 When the idea behind adding tiling to you know, I'm show was first introduced a couple of years ago I didn't actually think much of it I didn't think it was that great of an idea because if you want tiling just use a tiling window manager it makes sense Because tiling window managers are so much more customizable than a genome extension ever is going to be so for the most part Over the last two years. I've just kind of pooped it like it's not something that I've ever really decided I even wanted to try because it just doesn't seem all that great of an idea to me now I have tried some of the k-win scripts for Kd plasma that do there's something similar and I also think those are kind of janky and not very good So that led to me to a resistance to even trying the tiling mechanism in pop o s simply because I just assumed that it was bad and As we all know you shouldn't assume things so what I thought I would do today is Try it out now. I've been messing around with it now for often on for about a day in a virtual machine And I have some thoughts so let's go ahead and take a look at pop o s So this is basically just pop o s straight out of the box The only thing I've done is changed the dock so that it's not full, you know Full screen. It's just the part in the middle. That's all I've changed It's just because I prefer that look if you want to go through and try tiling in pop o s Here's how you do it. You just go up to this little button Which is installed by default and click this little slider so that it's in the on position And then as you open up new windows or new applications You'll see that they are tiled just like you'd expect them to be now if you keep opening up clients And if I remove my face here You'll see that the layout looks similar to what you'd expect in BS PWM and similar to BS PWM Where the client spawns really is determined by what window you're focused on so if we're focused on this Window, we'll see things spawn like that if we're on this window Like that and so on so forth and you can also see that because we're dealing with GUI applications This is it. This is gonna. I'm terminal and it has a lot of GUI aspects to it the bar at the top title bar The window decorations all that stuff the more clients you add to your desktop here The harder it gets for to tile so you end up with things where things are kind of overlapping It's messy now It's not anything that's unusual when you when it comes to a tiling window manager GUI applications oftentimes can only get so small before they won't get any smaller and That's basically the case on a lot of tiling when managers as well So it's not a huge deal, but it's definitely something that you'll have to keep in mind now Nobody's ever going to go through and try to create a layout like that and expect it to be usable So it's like that's not a huge deal It's just again something that you'll have to keep in mind because if you wanted to go through And resize things like I just did there you'll see how things are actually overlapping even there because Gunam terminal can only get so small in one direction So interestingly interacting with and moving the clients around Is fairly easy. You can go through and do that with a keyboard shortcut You can also go through and use your mouse if you wanted to use your mouse And it's kind of cool that you can use your mouse and it allows you to kind of create your own workspace. It's I'd say moving the the clients around with your mouse is kind of like bspwm's like pre-selection and that as you can see it kind of allows you to Determine where it highlights where it's going to go and what position and how big it's going to be all that stuff It's not as customizable as pre-selection and bspwm is But it's kind of similar also You'll see as on the screen Is that if you have things overlapping in a certain place if you try to drag them into Like on top of each other You'll then get tabs which is very much similar to what you'd see in i3, which is really cool, right? It's not something that I expected to exist The fact that you can go through and have tabs now if you you've noticed when I tried to add a third window It doesn't seem to allow you to have a third window As far as I can tell two windows in a tab stack is as much as you can have I may be doing that wrong But as far as I can tell you can only do two now the layout is Overall fine. The problem is other than you know dragging things and customizing basically making your own layout so that there's You know different widths and different heights and all that stuff There are no other default layouts that you can select so you can't select like master stack You can't select a centered master or any of that kind of stuff that you'd be able to choose in a like a tiling window manager What you get is the Fibonacci layout and that's pretty much it out of the box and you can't change it So and that is my first criticism is that there's no settings for this at all As far as I can tell I've searched now several times and have not been able to find settings for the tiling functionality of pop West They just don't seem to exist. They're not in the standard settings app They're not in the extensions application and they're not anywhere located here Right now there are some things that you can change. So for example, you can create basically what amounts to rules So if you've ever used a tiling window manager before you can know most of them allow you to set rules So that certain applications function in a certain way So for example, if you want to have say like gimp or something float You could go through and do that and the tiling when the tiling functionality of Pop OS has that functionality built in so you could go through and create exceptions to the floating rules so basically Allowing things to float and that's really cool. There's also several built-in ones that are automatically Set to float by default So that is basically the only settings that I can find that actually exists now The only other things that I did find so let's go ahead and close a couple of these things with super q and open Up the settings app If we go down to keyboard and then customize shortcuts and then tiling you can go through and customize Some I should say very few of the keyboard shortcuts So if we actually go up here and just open up the keyboard shortcut cheat sheet We'll close this so you can actually see this It tells you all the keyboard shortcuts that you'll need to know and most of them are pretty intuitive But the problem is of these the only ones that you can change are these And there's like what five different keyboard shortcuts here And that's all you can change and there's way more than five keyboard shortcuts now That's not a huge deal because you can adapt to these keyboard shortcuts but one of the things About a tiling window manager that most people like is it allows them to make Customizations to their keyboard shortcuts Not everybody prefers the same keyboard shortcuts and this is very restricting in that manner There's only so many you can change all the rest of them as far as I can tell Are hard coded and you can't change them The other thing that bothers me Seriously bothers me Is that the super key pulls double duty So you can see all these keyboard shortcuts shortcuts are using super which is the windows key Now I don't have a problem with the windows key being the meta key. It's the key that I use It's the key that I think is probably the one that most people use although I've heard from many people who use alt But it really doesn't matter super is the one that they've chosen to use And the problem is that it also pulls double duty in that it brings up the launcher So sometimes if if you let up on the super key when you're trying to Do a key binding that's going to come up when you're really wanting to do a key binding like super key or something It actually just did it there because It's finicky because that button is doing two different things. It's not all the time It's just sometimes and it kind of bothers me. The thing is They could have changed it so that the alt key was the meta key in this case Or whatever switched them around. It doesn't matter. I mean, I understand why super key works this way Because people who use gnom are used to using the windows key to access Either a launcher or the app drawer or whatever Usually the super key does something like that so I can see why they have that but it's also Does all those things that we just showed you or I just showed you for the tiling functionality And a key doing double duty does not always work that well And it's always going to lead to some problems now as we open up new clients You'll see if you if you pay close attention How some of the clients think they want to just open like up like normal like in a random position on the desktop And then they snap into whatever floating position they are So you'll notice up here where the mouse is if I open up a you know the terminal down here That's up there where the mouse just was There was there's a flash of red And then it goes down to where the floating where the next floating window should appear I don't know whether or not that's something that pop shield always does or if it's just a virtual machine thing, but it Makes it feel not so smooth So it's not it's not like if we go into just dwm here and go into another workspace and then open up a ton of terminals It just is very smooth. It just opens them up opens them up until you know You fill up the whole screen and there's no Weirdness right and that's because this is meant to do tiling and you know, it's not a huge deal of course But it does make it feel a little janky and that's where My final conclusion comes in a little bit is that It's better than I thought it would be It's better than I think it was when it first was announced way back when the problem is that it's still even after all this time Feels a little bit Paint it on if you know what I mean. It feels like it's kind of if well, it feels like an extension You know A lot of genomic extensions feel this way like they're kind of weren't meant to be like they were tacked on That their functionality that doesn't really kind of fit with the way genomes supposed to work And that's the way this feels it feels tacked on and it feels hacky in some ways Now it's not as bad as that cronkite cronkite and plasma for my very very brief experience Well, freely admit that it was I only used it for Maybe a few hours, but in my experience during those three hours That felt way more janky than this does like this is usable Cronkite for me just wasn't it had too many weird weird things going on with certain windows and kitty Spawns windows weirdly anyways unless you really dig deep into the settings and it was a mess The poppa west one is way better than that, but it still felt janky to me So but the thing that bothered me the most wasn't the jankiness of it Like I could deal with that if I were going to use this the problem that I have Coming from a window manager coming from a tiling window manager is the lack of customizability Like the thing about window managers that is great is that you can get into the config files And you can change things right you can alter key bindings. You can alter rules. You can alter layouts You can do all this stuff And as far as I can tell that's not something that you can do with the extension for popo s Now I will be completely honest and say that I did go through and search for a config file Like I went through and looked in dot config. I looked in the home directory for hide hidden files I didn't really go through the root directory all that much because I'm assuming That if there was something hidden there that you probably weren't supposed to mess with it It's usually the rule if you if it's in the root file If this if it's in the root directory don't mess with it unless you know what you're doing So I didn't go messing around in there. So As far as I can tell there are no configuration files for this extension and there's no settings really either There's just those few key bindings that you can change and that's it If I were a gnom user And I'd never use a tiling window manager before this would be cool But if you're a if you've used tiling window manager before even just floating window managers anything like that But you've had you have experience with things that allow you to customize the crap out of them This is not going to be for you simply because there's just no customizability And that's that that's the bottom line is that it's better than I thought it would be But it's not for me because you can't customize it and I would like to cut The very least I'd like to say hey you want to know it Let me change to do a different key binding for this or this or this And the fact that you can't do that Makes it pretty much unusable for me So in the comment section below if you would tell me if you've used this tiling functionality and whether or not You enjoyed it or not I'd really be happy to hear from you if you would like to follow me on twitter You can do so at the linuxcast you can support me on patreon on patreon.com slash linuxcast before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Today devon chris east coast web gen 2's fun 2 petrico primus marcus maiglin jack snipe tool steve sabergate linux garak michael artster carbon dated shaw and jeremy odin merit camp drash li j dog the beast He's rock peter a crucible and dart bandit six. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time