I really enjoyed reading this article. I’d say it’s been roughly 12 months since I started daily driving linux. I don’t do any work with computers, it’s all been exploration and learning so far. My learning is definitely more structured these days and will eventually evolve into a workflow.
That being said, using a tiling window manager is probably one of the most valuable things I’ve learned to use. I spent a lot of time on ubuntu 24.04 lts and a lot of time on Bazzite fedora atomic. Both had workstation options. It wasn’t until I was on bazzite that I started utilizing the workspaces more. If I pressed the super key I’d get a view of all my floating windows except they would be un-layered, I found that this was a really quick way to see what I had running and to refocus on layered floating windows more easily. Then I learned that when I pressed super and used the scroll wheel, it would cycle through workstations. I loved this! I started having a flow. Navigating my system had an intuitive feel, the “muscle memory” coming into play.
At that point I experienced my first tiling window manager when I installed Omarchy, I think it used wayland. It would have been difficult except that the documentation provided pretty good coverage of the essential hot keys, and even a hot key to open a menu of all the bindings. It was WONDERFUL.
Just as I was really starting to fly that system broke. When doing my research for a more stable distro than arch, a tiling window was a must! I loved the keyboard-centric approach and absolutely did not want to go back to relying on a mouse and GUIs. At first, I just thought tiling window managers looked cool, but once I spent a month with one, I felt that it gave me a next level way to interact with my system.
I’m now using sway fedora atomic. It may have been a bit in depth to find and read the sway config file to find out the basic key bindings, as a new linux user, but it really wasn’t that hard. And once I learned basic movement, I started flying on this new system too. When I open a new window and it auto tiles, if I need it somewhere else I can just press 3 keys to move it to the workspace of my choice. I often move windows around this way, as I need different things side by side as I work through my learning material.
It’s especially helpful with using containers because I can easily keep track of the terminal inside a certain env and the terminals open in my host system.
I know this is kind of a long monologue not saying much, but I just wanted to share and show that for a younger generation of linux users, people who don’t have enough skills yet to actually be employed in the industry, tiling window managers are a huge deal!
I would recommend twm to anyone in my shoes (if it fits their needs) and I must say the developers over at fedora, built sway fedora atomic to be ready to use for those with or without the most technical expertise and as the latter, I can say they hit their mark.
But about 10 years ago