Qtile vs BSPWM - Which is Better?

A deep dive into Qtile Window Manager and BSPWM, which is better and who should use which one?
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==== Special Thanks to Our Patrons! ====
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==== Referenced ====
qtile - qtile.org/
bspwm - github.com/baskerville/bspwm
Polybar Guide - • How to Install and Cus...
==== Time Stamps ====
0:00 Intro
0:50 Qtile
0:58 Dynamic Tiler
1:43 Groups/Workspaces
2:58 The Bar
3:42 The Config File
5:21 Keybindings
7:58 Configuration of Workspaces
11:03 Scratchpads
13:06 Configuration - The Qtile Bar
15:21 The Rules
16:22 The Documentation
19:00 BSPWM
19:14 Manual and Dynamic
22:05 Workspaces
23:57 Keybindings - SXHKD
26:21 The Bar - There is No Bar
27:14 BSPWM - The Config File
30:11 The Documentation
33:32 Qtile vs BSPWM
33:38 Who Should Use Which?
35:02 Dynamic vs Manual
36:36 Is One Better Than the Other?
37:56 Wrapping Up
#ramble #linux #thelinuxcast

[@TheLinuxCast]

Leaving a like up above on the video really helps me out!

[@Little-bird-told-me]

sure thing !

[@joshua_lee732]

I liked your comment instead.

[@tomasruzicka9835]

What's the matter with the commas and semicolons in programming languages that novice programmers complain so much? You configured in many many config formats already. Each of them having different rules. Why commas are the ones to throw you off? (I'm genuinely interested from a language design pov, this is NOT a roast)

[@UnhingedNW]

Is anyone going to talk about how many workspaces this guy needs? everytime you bring it up my jaw drops!

[@TheLinuxCast]

Oh, people say it all the time. It's just the way I work. It's not for everyone, that's for sure. lol.

[@thingsiplay]

My personal recommendation to anyone using Qtile is to learn some basics of Python to get the most out of it. Which you do, Matt. This comment is meant for the reader. Python is a programming language, but it is easy to get into. It might sound complicated first, but the strength is you are less limited in doing what you want compared to a simple config file from other tiling window managers.

[@profetik777]

When anyone says , "learn a programming language in order to use X" immediately I'm out. There is no reason why this has to be the case. Eventually some one will use Ai to build a front end gui to configure. Then Ill give it a try. Lol

[@thingsiplay]

@@profetik777 said: > "There is no reason why this has to be the case." For Qtile it is. Not every program is made for everyone. If I see any window manager configuration not being a programming language, I'm out. Or when I read someone used an AI to program something, I'm out too. And that's fine. You don't have to use it. But the appeal of Qtile is partly because it is written and configured in Python. Off course you don't need to learn the basics of programming and Python, but my recommendation is to learn these in order to make the most out of it. The entire point of Qtile is that. If you do not like this approach, then there are plenty of alternatives to choose from, which should meet your requirements much more.

[@barutaji]

I don't think tilling windows managers need to necessarily be configured through a text file, a program script or through the terminal. In theory tilling could be as newbie friendly as floating desktop environments. But... well, they are not. They are a niche thing and so they are more bare bones. The people who use it don't mind or even prefer that way, cause it makes it more flexible and configurable. So yeah, qtile is written and configured in python, so if you want to get the best of it you should learn the bare minimum of phyton (functions, dictionaries and lists, modules, etc).

[@thingsiplay]

@@barutaji I think there are some tiling window managers who are configured with text files only, which are actually noobie friendly. Such as i3. It has very good documentation and the configuration files are not too complicated. But DWM on the other hand is not noobie friendly at all, because they don't care about the beginners. Qtile is noobie friendly to anyone who want to learn and configure it, but it has some difficulties to document everything from the perspective of a beginner, because its extremely complex due to Python. The difficulty comes from Python, not Qtile itself. My point is, that the definition of the term "noobie friendly" is probably different from what you mean. And also most people are just beginners in the beginning.

[@barutaji]

@@thingsiplay considering that people already complain and say that typing "sudo apt install firefox" is much harder than finding and downloading a legitimate installer and pressing "next" 15 times on a GUI, configuring anything through a plain text config file would already be considered pretty advanced. So what I meant is that if tilling was the dominant windows organization system there would be many TWM with lots of GUI configuration tools and all the shinny buttons people like. But that is not the state of how TWM are, so you have to accept it first if you want to explore the nice things they have to offer. Even TWM that are not too tough to configure are still too bare bones to most people.

[@JoseMartinez-iq3xq]

Excellent tour, you were a fabulous guide

[@oglothenerd]

Him: "Qtile has one of the most configurable bars out there." Me: "Wayland has Waybar, which uses CSS."

[@johnprince7445]

Good on you Matt. You have just saved me weeks of "headbanging" trying to make a decision. Thanks.

[@iAmTheWagon]

In python you can run bash commands and save the output to a variable with `subprocess.getoutput()` or `subprocess.Popen()` and do whatever you want with the variable afterward.

[@mylinuxforwork]

Qtile is fantastic. Using it since a year without any problems at my daily work. Fully configured with pywal, dunst and polybar + Windows 11 in KVM. Yes, I like polybar a bit more, but I can switch back to the dafault bar just by setting a parameter in the Qtile config.

[@moya_mama]

How much RAM does qtile take up when running, without running applications?

[@bobbyhill69]

on a clean arch install for me it uses about 350-400mb @@moya_mama

[@ex0ja]

I wish windows workspaces worked like qtile or bspwm (I'm forced to use windows at work)

[@JoStro_]

hyprland doesn't have xmonad/qtile style workspace switching, but it's trivial to achieve the same behaviour by writing a shell script with hyprctl. It was one of the first things I addressed when switching from xmonad.

[@phonewithoutquestion80]

QTiles out of the box bar looks the coziest of them all.

[@MV-qd3dv]

I just switched from i3 to qtile only because I want to learn Python thank you for the commas tip, almost everytime after saving config so far 'default' comfig and black screen, have only accomplished so little so far hope to get it looking as good as this soon ❤️

[@wyfyj]

Fantastic video. I am kinda surprised I don't see an lsp. I use pyright for python. For the life of me, I can't get my scratch pads to work on my new install. I need to troubleshoot on my next day off. I am for sure gonna fork your bar. I like where yours is at. And I need to update mine. I have way more time with qtile over bspwm. So I can't comment too much on it.

[@TActually]

So... finally, I just understood what scratch pads are! it's the WM equivalent to minimizing an open application. Neat. So at this point, is there any advantage to using Hyperland or Sway vs Qtile? I mean other than the inherent security of Wayland vs Xorg?

[@mgltuba]

arch+qtile+kitty=perfection

[@BenjaminWSong]

Is there any other way? LOL

[@lieenvelope]

oh yeahhhh

[@sotecluxan4221]

Left a like, even not understanding the topic!

[@bojanstrkovski21]

great vodeo as always when is that 2 h qtile vieo coming i cant wiat to watch it

[@96shahab]

I love the font you've got running on your terminal there, what is that?

[@_regnar_4189]

I'm more interested in wallpapers, i like it so much, but can't find the same.

[@topherfungus8424]

For me the decision is simple, which one works flawlessly with XFCE? Bspwm, hands down. And I think xfce panel is the best bar out there.

[@codelinx]

Where'd you get that terminal background?? Can we get a link?

[@petalbacon235]

Is there a window manager or layout style that doesn't take over the entire desk top? If I launch an terminal, I don't want it to be the size of my screen, I want 80x40 (or whatever) because that works best for me. The reset of the desktop would just the background. I've played with I3 and Awesome but I didn't find a way to wrest control of my desktop from their covetous paws. Even a window style that has me manually lay out my windows, but gives me all the keyboard power/desktops of most tiling window managers would be a step in the right direction.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Openbox

[@TheLinuxCast]

Awesomewm will also do this.

[@petalbacon235]

This looks to be getting the job done. Thanks!

[@Karlzzzy]

What font is that in the qtile?

[@sys7emH4cked]

Why you never tried exodia bspwm edition, it's really fantastic.

[@evaldasa1891]

Qtile is amazing , switched from i3wm. Only one thing i dislike with Qtile its is status bar. On i3wm pybar is way better than Qtiles one. Dont know hows with Linux , but on FreeBSD i have to use pip to get packages to implement to Qtile as trough ports/packages it does not recognise it.

[@mohamedalichabani6775]

what font are you using in the terminal ?

[@flarebear5346]

Yes I wanna know too. It looks cool

[@maiserockstar3296]

can you take a look at ragnar wm ? sounds pretty cool and it’s made by a 15 year old

[@adrmantap6508]

I love i3, and yesterday i try to install sway, just because i want to run waydroid, 😂,

[@vitormelo22]

sxhkd for me is the best manager of shortcuts

[@johanb.7869]

Font is so small and blurred🤔 Especially on Qtile.

[@CotyTernes]

Your Qtile multimonitor workspace explanation left me more confused lol.

[@TheLinuxCast]

It is hard to explain. I think I do a better job in the bspwm section

[@CotyTernes]

@@TheLinuxCast I totally get it. That's a part you would be better really thinking it out and writing a script for. I'll look into it myself tonight, so no worries. I have enjoyed getting your perspective on a large number of things.

[@thingsiplay]

I'm still on the Qtile part watching. For the most part it is a good introduction. But I have to agree the multimonitor part was a little bit confusing. I have no idea how this could be showed off on a single monitor.

[@CotyTernes]

@@thingsiplay yeah I was still watching the video when I commented, just now finished it. The rest of the information on Qtile and BSPWM was good. It was only the one part that was confusing.

[@barutaji]

It has been 8months so I assume you solved your question. But for anyone else confused it works lile this: you have a keybind (lets say mod+1) to focus group 1. If your mouse (or rather the current focused monitpr) is the first monitor, then group 1 will go to the first monitor. Otherwise it will go to the second. So no group is assigned to any particular monitor, you cam send anythijg to any place. The only confusion is when you you have a group already being shown in one screen and you send it to the other screen (by pressing mod+1 while your mouse is in the other monitor). In that case what will qtile send to the other screen (now empty)? Well, it will send the groups that was previously in the other screen, so you switch the position of both groups shown. This can get confusing because you are thinking on one monitor but somethimg also changes on the second monitor too and you get a bit lost on where is everything. In my case I asssigned one set of groups for each monitor, and added other keybinds to explicitly switch monitors when I want.

[@daslodewijk8271]

The way you explain Dynamic v Manual (tiling), should it not be called Automatic (Tiler) v Manual ? A new term 'Dualmode' WM should replace Dynamic in the sense of doing both. Let's drop the very confusing word Dynamic in the context of discussing WM's. So let's go with: Automatic, Manual and Dualmode.

[@RoniellBerrios]

qtile vs awesome please

[@iAmTheWagon]

I don’t understand the point of manual tiling at all. I feel like it defeats the purpose of a tiling window manager (for me, anyway). I want the wm to handle window placement. That’s the point of a wm.

[@damnhatesyou]

Is a wayland compositor, so it wins because Wayland is for kings

[@damnhatesyou]

@@darthvader1191 what bugs I’ve had a flawless experience myself

[@dmitrii_cl]

​@@darthvader1191Wayland: problems with streaming. Xorg: tearing. Didn't have more problem on gnome Wayland vs gnome Xorg on Fedora.

[@AhmedFaisal13]

I just wish there was any form of desktop zooming in ANY window manager. either Gnome/Cinnamon projected style or xFce/KDE/Compiz full-screen zoom... 🙄 I thought of using compiz to zoom like I do in Mate, but as far as I understand it, Compiz is a window manager itself, so it will replace the window manager instead of empowering or layer-over it..

[@jpalan]

I tried to try qtile once, but no debian package and I just couldn't get that damn thing to install in any other way. So far bspwm is still my favorite of all the tilers that I have used.

[@benjy288]

I used qtile for a few months years ago and at the 1:03 mark is why I no longer use tiling window managers, there's 4 windows open and in 3 of them half of the info in the terminal is cut off, and if you open more only one will be usable because the others will get so small they become useless, so you can only really have 3 windows open at an usable size before you need to switch to another workspace, and also with 9 workspaces that gives you a max of 27 windows that you can have open at an usable size, but with a floating window manager you can easily have more that 27 windows open in just one workspace, then you can switch between them by either clicking on their panel icon or by using the task switcher.

[@thingsiplay]

The 1:03 mark you speak about is only 1 of the window layouts. This one is the default xmonad one, meaning it tries to mimic xmonad style of tiling. There is one that tries to mimic the auto tiling of BSPWM too (the spiral one). There are actually 16 layouts and logic for tiling to choose from! A few are variations, some are useless to me and some are things like max and float. But the point is, the one you used is only 1 of them. I actually have an icon to switch between the layouts and have predefined layouts for specific groups/workspaces. Matt in the video also shows off a few others too, but did not talk about the variation at all.

[@benjy288]

@@thingsiplay I know there's more layouts, but you still run into the same problem, open more than 3 or 4 windows and they become too small to be usable, then you need to switch to another workspace.

[@zizlog_sound]

@@benjy288, try the tabbed/ stacked layout. 27 windows on one workspace sounds like a lot. What do you do with so many windows?

[@thingsiplay]

@@benjy288 Not really an issue with all layouts. There is one or two that are a mixture of stacking and tiling. Look at "Stack"-layout, which will create 2 or more (depending on how many you defined) stacks, tile 2 windows and then any more windows will be put over the others. You can then cycle through them with keybindings in example or access through the bars window name by clicking with mouse. If you want you can also have more tiled stacks at the same time, so that more than 2 windows are visible with stack layout. Off course there are some other solutions as well. In example you can still minimize windows, which I sometimes use when I don't want to send the window to another group. Or as the previous guy suggested, there is also the tabbed one, which is basically like tabs on your browser. Qtile is pretty flexible when it comes to layouts! It just needs some manual tiling functionality as well, so we can mimic i3. :-)

[@benjy288]

@@zizlog_sound 27 windows open is unrealistic, that was just a theoretical max example , but I quite often have 5 or 6 windows open, which is no problem on a floating window manager with one workspace, but 5 or 6 open windows on a tiler with one workspace doesn't really work.

[@READERSENPAII]

Why would you ever need more than like 4 workspaces lol?

[@MNbenMN]

reminds me of the old "640kb ought to be enough for anybody" quote

[@READERSENPAII]

@@MNbenMN well I mean I was more joking tbh. I think it’s cool that you CAN have lots of workspaces but my comment was more about razzing someone who thinks they need 19 workspaces to be productive lol. But hey, whatever works for you.

[@MNbenMN]

@@READERSENPAII (I did see the "lol") I see people with 300 tabs open in one browser window and question how useful that can actually be... then realize I have just as many but in different windows spread across workspaces. Helps to pick up where you left off if your day involves constant interruptions.

[@READERSENPAII]

@@MNbenMN Yeah but I would say that having 300 tabs open is more of bad habit and not a functional workflow. I guess I would assume that if you have tiling and tmux, the idea of having more than 4 or 5 workspaces seems a little bizarre and unorganized. but like I said, whatever works I guess.

[@barutaji]

You can have "specialized" workspaces. So everytime you open firefox it goes to workspace X. The only active layouts on that group are W,Y,Z. So you always know where your applications are after you organize the task every workspace has to fulfill. In my case I have 8 workspaces, 4 for each monitor. Not only it is not confusong, it is much more organized and easier to find what I want. You also tend to leave things open, since they are so easy to find, while on floating you have to "clean up" from time to time

[@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug]

0:30 Already my immediate preference is Qtile, because that's at least somewhat pronounceable and memorable... The other one NBSPWRM or whatever (I really cannot remember it now that I have paused the video and scrolled down enough to not see the title anymore) is really annoying to say... hope it has a nickname at least 😅

[@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug]

To be fair I've just installed Qtile and Picom on my old work computer last weekend inspired by one of your previous videos on i3 and Qtile; so of course it's more memorable to me; but I really have a strong preference for names of things to have some vowels between the consonants. BSPWM (yeah I've scrolled up now) doesn't even work particularly well even if you think of it as Welsh and consider W a vowel because it still starts with a very un-english (even un-germanic) consonant cluster. I would say if you are going to name something and you want people to be able to remember and say it comfortably; if you don't want any vowels in it, limit yourself to 2 or at max 3 letters. Because all consonants effectively has to be pronounced as spelling, meaning every letter becomes at least one syllable (it's 2-3 syllables for W depending on your accent), so it becomes a very long and meaningless word. While a word with few clusters of consonants and some vowels in between is almost always possible to say as a word directly, or as a word with a spelled letter in front in the case of "qtile". So qtile becomes /kju:tail/ while BSPWM becomes /bi:es:pi:dobelju:em/ (at least in my accent). Any more than 3 consonants in a row it stops looking like the name of something and starts looking like your cat just walked over the keyboard.

[@slvcontentfwd]

Can't say I disagree, but it is an acronym. Easiest to pronounce if you remember "binary space partitioning" separate from "window manager", which is a little easier for me because of quake stuff.

[@Tala2n]

DT said that Qtile lacks performance. I use bspwm since years, its way of placing windows is fine, and the options are enough.

[@yokulen545]

lol the performance is nice in qtile, Dt doesnt know anything just parrotting "python is slow"

[@G.B...]

An interpreted language used to run a window manager (or literally whatever else)? No, thank you (and yes, I know other window managers are also written in interpreted languages). Isn't it funny, how an interpreted language is so popular, even though it is *orders of magnitude slower by design*? It's easy to learn, sure, but it's also interpreted crap. With the right marketing, and with people following the trend (even though it's crap) why not... Basic instead.

[@peachestv621]

stop saying so and the begining and end of every single sentence

[@exnihilonihilfit6316]

You damaged me. 😄 Now I can't stop hearing it. 😅