this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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GNOME Devs Are Working on a New Window Management System (9to5linux.com)
submitted 1 year ago by leo@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] Vinegar@kbin.social 116 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The 9to5 article is poorly written. In the first paragraph 9to5 says a new window system is "scheduled to replace" the current one, but this is not true. The cited blog post explicitly says "There’s no timeline or roadmap at this stage". The Gnome developers are merely experimenting with a new window management system and at this early stage it's impossible to know what the finished product may look like if these experiments go anywhere at all.

Here's a link to the original blog post where Gnome developer Tobias Bernard explains their dissatisfaction with existing window management systems and discusses the techinical challeneges developers face.

[–] hglman@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

That blog post is much, much better. That's a reasonably exciting system; I hope they make it work.

[–] Reemerge1511@lemmy.sdf.org 52 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think this looks amazing. I do like the behaviour of tiling WMs, but having a DE is too comfy for me to give up. This could possibly bring the bestof both worlds.

[–] Knusper@feddit.de 23 points 1 year ago (5 children)

There are already ways to have tiling and a DE.

On GNOME, there's PaperWM, although it's not quite traditional tiling either.

On KDE Plasma 5.27+, you can use Polonium. For versions before 5.27, Bismuth.

And on Xfce or LXQt, it's often possible to use them with a traditional tiling WM, like i3wm, bspwm etc..

[–] JuvenoiaAgent@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago

There's also Forge for GNOME.

[–] sapo@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've been using Krohnkite on KDE. Are those you mentioned better?

[–] Knusper@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Krohnkite went unmaintained a while ago, which is when Bismuth forked from it. So, Bismuth is basically a straight upgrade. The dev implemented tons of features, which you may or may not need, but I think, there were also some fixes for stability and Plasma version compatibility.

Polonium came about, because Plasma 5.27 introduced a (manual) tiling system of its own, which partially broke Bismuth, but also meant it made sense to develop a new KWinScript, which makes use of this native system.
As such, it is a step back from Bismuth. I think, it's roughly comparable to Krohnkite in terms of features now, but still a very young project, so not as stable yet...

[–] sapo@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Interesting! Krohnkite still works so well for my use case that I didn't even realize it was unmantained. I'll give those two a shot!

[–] 20gramsWrench@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago

I've tried all 3 and krohnkite felt like the more polished, can't tell you which doesn't do what but the others felt a bit clunky in the way they handled resizes and such

[–] eclipse@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Try out Pop Shell. Its works very well on my Fedora installs.

[–] theDodosConundrum@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Seconding Pop Shell. Very simple install via Gnome extension and it works wonderfully on my daily driver Ubuntu install.

[–] nik282000@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Chiming in with another great alternative, Tactile lets you tile windows and stack at the same time. Between the Tactile hotkeys, Alt+Tab and Alt+~ I never need to use the mouse for window manipulation anymore.

[–] tombuben@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

I really can't stress how good PaperWM is in combination with a touchpad. I wouldn't recommend it at all on a mouse-only environment, but when you can use multitouch gestures to scroll through the workspace it works really well.

[–] humanplayer2@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

You could try Pop!_OS. There you get the full DE, plus tiling implemented by a GNOME extension. You can also just install that extension, of course, or another.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 31 points 1 year ago

I saw this and I really like that they are trying to improve it and innovate. Nothing has happened for a long time in the desktop innovation area since the web took over.

[–] mfn@mfn.pub 27 points 1 year ago

Innovations are pretty rare in the desktop space but this looks like a really good innovation if implemented bug free.

[–] fourstepper@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I really enjoy how GNOME handles windows currently already.

Between having the ability to move and resize windows with Super + (mouse left|right), switching between windows of the same application with Super + backtick, workspaces and Super + type to search, there is very little to desire.

Unlike tiling VMs, this makes sense out of the box for 99% of the apps out there while providing a really quick way to get where you need quickly.

[–] Onionizer@geddit.social 5 points 1 year ago

Even better are the three-finger swipe gestures on the laptop trackpad

[–] AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 year ago

On one hand I'm interested in seeing how well it works and what they do with it, on the other hand...

Source: https://xkcd.com/927/

[–] gamma@programming.dev 23 points 1 year ago

As long as they're using standard Wayland protocols like xdg_toplevel::set_max_size/::set_min_size, I'm sure the rest of the ecosystem will be on-board for this.

[–] christophski@feddit.uk 20 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Looks like they have put a lot of thought into it so I'm keen to see where they get with it. My concern with these kind of changes is that they often end up trying to guess what the user wants, which creates an unpredictable behaviour that is then more annoying than it is helpful.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

Like how Apple's Stage Manager is unpredictable and gets in the way (reportedly… I deliberately opted out of upgrading).

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[–] Gutless2615@ttrpg.network 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve been such a fan of the Pop_OS window tiling. By far the best implementation I’ve found

[–] donuts@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This looks super promising to me, as it seems to blend the best of both tiling and floating windows. I hope they manage to work this in to future versions of Gnome.

[–] humanplayer2@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Indeed! It might be a good way to sneak tiling into the workflow of users that wouldn't actively set to using it.

[–] crow@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago

I thought this meant they were developing their own alternative to x11 & Wayland. It’s just how windows are arranged on the desktop.

[–] Horsey@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We’re the little video clips not working for anyone else?

[–] zero_iq@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Worked fine for me (firefox mobile).

[–] dnzm@feddit.nl 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Funny, that, didn't work for me on ff/Android.

Edit: on reload, it suddenly did. 🤷‍♂️

[–] pr06lefs@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

Not really digging the dragging windows with the mouse bit. Hopefully will be workable with keyboard only.

[–] WildeGreen@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago

At this point what I think Gnome should add is a Samsung-style touch friendly multitasking system. Stuff with touch dragable handles between apps