Grid-Tiling-Kwin VS i3

KWin used to have no tiling capabilities at all and people came up with lots of add-on scripts like kwin-tiling, Grid-Tiling-KWin, Krohnkite, Bismuth and so on. This gave users tiling, but it was always a bit hackish, getting KWin to do something it wasn't designed to do.

Grid-Tiling-Kwin

Personally I use Grid-Tiling-Kwin, which is working great with Wayland. Not sure why it won't allow more than 2 splits horizontally/2 splits vertically, though.

I only had issues a few times when installing new theme or icons. Desktop widgets might sometimes move a bit after restart, other than that it works well. I also use https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin

For starters, there is a couple of tiling scripts for KWin (Kröhnkite and Grid-Tiling). You can also turn any EWMH-compliant WM into a tiling one with PyTyle.

Also have noticed that when a notification shows up, an entry on the window list plasmoid shows up too - so it could be that they got kind of a regular window behavior somehow. This behavior is reported in bug #411462, which I think is the cause of another issue I'm having (using Grid-Tiling-Kwin and when opening a plasmoid, it wants to fill a space as if it were a regular window, and it messes up with the layout of previously opened windows) but am not sure if it's related to the focus stealing issue.

Note that there are at least other alternative. Maybe not as powerful as I imagine Bismuth/Krohnite is, the one I use, [Grid-tiling-kwin](https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin) (though it's being funny lately with Wayland and not sure why)

Perhaps a working kwin script - for example, I use Grid-Tiling-Kwin and for some reason while in use it keeps rewriting that file.

Tiling window managers take a lot of time to learn and configure, and typically require configuration through text files. I would not recommend starting with a true tiling WM. You can use System76's Pop tiling GNOME extension, which still allows you to use the mouse to drag windows as well as add tiling exceptions, or you can install KDE and use Grid-Tiling-KWin. Krohnkite also works, but it might be a little too advanced. Grid-Tiling allows you to meta-drag windows around to change their positions rather than relying entirely on keyboard shortcuts, just like the Pop tiling.

While I believe Memory Saver was a great improvement, it only works if the tab is hidden or the window minimized. I recently learned the required state is not triggered if the tab is open but on another virtual desktop. At least this is the case with many of not all Linux window managers. Some of the many discussion threads on the topic:

https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/4353

> This is very true, and unfortunately there are very few people working on linux accessibility (including not me! I am part of the problem!).

Accessibility work itself ironically suffers from an accessibility problem. I brought up i3wm above, the issue for that is pretty illuminating: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3393

It's not that the devs are saying "this doesn't matter", the devs behind one of the most popular tiling window managers in the X11 ecosystem are saying, "this does matter, but we don't know how to fix it. We don't know what changes we'd need to make to get Orca working."

It's a really fundamental breakdown that's kind of a tragedy because I honestly believe that if accessibility communities were more heavily baked into testing and development in Linux and if this wasn't treated like two separate worlds, it would be better for everyone -- fixing accessibility concerns very often improves interfaces across the board and makes them more powerful.

But... how do you bridge that gap? I don't really know, I tried looking into Orca to see what would need to happen here and bounced off of it pretty hard, it's not a very approachable tech stack and there aren't tutorials or getting started guides. And on the other side of the issue I can preach about needing accessibility input during interface design, but I'm not in a position to give specific advice because I don't use screenreaders or alternate control schemes and I don't know what the biggest problems are.

The people who need to be involved in that process can't get involved because there's a tech barrier in place even for technically inclined people, and because the underlying software locks them out from the start. i3wm isn't ever going to get someone who's intimately familiar with Orca to jump into the conversation because the people who need to use Orca can't use i3wm. So that leaves the people who can address that tech barrier, but they don't know what to do or how to approach the problem because of the lack of involvement and because the communities are isolated from each other. So it's a chicken-and-egg problem and I don't know how to solve it.

This is partially why i use tools like i3 (/ sway). i like the tool; it works extremely well for me; the design has stayed the same for 20 years; there's no profit motive to come along and fuck everything up. it just works. it is boring in the best way possible.

I use MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid-2014) with Manjaro as OS using i3 as a window manager. It isn't perfect, but I'm thrilled with it. I have been a Mac OS user for the last 15 years and wouldn't change what I have now for a Mac OS because I don't need more than what I'm using for development.

Even though, we have moved the official i3 support channel to GitHub discussions, i3's biggest community is still on reddit and if things continue like that there is going to be a lot of helpful content on an increasingly closed platform.

for example, take i3. https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/4478

For daily usage I really like kubuntu with i3wm, but it takes some configuration and getting used to the shortcuts, but it's well worth it