After I switched and got used to a tiling WM, it’s really painful to have to use a floating one.
Couldn’t tiling just be done with an app like how PowerToys FancyZones does it on Windows? That way anyone could just install it when wanted.
It would need some sort of way to hook into the compositor. PowerToys has it easy because they can just add the necessary APIs to the Windows compositor if it doesn’t already have them. And I feel like compositors would just implement it directly instead of designing an API for it because that’s less complex.
I have been working on a Wayland Tiling WM and have thought about expanding more into the DE space. While it’s finally starting to get to a good spot, it’s pretty daunting to consider all of the other items that need to be developed for a fully-featured DE. Especially when it’s something I’m doing as a side project after my day job. I think for anything bigger it’d require financial backing, for which open source projects are still struggling to find a good solution.
We do have them.
Most popular DEs already support tiling with extensions (Gnome and KDE).
KDE actually added native support, although pretty limited so far.
This. It’s not well-advertised in KDE – I accidentally discovered it through a key combo – but it was good enough (i.e., Win 11-level) in KDE 5 to make the switch painless on desktop. Where both have issues is apps insisting there are arbitrary dimensional minimums for functionality and refusing to adhere to positioning. This is most egregious in messaging programs.
IMO the tiling support in KDE and with gnome extensions does not look great. It cannot replace someones workflow that has been on a true tiling window manager. It is a benefit to those that have been using floating window managers for their whole life but I cannot now go back to them. Cosmic is the first desktop environment that looks like it has true tiling support (that can rival a tiling window manger) and not just drag a window to a side/area of the screen. Though I have yet to really try it out.
On KDE you can try out Polonium, which integrates with the native tiling support and makes it awesome!
https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite
This looks quite nice as well
If you’re still on X11. Krohnkite didn’t support Wayland all that well last time I checked.
I’m currently using KZones, actually, it’s not automatic, but it works pretty great.
