The i3 Family

i3 (Figure 5), or i3-wm as it appears in some repositories, is one of the most widely used tiling desktops. You navigate i3 by keyboard using commands starting with the Mod key (Alt or Win) plus letters or numbers for switching tiles, resizing the current tile or making it full-screen, or opening a virtual workspace. Similarly, applications are started with Mod+d. Users can also add a new tile that is horizontal or vertical to the current one. Minor or temporary windows, such as pop-up dialog boxes, can be set to float so that they do not take up a lot of room. Should you have multiple screens, one workspace is set up on each screen by default. The result is a lot of flexibility, all of which can be customized in text-based configuration files, but the flexibility comes at the cost of a lot of learning.

Figure 5: i3 is a popular tiling choice with numerous forks.

Like many popular open source apps, i3 has spawned a number of forks. For instance, i3-gaps allows spacing between tiles, which makes for easier reading. More conveniently, Regolith [5] (Figure 6) places i3-gaps in both an Ubuntu-based distribution and a package for related distributions. Regolith features a handy cheat sheet of keystroke commands and can save snapshots of window layouts for future use. Yet another fork, Sway, runs on Wayland.

Figure 6: Regolith is available both as a package and an Ubuntu-derived distribution.

Pop!_OS

Designed by System76 for its workstations and laptops, Pop!_OS [6] (Figure 7) is probably the main reason for the recent renewed interest in tiling desktops. Although tiling is not enabled during installation, a button in the desktop's upper-right corner enables tiling and provides a drop-down list of features and settings (including a list of keyboard shortcuts), a setting for adjusting the gap between tiles, and can be conveniently displayed as a tile. Although tiles are arranged automatically, you can adjust each tile's size by dragging with the mouse. Best of all, Pop!_OS lets you discover how tiling works in a matter of minutes, making Pop!_OS by far the most user-friendly tiling desktop available today – so much so that tiling desktops are now less exclusive than they once were. Because the basic desktop is based on Gnome, the tiling features are already available for Ubuntu as an extension and will likely soon be ready for other distributions as well.

Figure 7: System76's Pop!_OS offers user-friendly, mouse-based tiling.

Hybrid Desktops

Unknown to many users, a few traditionally stacking desktops have offered their own limited form of tiling. Gnome, deepin, and KDE Plasma all provide an overview of virtual desktops and the windows open on them, although Gnome and Plasma remain primarily stacking desktops. Due to the increased interest in tiling, Gnome is currently developing PaperWM, a tiling extension, while KDE offers kwin-tiling, a script for its window manager.

A word should also be said about Plasma Activities, which are separate stacking desktops, each with its own desktop environment and icons. Activities can be organized by task or by some other criterion. For example, I have one Activity devoted to graphics, with icons for Gimp, Inkscape, Krita, and LibreOffice Draw, and another for the command line, which includes only icons for a terminal and screenshots. Other users, I have heard, have separate Activities for different projects, or for school or office. Such specialization minimizes clutter and also makes required resources easy to find and a single click away, providing similar benefits to tiling.

All these solutions require rethinking the way you work. On the one hand, if you are a tidy worker, opening one application at a time and closing the window when you are done, you may not find much benefit in tiling or the hybrid features of traditional stacking desktops. Similarly, if you prefer using a mouse, some tiling manager's reliance on keyboard commands may not suit you. On the other hand, if you regularly have 20 or more tabs open in your web browser, a tiling manager or a hybrid just might help you to organize your work and improve your efficiency.