I have used gnome pretty much since Fedora/RedHat started packaging it. For the past 2 years or so, I have been using Material Shell (https://material-shell.com/) which gives Gnome tiling functionality and I have been really happy with the overall experience.

But, just recently, a co-worker mentioned Sway. I have to use things that prevent me from using Wayland, so I decided to give i3 a try after touching it and not understanding it many years ago.

The point of my WM life story is, that after all that, I have stuck with i3 for about 3 weeks now and am falling in love with it. There were some gnome things that I missed, but was able to quickly piece things together to get the functionality I wanted. Being a vi guy also, I really like using modes for my keyboard shortcuts too. It definitely helps with my productivity (when I'm not playing with things to increase my productivity anyway :) )

I had various bugs when I used Material Shell, but I did like several things about it, and I should probably give it another try. The Pop! OS shell extension is another good choice for mixing tiling with GNOME.

Sway has some reverse compatability via XWayland. I am curious, is there any feature in particular keeping you on a native X11 desktop?

Specifically I am forced to use the horrible disaster that is MS Teams for work. So far, screensharing on Wayland with electron-based apps doesn't work.

Wayland has some weird issues with screen sharing IME. The last time I used Google Meet with Wayland on Debian no one could see my screen.

This issue has been resolved for me for about 6 months, but YMMV obviously.

I like tools like Magit, or using NixOS, which seem close cousins to this "you put in a bit more effort, and get a better tool" attitude.

I've never looked into window managers. If I prefer to have all windows I'm using maximized on different virtual desktops all the time, is there still much of a benefit to using a WM?

With a tiling WM (like i3), most of the time the whole screen is used. So, currently I have Firefox open full screen. But if I do decide to open another window in this workspace, it'll nicely cut the screen in half and put them side-by-side. So, if you are a mostly-fullscreen person, then the tiling WM workflow might do what you want automatically, more often.

Sometimes it feels sort of like using tmux full screen in a terminal, but some of the panels can be firefox or a PDF reader, haha.

It strongly depends on your workflow. If you generally have a single thing maximized on your primary display then a tiling WM will be a big upgrade. i3 (or the Wayland equivalent: Sway) are a great gateway.

I can't say much about floating WMs, as the above paragraph applies to me. They do exist, Hikari seems to be doing some interesting stuff.

As a NixOS, Magit and i3wm user, I think you should give it a try. I also like to have windows maximized most of the time, but it's nice to have i3 precisely for when I don't want that.

This is the workflow I have in MacOS and I hate it. To each their own. Instead of swiping back and forth I can tile more of what I use on a single monitor. And I can use hot keys to jump to my numbered workspaces.

I'm curious if anyone who has put in enough effort to get familiar with a tiling window manager has ever gone back to a traditional one. IMO tiling window managers are superior in every way.

I did. I used i3wm for a long time, but I always missed having a more comprehensive desktop environment. I didn't like having to install a lot of basic utilities separately. Things like screen shot, network management, display management, audio device management, compositing, etc. Add to that the fact that I mostly have the same handful of windows open, and I didn't feel like I needed a tiling manager. I use 1 terminal window with tmux where all my dev work happens, 4 browser windows, and a discord window. As long as I can have work spaces that I can bind to keyboard shortcuts, I am good. KWM is very customizable too, more than I need honestly.

You don't need to pick one or the other. i3wm being a window manager, not a fully fledged desktop environment, means you can use it with KDE or Gnome for example.

I have gone down that route before too, several times, it is not pretty. The KDE panel and startup splash screen don't play nice with a custom WM. Removing the KDE panel also removes a lot of the kitchen sink functionality I was looking for. The best option for tiling in KDE was using a KWM extension that supported it.

Some good points. Have you tried something like Regolith or pop shell? I forget the name but there's also a toolkit for Sway that includes the kitchen sink. These should give you some of the configurability and tooling of something like Gnome but with tiling.

Pop shell seems really nice, but I am not too into GNOME. I know they are trying to make it an independent desktop environment, so looking forward to that.

Mostly I like i3wm and sway.

I used whatever the default Ubuntu DM is (gnome, not sure the version) for a while, because I got a new computer and didn't feel like messing around with .config stuff. Tuned it a little -- actually the gnome tweaks and plugins system is pretty nice! I had an applet that could control my smart-bulbs, and there's one that will invert a window color (I'm sure this is possible in sway but it would probably involve come obscure program I might need to compile).

But in the end the draw of proper keyboard controls over my WM is too appealing, switched back to sway.

IIRC, one thing that kind of kept me on the floating WM was Zoom. I think the general Zoom workflow depends on drawing a lot of windows of various random sizes, closing and opening them automatically, etc etc. It is a pretty dumb application (but it was mandated from on high, so...).

Agreed, zoom is absolute garbage on a tiling wm. I was able to at least make it useable with some custom config for zoom windows.

I don't really feel a difference in productivity. It's usually browser/vscode/terminal with tmux on full screens anyway. The biggest difference for me are the aesthetics and a distraction-free minimalist design. I like to have my pixelspace used with close to no waste.

I've switched to windows because of laziness and need to reconfigure my dotfiles after like 6 years of using i3. This week I'm getting a new m2 disk and will be installing arch to finish my rice.

I used XMonad for about 1 year. Back at FVWM since ca. 8 years, but XMonad influenced the setup quite a bit. The WM is barely noticeable, it manages 2 full screen rxvt/ssh/screen windows, Firefox, Zoom and little else. Keybindings + integration with a self written Plan9 plumber-like tool (edit/modify selection, link to bug db, jira, ... based on selection contents) are the real productivity boosters.

I still use a non-tiled wm for specific use cases.

Openbox is extremely minimalist and customizable. I use it for games, gimp, and occasionally gui application development. You can add directional selection keybindings etc. so it keeps a tiled-esque feel.

I dumped a shellscript in my ~/.zprofile where I can easily switch wms and X configurations without logging out (keep mounts, music, etc). It makes it really painless to switch.

I did. Used i3 for a while, but between how slow adjusting window sizes were (I opened new windows often as part of my workflow), and how you can’t hide windows behind others I ultimately found it too limiting.

I did love the fact that all shortcuts started with the superkey though. That meant no overlap with any ide (I am looking at you, gnome).

If I remember correctly, i3 has a stacking mode that lets you hide windows behind others.

Yup. Stacking is really useful sometimes.

Well you can configure shortcuts to quickly resize windows, and you can hide windows behind each other using tabbing or just different workspaces. I'm curious what your use case is for hiding windows behind each other though.

It was simply that I ended up with a lot of windows: an ide, a browser for the site I was building, the debugger for it (and I wanted to switch between them fast), my music app, the company mandated chat app, browser windows with google searches, file browsers, terminals and so on.

In the end it was much faster to use the switchers in more traditional managers like Gnome and while you can stack/tab windows they still take up space.

Finally, and I think most importantly, while I was using an ultrawide screen at the time, and it was definitely nice to be able to easily split it in two or three windows quickly, I mostly don't need a tileable screen.

Yeah it’s really hackable. That’s what I really like as well.

I tend to ping-pong between (one of my employers for ~5 years was a Mac shop; still use Windows for gaming etc.), but even almost 2 decades since I first used XMonad, nothing else feels like home. I use Sway on Linux these days because I have a mix of DPIs in my displays, so Wayland is semi-mandatory, and _man_ I miss XMonad.

What do you miss from XMonad vs Sway?

they're terrible when you need to float windows (like plots, or gui apps, or gui system utilities). i used to think about how i could merge the two and have floating vs. tiling desktops.

then i realized i could just run a full screen terminal on one desktop and run tmux within it. it can be a little annoying with just one screen but otherwise great.

(incidentally, i also used to be a window maker person, and an actual nextstep person... after those two i ran something extremely lightweight, with small thin window decorations and that's it. i cannot remember the name)

You can float windows in i3.

yeah... but i remember it not being their core focus and it ending up kinda like a mcdonald's salad. you can do it, but there are better places to go for that.

is it good? like if i'm doing something new and something new wants to pop a floating window, can i just keep doing my thing or do i have to start thinking about my window manager?

i find that dedicating a screen to tmux and another screen to a classic desktop environment gives the best of both worlds. (subject to the limitation of becoming dependent on multiple screens)

I’m never going back. And I’ve used them all.