The 9to5 article is poorly written. In the first paragraph 9to5 says a new window system is “scheduled to replace” the current one, but this is not true. The cited blog post explicitly says “There’s no timeline or roadmap at this stage”. The Gnome developers are merely experimenting with a new window management system and at this early stage it’s impossible to know what the finished product may look like if these experiments go anywhere at all.
Here’s a link to the original blog post where Gnome developer Tobias Bernard explains their dissatisfaction with existing window management systems and discusses the techinical challeneges developers face.
I think this looks amazing. I do like the behaviour of tiling WMs, but having a DE is too comfy for me to give up. This could possibly bring the bestof both worlds.
There are already ways to have tiling and a DE.
On GNOME, there’s PaperWM, although it’s not quite traditional tiling either.
On KDE Plasma 5.27+, you can use Polonium. For versions before 5.27, Bismuth.
And on Xfce or LXQt, it’s often possible to use them with a traditional tiling WM, like i3wm, bspwm etc…
Krohnkite went unmaintained a while ago, which is when Bismuth forked from it. So, Bismuth is basically a straight upgrade. The dev implemented tons of features, which you may or may not need, but I think, there were also some fixes for stability and Plasma version compatibility.
Polonium came about, because Plasma 5.27 introduced a (manual) tiling system of its own, which partially broke Bismuth, but also meant it made sense to develop a new KWinScript, which makes use of this native system.
As such, it is a step back from Bismuth. I think, it’s roughly comparable to Krohnkite in terms of features now, but still a very young project, so not as stable yet…
I saw this and I really like that they are trying to improve it and innovate. Nothing has happened for a long time in the desktop innovation area since the web took over.
Innovations are pretty rare in the desktop space but this looks like a really good innovation if implemented bug free.
I really enjoy how GNOME handles windows currently already.
Between having the ability to move and resize windows with Super + (mouse left|right), switching between windows of the same application with Super + backtick, workspaces and Super + type to search, there is very little to desire.
Unlike tiling VMs, this makes sense out of the box for 99% of the apps out there while providing a really quick way to get where you need quickly.
