this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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My takeaways:
I've been using linux for about 20 years and have never used a tiling WM. What are the benefits? What am I missing out on? My current daily driver is Mint with Cinnamon.
Years ago I had tried a tiling wm on a personal computer. It's cool if you're working with a lot of windows at the same time, also I like the idea of one workspace per software as it makes it very simple to switch from one to the other.
However, I never felt those to be a good fit for when I work. At work I need a bunch of software open and I always felt having actual windows to be a bit simpler as you can easily move them around. A tiling WM always splits your screen, so you have to be careful where you open software and be moving it around.
As such, I've been most time using KDE and have little complaints with it. Pretty much completely vanilla setup.
However, recently I have heard of sliding window managers. I decided to try as it appeared cool, just to play with it a little bit. So far I've been using niri at my job for 4-5 months and I never felt I needed to switch back to KDE.
It makes it simple to split the screen like a tiling wm, but you're not limited to the screen space and you can have more windows in the same workspace that you easily scroll through.
In the meanwhile you can have several workspaces and easily switch through them.
One simple thing it allows me to do is: two terminals splitting the screen vertically for local/remote and besides a full screen IDE for coding. I can easily switch to test locally, remotely and adjust the code as I am testing without having to alt tab and find the correct window all the time.
Give it a try, it's pretty cool and quite simple to setup: it took me no more than half an hour to have the configuration I'm still using to this day using the noctalia shell. https://github.com/niri-wm/niri
never been a fan of them myself, but then i don't sit in a terminal (or rather, multiple terminals) all day, either. those days are long behind me. i very much prefer a traditional stacking wm, and also one that remembers window geometry and locations, too--a trick windows has done since forever, but gnome and kde still require addons to pull off.
Tiling WM is great when you love sitting upright at a desk all day and are crystal clear in the tasks you want to accomplish using only keyboard shortcuts for pure speed.
Me….i like slightly reclining, using one hand to navigate my mouse to do nothing productive.
I like it because even when i was still using windows i would always snap two windows next to each other, the tiling window manager takes care of that for me so the only thing i have to do now is just open my apps. That's what got me into it initially, but now i also really like the keyboard driven workflow, and try to get as many parts of my system controllable with the keyboard as possible.