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KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

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Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#71

Post by approxim8ion »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #63
unsungNovelty wrote: post #38

The 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…

Not using a tiling WM, but especially on small notebooks I'm so desperate for compact decorations and a global Mac-like menu that I've even prolonged life of my old XPS 13 w/ Ubuntu 16.04 using Ubuntu Advantage/extended security maintenance (their old gnome2-based desktop with Unity). At least there's some hope using KDE Plasma eg. [1]. [1]: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/plasma-look-like-ubuntu-...

KDE has a global menu applet on their panel as well, to be used in conjunction with appmenu-gtk.

KWin will also let you set how much (or how little) window decorations you want if at all. I'm very happy with it.

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#72

Post by simion314 »

Since people are sharing their setup, I have to use big fonts and Zoom because of bad eye. So all my Windows have to be maximized to fit the content. So I have 7 Virtual desktops and I have apps organized on this 7 VD.

1 Thunderbird and Firefox(I mostly use it for developement, I prefer Ff dev tools, look to me easy to read)

2 File Manager and Kate (a plain text editor, I mostly use it to write temp notes or paste temp stuff there)

3 Slack and Skype

4 Vivaldi(a web browser I setup with JS off by default , I use it to read stuff or listen to things not work), Konsole (a terminal app with tabs)

5 Intellij

6 Play on Linux, Steam, video games that I start to use in my free time

7 is mostly empty

I quickly switch with keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+F1,F2,F3... but I used KDE global shortcuts to remap the Alt button into Ctrl, Meta (Win) into Alt, I remap all my shortcuts to use Ctrl instead of Alt , or Ctrl+Shift . My key shortcuts are designed to be used with only left hand , especially because most of the time I have the Desktop Zoomed in so I have Zoom follows mouse and I might keep my hand of the mouse a lot more then a regular user.

So global shortcuts in KDE is a 10 of 10 for me.

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#73

Post by rawoke083600 »

anyfoo wrote: post #5

I 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…

> really get the appeal of tiling window managers.

There might be "levels" of appeal and value... I too a few years ago moved to i3. The "tiling" nature is not where I got the most value from. I got it from have "multiple dedicated virtual workspaces(vdesktops)". With the ability to switch to them fast.

Example:

1) Terminal

2) Browser

3) Browser-2

4) Code (VStudio)

5) Code-2 (VStudio)

6) Files (File manager)

7) Gimp

8) Geany (Text Editor)

9) Empty

10)Empty

Just "knowing" how to "instantly" go from Code to a Browser or Text Editor has giving me A LOT of productivity. I'd say more so than any "tiling feature"

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#74

Post by Zardoz84 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #9
fartcannon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss the browser. I miss when we cared about KHTML passing the ACID2 tests. I'm quite old now I guess :)

Oh, ok. I miss having alternatives too. If it kept up, I probably wouldn't be using Firefox now.

Rekonq was stupidly fast and lightweight...

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#76

Post by allisdust »

KDE as it stands today has the perfect balance between the defaults and what can be configured. It's a breath of fresh air coming from windows and after trying Gnome which took the exact opposite route. Gnome would have been great if its not so strongly opinionated and didn't need so many extensions to get the basic functionality working.

That said either of those beats the pants off current or previous windows versions. Existing companies (dell and lenova) should start making Linux only laptops through partnerships with either KDE/distro maintainers. I would bet that most of the users can't even tell the difference especially if they are mostly on web browser based workflows.

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#77

Post by pmontra »

KDE Connect is wonderful. Gsconnect is its port to GNOME. I've been using it for years.

And with the right amount of extensions a GNOME desktop can be tamed into a bottom bar only desktop / virtual desktops without activities one. I should write a blog post to provide a link to my customization. However if KDE does it out of the box, good for them. I tested KDE back in 2014 and I didn't like what I saw. I went to GNOME Fallback (or was it Flashback?). Too many clicks to do anything. Maybe they fixed it now but I don't have the time to test it again and get basically the same functionality I have now.

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#78

Post by hibbelig »

djur wrote: post #54
pjerem wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow maximiser here. It’s probably the reason why I still love OSX after all the shitty updates. The full-screen mode is a marvel of ergonomics once you get it. Just maximize your apps and switch between them with the trackpad like they are virtual desktops (because they, in fact, are). It’s an awesome mode for a single screen workflow. Tilings WM are cool but you are rapidly limited with be screen (and even with t…

My main gripe with the macOS fullscreen mode is that there's no way to force the non-fullscreen desktop to stay in one place. If something in a fullscreen app pulls up the desktop (for instance, running an installer you just downloaded), the desktop gets moved to the next position. I want to force it to stay in one place (or, ideally, have a gesture or hotkey to switch between my fullscreen windows and the desktop).…

Isn’t there an option to support spaces by LRU? It defaults to on. I turned it off ages ago. But I also stopped using spaced some time after that so perhaps the option was removed…

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#79

Post by hibbelig »

rawtxapp wrote: post #33
anyfoo wrote: post #5

I 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…

I think once you get used to a tiling window manager, like force yourself to use it for over a couple weeks, it's very difficult to go back. Somewhat similar to vim. Personally, I have 2-3 external 32" 4k monitors and I want to maximize the real estate that's used, tiling wm (specifically i3 in this case) makes it very easy to move windows around, to switch between different screens, to move screens between different…

I used to love tiling. But then I started to use apps that needed more than half of the screen: web browser, IDE. Now I put my IDE full screen and the browser about the top right 70% of the screen so that the console output in the IDE peeks out below the browser so that I can see what output is generated when I use the app I’m developing in the browser.

Re: KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

#80

Post by qwertox »

anyfoo wrote: post #5

I 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…

My issue is mostly with the half-screen vertical split (two side by side panes). Half a monitor is not enough for me to feel comfortable in an editor, so I'd split it 2/3 or even 3/4, but the remaining 1/3 or 1/4 are not wide enough to hold let's say terminals, and using a horizontal split to get the full width for terminals also steals a lot of height from the editor, while full width in terminals is usually not desired, it's between 1/2 and full width what my terminals should be.

So I prefer to alt-tab cycle. Even though I know that this is an extra effort, at least I can size the windows so that they contain the optimal amount of information.

I do use tools which help me with sizing and positioning of windows.

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