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The Qtile Window Manager: A Python-Powered Tiling Experience

59 points by stonecharioteer

by kstrauser

1 subcomments

Way back when, I had a little trouble installing Qtile on Ubuntu 10.10 or so, so I wrote up a little guide on how to do it. I think that became part of the official docs somewhere along the way? But anyway, I didn’t think much about it.
I went to PyCon in Santa Clara with a coworker who was being a little full of himself that morning. We were standing in the swag line and idly chatting with people around us. The guy in front of me was saying something, stopped to look at my name tag, and did a double take. “Whoa, you’re that kstrauser? Who wrote the Qtile guide? Wow, thank you so much!” He shook my hand, then we got our swag and went different ways. I don’t recall anyone else ever mentioning it to me, but from my coworker’s POV, we’d talked to about 10 people in a conference of 3,000 and one of them knew of me, so clearly I must be quietly famous or something. He stopped being a know-it-all, at least for the morning.
So thanks, Qtile. You gave me 20 seconds of fame while standing in line once.

by zahlman

2 subcomments

> Additionally, I disagreed with the default way of installing Qtile. As a principle, I never sudo pip install anything. Instead, I asked my friend Karthikeyan Singaravel, who is a Python core developer, and he recommended using the deadsnakes PPA for Ubuntu to install any version of Python that I chose. I tried compiling python 3.10 myself, installing to /opt/qtile/ using configure --prefix /opt/qtile/ during the configuration stage of the source code. However, I admit that using deadsnakes is a far better idea since I could create a virtual environment based on python3.10 into /opt/qtile/ instead. I had to change the owner of the folder to my user account. Note that I could store the virtual environment in my home folder and just use that, but I wanted to isolate this outside of my home folder.
Qtile doesn't appear to be tied to a specific Python version. Could you not have made a virtual environment based off the system Python? For that matter, could you not have made a virtual environment from a local compiled-from-source Python? (I do that all the time, because I'm interested in testing against specific Python versions and comparing their performance characteristics.)
> Then, I changed the owner of the folder to my regular user account.
> Then, it was time to install qtile.
> I created /usr/share/xsessions/qtile.desktop and filled it with the following:
Doesn't this require the environment to be owned by root? Doesn't it make more sense to leave things that are in /opt as root-owned anyway? (Or at least, change them back after running the installation as an unprivileged user.)
> After this, I logged out of my previous window manager and switched to the new entry for Qtile.
Will any random greeter program just naturally pick up the contents of /usr/share/xsessions, then?
> Qtile’s config file rests at ~/.config/qtile/config.py
So does it just ignore all your other dotfiles? Can I safely just try this out regardless of my usual WM/DE choices?

by caminanteblanco

1 subcomments

I've been using qtile as a replacement for hyprland for a few months now, and I don't have any complaints at all. It's an extremely functional piece of software, and at least for me it seems to be more stable than hyprland was.

by noobermin

1 subcomments

blast from the past. I moved over from awesome to qtile as I really didn't use lua probably a decade ago (and I still don't) but unfortunately, over the years, I did the boring thing and just stuck with the gnome 3 default installed by whatever distro I use.
Does qtile work on fedora these days? Good to hear wayland support is coming along, I often miss tiling wms.

by slightwinder

1 subcomments

How is the state of Wayland these days with QTile? I remember some years ago it was somewhat running, but stalling. Did it improve in the meanwhile?

by imiric

0 subcomment

It's great to see Qtile still going strong. I used it briefly many moons ago, and enjoyed how easy it was to extend, given it is configured with Python. Sadly, I experienced crashes, which soured the experience, and moved on to bspwm, and now niri.

by stonecharioteer

0 subcomment

I've been using Qtile for over 4 years now, and I absolutely love it. I'd written a while ago about my updated config, and thought I'd share.

by pydry

1 subcomments

Looks really nice. It's a shame it isnt quite there with wayland. I'd definitely use it if it were.