‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop

407 points · 545 comments · signa11

  1. smallerfish · · focus · HN ↗
    I think he's bang on with his observation that overlapping windows are a relic.

    My wife, whose technical level leans her towards wanting to replace her mac mini when a VPN that she'd installed and then disabled left hostile firewall rules in place ("the internet is flaky on this computer"), is jealous of the tiling setup on my desktop (was hyprland; now sway with a custom dwindle layout). I think tiling has an audience beyond nerds, but I think nobody (perhaps with the exception of omarchy) has made a serious attempt at packaging it in a way that's accessible to business/productivity users. KDE's tiling attempts were, at least last time that I checked, somewhat bolted on and half-assed. I wish omarchy success in de-vibing their codebase, but it would be great to have some serious competition in the space.

    1. godshatter · · focus · HN ↗
      > I think he's bang on with his observation that overlapping windows are a relic.

      The paradigm of setting windows on the desktop strategically placed so parts of the title bars or portions of windows that can be clicked without issue are visible can be a really useful one. Combine this with virtual desktops and it works nicely so you don't have one humongous blob of everything but a few strategically placed windows dedicated to one task in each virtual desktop, overlapping so that each window is large enough to use.

      I'm not a big fan of tiled windows. I tend to focus on one window at a time and if I am focusing on just one, then a large amount of screen space is wasted.

      So please don't just take that away because some dev somewhere is a fan of tiling windows.

      1. someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
        You're describing the taskbar
Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.