Best linux distro and/or tiling window manager for a small touch screen?
There seems to be a solid community of Linux people growing here, so thought I might try asking...
I'm building a head unit for my car, using a Raspberry Pi to a 7" (and eventually 10-14") touch screen.
I'd like to have a fast-booting Linux distro with tiling windows that lets me set up a config file to launch a bunch of programs that are tiled perfectly edge to edge, with minimal border (a 1px line us OK), minimal header (just the name of the program? or none at all maybe), and have them all locked in place so I can't accidentally drag one or resize one when touching audio controls, for example.
The idea is to have a few windows, such as an audio player, a GPS map, 2 dash cam feeds, and an OBDII style sensor readouts, all on screen at the same time, each sized differently.
I've got each individual program working fine on Raspbian right now, but no idea how to go about the tiling-on-boot, locking them in place, etc.
Can I do it with Raspbian with some specific window manager? or do I need a different distro?
Thanks in advance.
i3 is a popular tiling window manager, it supports loading a predetermined session of windows with preconfigured sizes from a file, and I think you can disable mouse resizing (so you'd need to use the keyboard to resize, effectively locking it if you only have a touchscreen). It should certainly be available for Raspian, since I know you can get it for Debian and virtually every other Linux distro.
Well that was easy, thanks (and to @klieber)! Have confirmed i3wm works on Raspbian, which makes things very simple for me as I've built everything else around Raspbian.
Also of note is Sway WM. It is pretty much a rewrite of i3 for
WestonWayland.Edit: Thank you @jgb for catching my lapsus calami.
A rewrite for Wayland (the protocol), not Weston. Weston is the reference compositor for the Wayland protocol, so Sway (as another compositor) fulfills the same role as it.
While Sway is superb, I don't know if it works well with touch. If it doesn't at the moment, perhaps in its upcoming wlroots incarnation it will? I doubt it's a priority for the developers, since their focus is likely on making a great desktop compositor.
@sircmpwn might be better placed to discuss this.
@jgb, you are right, of course. Good catch!
In my defence, I just came back from a wedding and slept almost nothing. I’ll fix it in my comment.
I haven’t tried Sway yet either. But when it comes to tiling WMs, I tried quite a few, and even though KDE Plasma is my go-to DE, I always keep a tiling WM as a backup and i3 is my favourite. I’d say dwm is a great way to start tiling WMs (and if you’re really low on resources), and from then i3 is a great WM, unless you have specific needs.
Sway is great, I'm really happy with it. The i3 config compatability is nice for themes and such like.
Not really sure on the linux distro -- I tend to use Ubuntu and stick with that, but not sure it's "best" for your use case.
That said, i3wm will do exactly what you're asking from a tiling standpoint. It's what I use every day and I've got certain apps configured to launch to certain monitors (I have three that I use). And, I can tile them within a certain monitor. So I have three instances of my terminal tiled on a single monitor. It takes some fiddling to set up just the way you want it, but once you have it there, it works great.
As for a Linux distro for an ARM boards other than the R-Pi, I can warmly recommend Armbian. It is based on Debian, but optimised for each board separately and the main guy behind it very much knows what he’s doing.
I use it on two servers – both Olimex Lime 2 eMMC, which I can also warmly recommend – and love it.
i3 is a great recommendation. You might also consider bspwm, because it is completely scriptable, and very lightweight.
I like Fedora and Sway.