this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2025
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Friendly tiling setup for a laptop? (tiling window manager?) (lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by BigHeadMode@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I have a laptop with an 11 inch screen and 768p display. Naturally, my usage breakdown is:

  • 80% one window in fullscreen
  • 15% two windows side by side
  • 5% other

I've considered tiling window managers. I used i3wm on this in the past. It was a little complicated and I customized the bottom bar to show commands for dummies.

alt-Enter: term | alt-D: launch | alt-F: fullsc | alt-1: new workspace | alt-shift-1: move to workspace

That plus some battery, wifi, time info. I never got 'good' with i3 and would consult the cheat sheet regularly.

Is there a paradigm (tiling or otherwise) that would let me quickly and simply launch programs with the keyboard (like most distros these days) and switch between fullscreen windows? and set them side by side as needed?

My usage is keyboard-first but mouse-available. i3 didn't seem tailored to mouse usage the way some other tiling wms are. and sometimes you'd launch a program like the wifi settings window and it wasn't built to be resized for a twm, so it looked weird. (no floating window support.)

edit: Tried

  • cachy+LxQt
  • cachy+niri
  • AntiX + IceWM

Couldn't figure out how to remap keys in LxQt. Niri was cool but a bit overwhelming especially on a laptop with just kb+touchpad and it's easy to back yourself into a corner (window wider than the monitor).

IceWM allows for super+arrows to move windows side by side like Windows. I don't love it but it works okay. Performance is also a big concern and my idle RAM seems to be around 300M for AntiX vs 700+ for cachy+niri.

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[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

And KDE's RAM usage is very reasonable these days, especially if you opt out of some of the bells and whistles.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It was quite good for a while but I feel like it has crept up again. It is over 1.5G at start for me these days.

It used to be under a gig.

It makes a difference when you only have 8G on a laptop.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Look up RAM usage in btop, sort processes by memory usage. A lot it is random services you can disable in the system setting or uninstall with a package manager.

And yeah... it even matters on a higher RAM setup. Sometimes I have most of mine filled with a background thing, and 1GB vs 2 or 3 can make a big difference.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Agreed. That does not change what I said though.

For me, “baloo” is the worst offender.

Also, great to see another btop fan. I use it a lot.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Baloo can be disabled, it's just the background search indexer. So can kaccess (the accessibility service) and kde wallet (the secrets manager).

A lot of the widgets, effects and stuff take up RAM too.