Can we stop hyping up Gnome's tiling window feature?
Date: 2020-10-03
This is not the first time that I see a praising article about POP OS! tiling window feature for Gnome 3. This time GamingOnLinux wrote an article, titled, System76 are doing some serious magic with Pop!OS and Auto Tiling. What I don't understand is, what is that serious magic? Tiling window managers (and dynamic too) existed for a long, long time.
If you don't know what a tiling window manager is: basically a normal window manager is making your windows float, and you can move it with your mouse. A tiling window manager however places your windows next to each other to make fill your screen. When the first window launches it will be full screen, with 2 windows it will be side-by-side, and you can place them to your liking. With dynamic tiling manager, you have given layout configuration that you can use (or add later), that you can activate with a shortcut and then use it when you want to with the windows that are open.
I think it's OK to give another option for Gnome users to handle their windows. I am not against that. However please don't hype this function up, that it's some kind of new thing, or "serious magic".
I also think that a dedicated tiling window manager is much better for somebody if you want to try them out, because Gnome is first and foremost has loating windows, this is what primarily made for, not tiling.
And I have to say it's very easy to try out tiling window managers, most distros have something like i3 in their repositories. I started with it, it's really good. Basically you install it, you choose it at login screen, and then you don't know what to do, because you haven't looked at the site for shortcuts. These system has what they call, the mod key, which starts everthing from menus, programs, your terminal, etc. It's usually the Alt key, btw.
There are so many tiling wm to choose from, you can use one every month and it would fill your days. I highly recommend DistroTube's channel to check them out.
This was day #68 of #100DaysToOffload, where we write about different things on our personal blogs. Join the project or just read the blogs.