Linux: We need tiling desktop environments

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall sentiment on tiling window managers

  • Many commenters love tiling WMs (i3, Sway, Awesome, XMonad, Hyprland, etc.) and say they dramatically reduce “window juggling” and mental overhead.
  • Others remain unconvinced or bounced off them, finding the cognitive load, shortcut memorization, and layout management not worth it.
  • Several people say they mostly run one app full‑screen per workspace, using tiling mainly for terminals or occasional side‑by‑side layouts.

Niche vs. “we need this”

  • Multiple comments stress that tiling WMs are a niche within an already‑niche Linux desktop, so massive investment or new DEs is unrealistic.
  • Others counter that the niche is well served: there are many actively maintained tiling WMs and even distro spins that ship them.
  • Some argue Linux already suffers from too many DEs; they’d rather improve existing ones than create new tiling‑centric environments.

Integration with desktop environments

  • A recurring theme: standalone tiling WMs are powerful but lack DE conveniences (auto‑mounting media, display config, volume/network integration, portals, notifications).
  • Some users run tiling WMs inside DEs (e.g., KDE/Xfce/MATE + i3/XMonad) to get both tiling and DE services, though Wayland makes swapping WMs harder.
  • KDE and GNOME have tiling features or extensions (KWin scripts, GNOME extensions, PaperWM-like approaches), but these are seen as less cohesive or sometimes fragile.

Usability, workflows, and accessibility

  • Strong divide between keyboard‑centric and mouse‑centric users. Tiling fans praise precise keyboard workflows; others prefer quick snapping, grids, or FancyZones‑style tools on top of floating WMs.
  • Some dislike automatic resizing of browsers/video when new windows appear; tiling users respond that workspaces, tabbed/stacked layouts, or newer scrolling/PaperWM‑style WMs address this.
  • Poor app and web UI scaling, padding-heavy “low density” design, and mobile breakpoints are called out as major problems, especially for visually impaired users.

Technical and platform constraints

  • Wayland compositors typically bundle WM + compositor, making “DE + different tiling WM” setups harder than on X11.
  • Specific pain points mentioned: screen sharing, xdg-desktop-portal quirks, XWayland scaling, and proprietary Nvidia drivers blocking some Wayland tilers.
  • Some see Wayland as reducing modularity; others note active development and X11 being effectively feature-frozen.