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Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

You still haven't seen that day, have you? macOS still offers only a floating window manager, now with some window snapping capabilities. But there is no mode or window manager built into macOS where new windows are arranged in tiles spanning the whole screen by default.

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Exactly, by the description of it on the announcement, this is not "tiling window management" as we're used in Linux, this is just "Window Snaping" that been available on Windows and Linux for what, a decade now?

I really hope there is a "automatic tiling" option, otherwise this is just mouse support for the current "Move Window"/"Tile Window" options already available on the OS (and easily bindable via custom shortcuts).

When did “Linux” settle on a single window manager? There have been 3rd-party solutions for Mac for years, I don’t understand what’s different about that versus Linux, which comes with nothing by default, not even a graphical interface.

Most desktop Linux distros come with one of the big DEs like Gnome or KDE by default. And those have had Window snapping since shortly after MS demoed it for Windows 7. How is this different from Mac OS? It's integrated into the DE, you don't need to install anything extra and it works like you'd expect. On Mac the third party options never felt quite native.

I get what you are saying, but for me nothing on Linux feels nativ. I'm still amazed that Apple has people who can announce window snapping and sound absolutely sincere when claiming that's a revolutionary new feature in the world. So.. I really get where you are coming from

Who claims it’s a revolutionary new feature?

While some tiling window managers do support mixing in special floating windows (often used for modal dialogs, for example), the defining characteristic of a tiling window manager is that all windows are tiles by default; tiling is the rule rather than the exception.

There are floating window managers with window snapping on the free Unices, of course. But none of those claims to be a tiling window manager and nobody confuses them with such.

Available on windows since Windows 7, 14 years ago

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