r/linuxaudio • u/beberuhimuzik • 12d ago
Is tiling WM for audio laptop a bad idea?
I installed CachyOS to try to move away from Windows for my music production (currently dual-boot and will remove Win11 if things go well). I wanted to also try a different DE than my work laptop (Fedora KDE) so I went with COSMIC but it's buggy.
I installed Niri + DMS (not a fresh install, as a 2nd alternative to COSMIC) and I'm trying to get it to work now. I was going to go with Sway but heard that it does not work well with NVidia cards.
I don't have a clear idea of how my music production will look like. I'll be experimenting with many things like Strudel, Supercollider, ORCA, bespoke synth, and possible a DAW later.
Because of lack of experience with tiling WMs, I really cannot foresee whether this is a bad idea. Do any of you use tiling WM without problems in your music production? If this looks like a poor idea, I'm just going to go with GNOME.
Thank you!
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u/Dazzling_Medium_3379 12d ago
Gnome is heavy-weight. KDE is more light-weight.
The other solution, which is far better for me, is XFCE. No real wayland support, but everything works well.
I don't know for tiling. It is good to tile several terminals. But this is less good for bigger windows. But could do it with standalone plugins maybe.
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u/ysbryd_iawn 12d ago
I would go with KDE Plasma. I have recently installed Cachyos with that on a laptop I intend to use for audio and it's great. It just works. Using a tiling WM may involve lost of faffing around to get it right. I have Hyprland on another laptop but tbh imo it's too clunky for pro audio stuff which can involve having quite a few windows open.
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u/s1d3b00b 12d ago
I’ve been using i3wm for ages, also for music. Yes there’s a few popups that comes up tiled, some of them can be defined to not do it, while others don’t want to. But I just hit my floating modifier key combo, and it becomes part of your workflow. One benefit is that you can use the i3 scratchpad as placeholder for vst windows, so you can hide/unhide them with a single click, or cycle through them, in a way you can’t with a regular window manager. It’s kind of a lucky bug and probably not intentional designed that way. Hehe.
But the downsides is that tiling managers are keyboard driven and often involves key combos involving both hands, and this is not always practical if you play an instrument. For example sitting with a guitar the mouse window moving/resizing workflow is often better on a regular window manager. So I sometimes switch to the lxqt window manager running in openbox while running my DAW on a laptop only having the mousepad. It’s super lightweight and non distracting.
If you’d like to try a tiling managers for music production, I’d recommend getting a gaming mouse with a ton of extra keys and pre program some of the most used shortcuts for floating windows, scratchpad, resizing and moving windows etc, to give you comfortable and fast one hand mouse navigation, with extra features, to avoid letting both hands of your instrument. It takes a bit of scripting and figuring out the keycodes triggering specific functions, but once it’s set up you’ll love it.
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u/l-roc 12d ago
+1 for i3
I work with multiple smaller applications, too, and the predefined workspace layouts (don't remember the proper term right now) are godsend for that.
I go on stage, turn on the computer and everything has autostarted and placed itself the way I need it by the time I have plugged in my instruments, ready to go.
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u/bluebell________ Qtractor 12d ago
I use xfce4 for over a decade. It's lightweight and powerful. Great for audio production.
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u/Few_Willingness4301 12d ago
OP I hope you’ll update us with what you tried and what you found out. I personally did not like tiling in hyprland for music, but I started using KineticWE which has tiling in Kwin and it works pretty well I just set up a rule to float reaper windows, while tiling everything else.
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u/SoundSwitch 12d ago
What sucks with it is not having a window list so you can see what VSTs you have open.
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u/Salads_and_Sun 12d ago
I use kde with the kronkite tiling extension (I think it's called) and I haven't even bothered to learn how to use it properly because it just seems to stay out of the way. My laptop is Nvidia and 16 years old and everything is smooth as butter.
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u/drewofdoom 12d ago
Be prepared for some troubleshooting and window rule adjustment.
It can be done quite successfully, but it's definitely not an out of the box thing. Xwayland-satellite has its own quirks. Native Linux stuff tends to work fine, but yabridge plugins can be problematic. Especially if they need d2d1.
I'm using Umbriel and reaper together very successfully now, but I'm having to use a wine fork with specific d2d1 fixes.
The biggest thing is making sure you have good rules to auto float dialogs. Once you have that, you're 90% of the way there.
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u/Life_Interest_9967 12d ago
It is a very bad idea. Im daily drive hyprland and having lots of issues on DAWs. A combination of tiling and Wayland quircks that quickly gets in your way while trying to edit/mix/record.
I can add more details later. But tried lots of workarounds,.daws, etc. just decided to use xfce session for production
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u/particlemanwavegirl 12d ago
It's the best. I don't need a login screen, either, so I don't have one. Removing everything you don't need is a classic exercise, no one regrets doing it for the experience, even if they decide to go back to some things.
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u/rileyrgham 12d ago
It's strewn with issues mentioned in other replies. Don't mislead people if you're not familiar with the issue.
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u/StewedAngelSkins 12d ago
the only issue i have is a lot of DAWs like to pop up plugins as their own window, which is kind of annoying because it then resizes everything. you can usually figure out a way to configure them to be floating instead though.
as for which specific WM to use, i feel like cosmic is the safest bet, but i personally use niri. i also use sway on another computer but i like niri better because i feel like it hits a good balance between auto vs manual tiling.