the box. The problem is that those window managers (in my opinion) is that they fail to do the basics well.

that you get something that works as you'd hope in terms of spaces and tiling behavior. It's only once you adopt something like i3, dwm, awesome, bspwm, xmonad, etc. I know some of them can be run on top of XFCE and have for a while, but all of them fell similarly janky to ones on MacOS. Only fairly recently has Linux really seen much development of tiling WMs on top of things like Gnome and KDE. The fullscreen mode of Apps alone is just so botched, no way this is gonna work failsafe with a third-party window manager that is reverse engineering the unofficial, breaking, APIs. The virtual desktops there are usually just a single stack behind the scenes, and they are not per screen, so working with those platforms and expensive window manager tools has been always a pain for me. On MacOS and Windows, on the other hand, I don't see a chance of this working anyhow. If I need a new virtual desktop on the fly, I just create one without any repercussions for the rest of the layout (or stack).Īnd I think that's the key concept of tiling WMs: user choice.

I usually have 10+ virtual desktops, because I use 3 screens, and each of them has a different set of virtual desktops - which are also not bound to a specific screen and can be moved to another screen just as easily. It's because they let the user decide what layout and how many virtual desktops they need.

The point why i3 / sway on Linux are used so much is not that they have a specific layouting concept.

Window management windows 10