this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
290 points (98.7% liked)

Linux

55801 readers
837 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml
nooter692@lemmy.ml
MarcellusDrum@lemmy.ml
cypherpunks@lemmy.ml
cyclohexane@lemmy.ml
d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
290
GNOME Devs Are Working on a New Window Management System (9to5linux.com)
submitted 2 years ago by leo@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show to c/linux@lemmy.ml
53 comments fedilink hide all child comments
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Vinegar@kbin.social 117 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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 2 years ago

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

[–] Reemerge1511@lemmy.sdf.org 41 points 2 years 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 21 points 2 years 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 2 years ago

There's also Forge for GNOME.

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

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

[–] Knusper@feddit.de 5 points 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] theDodosConundrum@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

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

[–] tombuben@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years 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.

[–] nik282000@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years 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.

[–] humanplayer2@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years 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.

[–] mfn@mfn.pub 27 points 2 years ago

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

[–] AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml 25 points 2 years 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/

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 24 points 2 years 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.

[–] gamma@programming.dev 23 points 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years ago

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

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] Gutless2615@ttrpg.network 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Agreed. It's the best blend of keyboard driven window management and recognizing that users might also use the mouse from time to time. I got my wife to use and default to tiling with Pop!_OS.

The only problem is Pop!_OS is a shitshow of dependencies being built on Ubuntu. I had an update last night that reinstalled snapd and LibreOffice and Firefox even though I intentionally uninstalled them in favor of the flatpaks. Cosmic DE, and presumably re-basing Pop!_OS on nixOS (given a dev comment) can't come soon enough.

[–] testingtesting123@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There is no snap in pop os unless you installed... Firefox and libreoffice are debs. The problem may be that the pop-desktop package is depends on too many packages, but not snap

[–] unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Yet somehow, through only apt updates, it brought back LibreOffice, Firefox, and snapd.

IIRC, it was something to do with ubuntu-minimal or ubuntu-release meta packages, which I never intentionaly installed.

I'm probably the only person who uninstalls the Firefox and LibreOffice packages and replaces them with the flatpaks, but this seemed like an oversight and dependency hell that comes from using the derivative of a derivative distribution.

[–] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I experienced the same thing (had previously uninstalled libreoffice, but it came back after the update). I didn't get snapd back fortunately (though I do use Firefox packaged by Pop).

Part of the change is that Pop!_OS is moving away from ubuntu-minimal and ubuntu-standard meta packages and towards their own metapackages as shown in this this recent commit.

After the update, I simply uninstalled libreoffice... hopefully it doesn't return in the next update :]

[–] unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 years ago

Yes, the solution for me was to remove those ubuntu-* meta packages, reinstall what I needed by hand then update. Simple things like ftp, telnet, time, etc. had to be reinstalled.

I was kind of nervous on the reboot since a plymouth theme was removed in addition to adding a newer kernel with the amd microcode patch, but it came up fine.

[–] fourstepper@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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 2 years ago

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

[–] donuts@kbin.social 15 points 2 years 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 2 years ago

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

[–] pr06lefs@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago

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

[–] crow@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years 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 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] zero_iq@lemm.ee 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Worked fine for me (firefox mobile).

[–] dnzm 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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

Edit: on reload, it suddenly did. 🤷‍♂️

[–] Furycd001@fosstodon.org 1 points 2 years ago

@dnzm @zero_iq Didn't work for me either.. Running Firefox nightly on Android 13....

[–] WildeGreen@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 years 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

load more comments
view more: next ›