Is it still unusably buggy? Not sarcasm, I'm just curious.
Was it ever buggy? I know Plasma had a rocky first few months but otherwise its been solid for years now.
It's moving to Wayland now, and that is still rough. X11 session is solid though.
KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE
41–50 of 187 posts
Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm the same way. I've tried the various tiling WMs over the years. To me the ideal is just letting me manage the windows myself, and then if you give me some keybindings to snap a window into a certain half or quadrant of the screen then life is real good.
This is all I need. I use an app on macOS called sizeup that let's me do this. I can center a window for reading text on my larger display. Fullscreen a window without using the actual native full screen on macOS. Snap left, snap right, up down etc. It can also keep track of hardware profiles, so windows will restore to their bigger sizes and positions when I plug my laptop into a display. https://s3.whalesalad.com/i…
Am I the only person left who still uses Expose? I feel like Apple is going to kill it off, they already rolled it into "Mission Control" and removed all the keybindings.
Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE
#43I must be one of the very few "hackerish" minded people that does not really get the appeal of tiling window managers. Even in the early days of Linux I meticulously arranged my overlapping windows in my X11R5 window manager. For example, there are some terminal windows or similar with running logs (or chats) at some of the edges, partially obscured by other windows who make better use of the space they cover. But th…
There’s nothing there a tiling WM cannot do. I have only tried i3 so I can speak only about that. But I’d assume most others are similar.
1) Tiling WMs make Workspaces incredibly easy to access. Super + # is usually enough to get you to a specific workspace and you can easily have 10 of those. So if you are monitoring stuff constantly, it’s easy enough to tile them all in a workspace and gain almost immediate access and come right back to your primary workflow without disrupting much.
2) If you want constant visibility to a small section of a webpage, for example, you can trivially tile it and resize it to be extremely narrow/high on your current workspace, and scroll to ensure the party you want to be visible is visible.
And you can do all of this with a keyboard probably a lot faster than you can with a mouse.
And the tiling WM ensures you’re using up all the space in the screen without you doing anything (as you make the “background” window smaller, the “foreground” window grows).
3) Finally, you can always pop out 1 or more floating windows as well.
Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE
#44The biggest productivity boost for me happened after I started using a Tiling WM (i3). I started out of necessity when I felt I have reached the maximum optimization with XFCE DE. I just didn't want to organize my windows manually again. Now browsers are all in 1st workspace. Text editors are all in 2nd. 4th is for chat apps. 6th for reading and documents like excel, pdf etc, 8 for image editing like GIMP, KRITA, Ink…
I believe one of the best explanations for the power of tiling WMs is "Tags are not workspaces"¹. It describes that beyond your way of working there is a parallel way which exists with no extra work.
I think this is also true for different layouts. You can happily work with simple equal size window layouts, but you can also have per-project or per-app layouts should you wish.
The software grows naturally with you, or if you prefer the other functionality just stays out of your way.
¹ https://github.com/w0ng/wongdev.com/blob/master/content/dwm-...
Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE
#45Khronkite is another "honorable mention" for KWin tiling and I prefer it over the one mentioned in TFA: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite With KDE+X11 it's trivially easy to change the window manager away from KWin and still get the benefits of suspend/resume, multi-monitor auto-configuration, wifi, system tray, etc, by just setting the KDEWM environment variable in your profile. https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/…
Setting KDEWM to something other than KWin no longer works in Fedora as of 35 (and other "leading edge" Plasma distros like OpenSUSE are quickly approaching this turning point as well). There are several spots in the Plasma code base that KWin is hard coded. Those distros that still allow functional KDEWM only do so because their version of Plasma is either not yet new enough to be affected, or they have deliberately held back parts of Plasma (which means at some point they'll have it give in as well).
Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it ever buggy? I know Plasma had a rocky first few months but otherwise its been solid for years now.
early days of KDE4 (so ~15 years ago) weren't great
Middle days of KDE4 weren't great either, but at least you could tell things were getting better.
Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE
#47I must be one of the very few "hackerish" minded people that does not really get the appeal of tiling window managers. Even in the early days of Linux I meticulously arranged my overlapping windows in my X11R5 window manager. For example, there are some terminal windows or similar with running logs (or chats) at some of the edges, partially obscured by other windows who make better use of the space they cover. But th…
no you are not the only one. Don't even get me started on binary space partitioning, don't these people even stop for a moment and think what the point is.
Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE
#48Is it still unusably buggy? Not sarcasm, I'm just curious.
On X11 it's pretty solid. Wayland still has kinks.
Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE
#49For tiling, Krohnkite[1] is what I use. It integrates with KWin wonderfully, provides a ton of layouts and entries in the default system shortcut settings to set keybindings.
For those more graphically oriented, there is also Bismuth[2] which seems cool.
Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE
#50I must be one of the very few "hackerish" minded people that does not really get the appeal of tiling window managers. Even in the early days of Linux I meticulously arranged my overlapping windows in my X11R5 window manager. For example, there are some terminal windows or similar with running logs (or chats) at some of the edges, partially obscured by other windows who make better use of the space they cover. But th…
Everything you're describing in this reply just exhausts the hell out of my brain. You're describing an incredibly large amount of cognitive load you hold in your head all the time about where things are and what they mean and how much of them are visible.
Tiling WM are largely about just not thinking that much about windows at all. They're visible or they're not, they occupy precise areas on your screen, and moving them around is easy and simple and they don't scatter to the 4 winds when you plug your laptop into an external monitor and then unplug it again.
Every time I have to go use a computer with overlapping windows I suddenly find myself thinking about where things are about 10 times as much and it's frustrating and tiring.