Thanks for the clarification. I’ve updated the post accordingly. I run ArchLinux, where there isn’t a binary package available, so I did have to compile it myself. You’re right that this is a non-issue in Ubuntu (and Debian, etc.), though.

And thank you for making Bluetile!

I’m the author of Bluetile. Thank you for taking the time to write this nice introduction and review of Bluetile! I agree with your points under “The Bad” and “The Ugly” and in all of those cases improvement should hopefully happen sooner than later.

Just wanted to clarify one thing: Bluetile is indeed based on xmonad, but that doesn’t mean it inherits the requirement for a full Haskell toolchain. Xmonad requires Haskell both at compile time as well as runtime, because xmonad’s configuration is a Haskell file as well. Bluetile only requires Haskell at compile time. So if you are not compiling Bluetile yourself, but install it from a package, you don’t need the Haskell toolchain.

All in all I’m glad to hear that you think Bluetile is a good introduction to tiling window managers. That was the primary goal.

Best regards!
Jan