I’ve tried tiling window managers, I’ve given them an honest trial and tried to like them, but they just don’t work well with how I tend to use a computer. I’m much more comfortable with a more traditional desktop experience using something like Cinnamon, KDE Plasma, Budgie, or MATE.

One of the biggest buzzkills for me when it comes to a more custom setup with a tiling window manager is that they don’t seem to include system settings panels for things like Wifi, power management, displays, printers, thunderbolt devices, etc. I’m sure I could mix and match programs and such from different DEs, but I also don’t want to necessarily make my experience more complicated, and I don’t want to have to do a bunch of additional work in the command line to change settings.

Probably kinda silly to hear from someone mainly playing around with Gentoo and Arch lately, but I’m sure you can understand where I’m coming from. I just generally prefer an all-in-one desktop experience.

I wish they did work for me though ‘cause the various setups I see people configure for themselves look dope!

@maddy That's very real. I know it's impractical to expect maintainers or app developers to have a list of defaults to cover all the various standard DE dialogs, but it sure is a nice-to-have that borders on need-to-have for me

@maddy My experience with Hyprland be like

@maddy yeah same. I just use Plasma now

@josh I really like Plasma, though I’m still struggling to find a DE I like for lower-spec systems.

@maddy yep, the fact that you can only have a DE but not a window manager of your choice, or window manager of your choice but not really a DE annoys me endlessly (a gentoo user)

personally I didn't want to switch to niri because then I'd have to deal with missing things, but... I kinda just gave in anyways. the scripts to emulate that concept on existing DEs just work poorly

switching to niri has kind of been a pain because things I used to be able to do easily, but very rarely, would become something I have to figure out what to do very quickly from scratch (e.g. unpairing and repairing 2 Xbox controllers), because even the Wayland shell thingy I use has not enough features and UI to support that

I have poked at things and figured out a way to use LXQt or COSMIC together with niri (https://micro.jacksonchen666.com/@jacksonchen666/115732060713029456) based on the mentions of using those with niri in the niri docs, but I'm not sure how fond I'd be with using either desktop environment. it's interesting though

@maddy

i have tried multiple tiling WMs in the past and kept going back to KDE

@maddy @josh I'm partial to xfce4 using i3wm instead of xfwm for my low spec machines.

I use this with Void Linux on my 2Gig Celeron D machine (2006 era).

@maddy I use Plasma because of this but its memory usage is excessive (currently at 221M resident for kwin_wayland + 781M resident for plasmashell, which is a total of slightly over 1GB)

@maddy Ya, I too love the idea of tiling window managers, but I can't do "100% keyboard". That does seem to be a goal of Cosmic (combine traditional WM with Tiling), but it's still pretty early.

@maddy tiling window managers arent for everybody, and thats okay! i still switch back to kde plasma on my arch laptop from time to time, mainly just because it handles multiple monitors better, and its much easier to configure keyboard layouts and display resolutions with a real settings menu