Qtile Versus i3 Window Manager

Qtile and I3wm are two of my favorite window managers. Today we compare and contrast.
👇 PULL IT DOWN FOR THE GOOD STUFF 👇
Two things I forgot to mention in the video:
Qtile has it so that workspaces can float between monitors, whereas i3 can be configured otherwise easily.
I also didn't talk about 3rd party bars on qtile. It does support them, but the support isn't as widespread as it is with i3.
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==== Time Stamps ====
0:00 Intro
1:10 i3 Installation
2:05 Manual Tiling Window Manager
2:32 i3 Configuration
3:08 Workspaces
3:58 The Bar Situation
5:26 The Community
6:15 The Documentation
7:06 The Variants
8:04 The Pros and Cons of i3wm
14:02 Qtile Installation
15:06 Dynamic Tiling Window Manager
16:07 Qtile Configuration
17:57 Workspaces
19:35 The Bar Situation
20:00 Widgets
21:26 The Community
22:04 The Documentation
23:03 The Variants
23:46 The Pros and Cons of Qtile
34:56 Conclusions: Try them both
#vs #windowmanagers #thelinuxcast

[@TheLinuxCast]

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[@russellrussell5495]

I never understand why any review or discussion on i3 neglects to focus on stacking and tabs - by far the most unique(?), practical and outstanding feature of i3, imo

[@styrofoamsoldier]

Agree, although it isn't unique to i3. I stayed on dwm for a long time but at some point realised that it was really missing something and couldn't put quite put my finger on it. I remember DT talking about the 'killer feature' of tilers which IIRC was the workspaces/tags. I think that manual tilers have the extra killer feature of stacking/tabbing windows so you can easily move them, browse through them and in some cases even search through them. I think dynamic tilers might work like I want them to work if I used small fonts or had a larger monitor (and it's already large...) but manual tiling really makes it easy to hide some windows with the stacking, and to a lesser extent, the title bars. For my workflow I need tiling, but I also want to preserve the layout even if I need to open new windows and stacking makes that possible. I honestly don't mind having to manually split the frame since you really don't have to do it a lot. I don't like i3, for me it's always seemed somehow sluggish and not very hackable. It's been a while since I last used it though. I tried stumpwm (and I'm still almost certain this is the god tier of manual tilers) but I couldn't be arsed to learn lisp properly to hack on it. It still seems like the endgame wm but I changed to herbstluftwm since it was a bit easier to configure and extend and haven't hopped since.

[@DylanMatthewTurner]

If we're talking about i3, I gotta recommend i3-alternating-layouts. It causes a default Fibonacci spiral layout for i3, although you still have the control to real-time override it do it manually if you'd like. You get the control of a manual tiler with natural feel of a dynamic tiler. Maybe it's not for everyone, but whenever I use i3, I always use that now

[@FolklorCaduco]

I use autotiling, which is inspired by the i3-alternating-layouts. It's a bit larger, but you can set a limit for container spliting. It has packages in Void, the AUR, Pypi and a few others.

[@santonopoulou]

Love your channel Matt. Always great Linux content, and you cover a lot of various topics. I also like your style of presenting. It's like hanging out with my other Linux enthusiast friends and just chatting or someone showing us something new they recently discovered. Honestly, best Linux channel on KZbin in my opinion :) Keep up the great work! As a long time user of QTile I'm sorta interested in trying i3 and this video was a great comparison to give me the push to actually give it a go :) As a developer myself (c and c++ at work, python for fun) I think i3 will be fun to work to extend or build extensions for etc.

[@claytonreardon42069]

Just finally finished setting up i3 and polybar on my system. Im really really enjoying it. It feels so smooth to navigate and it just looks great too. Makes me feel so much in control than any DE ive used. Your channel was a big help in helping me decide what my first tiling window manager would be and to get it all set up. So just wanted to say thanks Matt! Youre the best I appreciate all the work you put in :)

[@faustipez]

Thank you so much for this comparison Matt 🙏❤️ I just installed Archcraft and I'm using it with BSPWM and I love it, I didn't have to do too much, but I'm still figuring out how some things work. However, I already used i3 a long time ago and reading some comments about i3, made realize a lot of stuff I didn't even existed and I might switch to i3 in the near future. I would really appreciate if you can make some sort of "walkthrough" to se up Tiling Window Managers from scratch, or using an existing config and explaining how to do certain things, especially for beginners.

[@saintnight9792]

got to say, i'm new to this channel and i'm glad that i found this. Very informative videos you got.

[@mikel8190]

Why this video didn't show up in my feed until now... I don't know.... Great video as always Matt.

[@kenana3456]

Could you talk about the desktop environment and the themes you're using? I notice that you have a very beautiful look and feel desktop, I would love to see all the details. Thanks a lot Matt, I love your content and you really got me into Linux.

[@mykytao5028]

i want to mention that in i3 you can bind scripts written in any language, such as lua, python, rust, etc. Use "i3-msg" to control you wm from scripts. So you can get extensibility a much you need.

[@anthonyshi3031]

Yes. i3-msg is actually the thing about i3 that I like the most. You can set a keybinding to launch any script in any language in order to interact with the window manager during runtime. One example use case is a script to dynamically select workspaces upon the press of a keybinding. So if you want the leftmost workspace to always be selected when you press $mod + 1, then you can do that with a script that calls i3-msg -t get_workspaces and then parses the json output.

[@burpsan]

Great comparison!

[@markmiranpt]

Love the terminal looks awesome.

[@mkd1964]

I like this guy and I'm not trying to make fun of him, but I don't think he knows how many "a dozen" is. I've heard him say "two or three dozen" in other videos when scrolling through a gigantic list of options, when there are clearly way, way more than 24 to 36 items. Maybe just a habit of his speech. But I like his information. It's very in-depth, he presents things calmly and simply, with very little bias (and actually admits when he has one). Good video.

[@TheLinuxCast]

I didn't count them. And I'm terrible at guessing.

[@EssaVidaAi]

Thanks, bro. Great job!

[@bstar777777]

i3-gaps is available in the standard arch repo... you get a choice of which variant you want to install (this is how it works in Endeavour). IMO, i3 just introduced a killer feature... now you can mod-click and drag a window anywhere. i3 will draw a block where the window will align. It makes managing layouts really simple.

[@Perry....]

Wait that's a feature?!? That was literally the ONE thing holding i3 back for me believe it or not

[@bstar777777]

@@Perry.... agreed, it solved my only major gripe... and that's for complex layouts, I found it too hard to rearrange things. This feature fixes it with ease.

[@stephenwilson0386]

@@Perry.... Yep, I run i3 on openSUSE Tumbleweed and discovered this by accident one day (was trying to resize with mod+right click but for some reason hit the left mouse button instead). It makes moving and resizing windows trivial, where before if you used the keyboard shortcuts they always felt reversed to me.

[@faustipez]

Wow. I didn't know this. That is pretty cool, I might switch to i3 from bswpm, I like that the tiling functionality is not limited to keyboard 🥰🙏

[@stephenwilson0386]

@@faustipez That's one thing that annoys me about some KZbinrs - they try to sell window managers as "fast and efficient" because you may not use the mouse as much. In reality, people are going to be more efficient using the most intuitive option, especially if they're new to TWM's. The way i3 does it now is perfect IMO, and if you're a stickler for the keyboard then you can do that too.

[@busterbrown8830]

Great video Matt! I will stick w/my i3WM for the moment.

[@Zhaba_bolotna]

04:09 AM here and I’m watching you instead of sleeping 🎉

[@HeCodes2Much]

you could patch i3 with C if you wanted too there just isn't a list of patches online like with DWM. it's open source so it can be patched :) how else do you think gaps was made :)

[@thingsiplay]

I just wanted say that because of your complain that it's not easy to use scripts or shell commands as text output on the bar, I have created a simple widget to do that task. And it will be integrated into Qtile. So when you ever again have a look at Qtile again, then you can use widget GenPollCommand.

[@thedeparted_one]

Thank you kindly, dear Sir, for the excellent video! Hope you're doing well.

[@georgelabonte2258]

I like i3, but I want to try qtile as well. I prefer an Arch distro, and Arco has an iso with all the popular twms as well as some newer ones.

[@danduby8416]

Not that it really matters, but what kind of work do you do that you need 19 workspaces?

[@krishna-tiwari1]

Arch repos have both i3 and i3-gaps in its community repos. You don't need to build from AUR.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Ah, that wasn't the case the last time I used Arch, or at least I don't think so

[@krishna-tiwari1]

@@TheLinuxCast It very well could be the case.

[@thingsiplay]

I am at 28 min now and must say, this is a very well made comparison or experience documentation. I really like how you test stuff for longer period of time before comparing your real world experience. Can't say it enough. I am curious to what downsides you will list for Qtile. I may or may not respond to me for tips or correction.

[@thingsiplay]

Bash scripts are hard to use? I am not sure why you say that and need to understand this issue more. Maybe I write a widget for to make it easier.

[@thingsiplay]

Picom issue. So I am using Qtile and Picom for over a year and half and don't remember having this issue you describe. And so maybe since half a year or longer I use Qtile compiled from source (AUR). I highly recommend to create a topic in Reddit and ask for this. In Reddit is a highly active developer and one or two less active too.

[@thingsiplay]

Python error. You can test the config file before loading. It will check for errors. I can put the command here, but KZbin will probably delete it like always: python3 ~/.config/qtile/config.py && qtile cmd-obj -o cmd -f validate_config

[@thingsiplay]

Updates break Qtile. Well, at least for me that is not true. There was once a total breaking change in which my Qtile didn't want to run anymore. But for the most part, I wouldn't say that Qtile breaks 50/50. Just speaking from my personal experience.

[@milohoffman274]

@@thingsiplay The big change from .17 which so many distros like Debian/Ubuntu had for a long time, to the current .21/.22 versions are where configs break. Lots of people find they were using their config in the old version provided by the distro, but when they want to update to the latest THAT IS when they find their config breaks, including many of the old examples floating on the web. Once you get your config working on the newer versions, you will not really have any problem.

[@Bruces-Eclectic-World]

Sorry Matt! Didn't work... Staying with SpectrWm (LeftWm too)... Good try though! 😆 You got closer with DWM to getting me to change... 🤪 All jokes aside. I would go with i3 and polybar. That would work for me. I'm not so much stuck in dynamic or not dynamic part of it, as it is the configuring of it and how simple is it to read and understand. (I'm old ya know!) While I can read some Python and playing with it making small app helpers and things. I don't think I would like to have to use it all the time and there is the update breakage you mention, so there is that too! I be leave this is one of your better videos! Thanks! LLAP 🖖

[@inxendere]

It probably makes more sense to have separate chapters for Pros and Cons instead of having them both in 1 chapter

[@TheLinuxCast]

I was new to doing timestamps at this point. I've gotten better. Sometimes at least.

[@nikolayi8199]

How to fix tiring on i3wm?

[@andredias5061]

Hey I'm a beginner/intermediate user, I used Q4OS before with i3 gaps... My current laptop is pretty garbage for my work (I'm a developer) because I need a lot of RAM, and I only have 4GB.That said, can anyone recommend a simple just work distro? I'm having some problems with video drivers because I need Nvidia graphics

[@Andres0772]

There are lots of distros which consume barely even 500MB of RAM by themselves, some which I've used are: Alpine Linux, Linux Lite, and basically any distro which can use lightweight desktop environment like lxde or i3wm. Unfortunately I'm not an Nvidia user so I cannot help with that.

[@1mr12]

❤‍🔥❤‍🔥❤‍🔥

[@GCoda]

after years of i3, bspwm, herbsluftwm - i am using gnome with paperwm extension.

[@ArniesTech]

When it comes to WMs I am a classic OpenBox and iceWM guy 😁

[@danduby8416]

Same here. I never had any reason to use tiling window managers, however, I used to like wmii only because it's default mode was stacking. Mostly I like JWM and Openbox the best.

[@FolklorCaduco]

I used to use Openbox before switching to i3 a few years ago, one thing I loved about it was the chroots (modes in i3).

[@milohoffman274]

The widget GenPollText is how to easily use your own script in the bar.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Yeah I saw that but I disagree with the word easy.

[@tristen_grant]

Oh how things have changed.

[@ssmith99]

i3-gaps personally, but that it the great thing about linux, you can use whatever you want

[@wyfyj]

Qtile is my favorite wm so far

[@htx80nerd]

19 workspaces!

[@abdellatifdev]

it on arch community repo: sudo pacman -S i3-gaps

[@Hubbabub65]

i3-gaps has been merged into i3 (it will be i3 4.22).

[@jvnicholas]

Qtile just give me a lot of headaches, i3 is better, or bspwm and xmonad are good also.

[@jackelofnar]

It is strange how people can have such a different experience for me I3wm is the worst wm I have used, and Qtile is the best.

[@FolklorCaduco]

Why did you hate i3 and why do you love Qtile?

[@jackelofnar]

@@FolklorCaduco i3 is a manual tiler

[@honestyrocksu]

why are we looking at you instead of the window managers and their differences?

[@TheLinuxCast]

There is a ton of broll in this video.

[@nevoyu]

i3 is still the worst.

[@thingsiplay]

Why?

[@nevoyu]

@@thingsiplay It takes longer to compile than ratpoison does.

[@thingsiplay]

@@nevoyu So the compiling takes longer than a different TWM. But the program itself is good? How is this the worst then? I mean compile times is not the only thing a window manager has.

[@HeCodes2Much]

some times build time is more important then anything for some people even more if you wish to edit the source code :)

[@phonewithoutquestion80]

@@nevoyu what's a real reason that involves actually using it

[@dragos-andreirotaru2316]

I m lazy so i use hyprland