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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

#91

KDE is fantastic. But there are two things that irks me: - how can I see that a screen/dialog is active? It is with the default theme extremely hard to see - why is drag handle area impossibly small? When I need to manually resize a window (or column) I need to have the mouse pointer on the specific pixel of the window border, or else I wouldn't get the resize pointer

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

#92
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…

I'm confused, you make it sound like there is something unique to OSX here. But every Linux WM has had virtual desktops since ages ago and virtual desktops are a superior solution to just fullscreen windows (they can do the same for fullscreen windows+do the same for groups of windows... )

OS X also has normal virtual desktops. The 'unique' feature of OS X is that when you maximize a window instead of maximizing on your current desktop, covering any other windows you have open, it creates a new virtual desktop and moves the maximized window there. When you de-maximize it automatically moves the window back to its original virtual desktop and removes the temporary desktop you created.

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

#93
post #89

KDE is fantastic. But there are two things that irks me: - how can I see that a screen/dialog is active? It is with the default theme extremely hard to see - why is drag handle area impossibly small? When I need to manually resize a window (or column) I need to have the mouse pointer on the specific pixel of the window border, or else I wouldn't get the resize pointer

Holding ALT + right mouse button can be used to resize windows easily. (Left for moving them)

It's super/meta for me, not alt.

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

#94
post #45
post #16

Khronkite 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…

Using Fedora 35 here, still using i3. The trick is to modify /usr/lib/systemd/user/plasma-kwin_x11.service, here's mine.

    [Unit]
    Description=KDE Window Manager
    #Wants=plasma-kcminit.service
    PartOf=graphical-session.target

    [Service]
    ExecStart=/usr/bin/i3
    BusName=org.kde.KWin
    Slice=app.slice
    Restart=on-failure
The only downside is that you will need to wait a bit more for it to start.

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

#97
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…

Heh, i feel like maybe hardware constraints also play a role here.

For example, right now i have 4 1080p monitors connected to my computer. I've never really needed anything more than the ability to snap windows to either side of the monitors (or bottom/top for vertical ones) or make them full screen.

With a higher resolution monitor (or an ultra widescreen one) i suspect that it would rapidly change and i'd need to look into either more advanced snapping setups (e.g. AquaSnap or PowerToys FancyZones on Windows, or the Linux equivalent, though even XFCE is pretty flexible out of the box there).

That said, on a laptop i probably wouldn't even try doing that and in many cases the software where i would actually want some sort of tiling already has it baked in - SSH clients like MobaXTerm (though Remmina is also nice on *nix) or all of JetBrains products. Tiling OS windows with smaller sizes feels rather inefficient, because many OSes out there waste space immensely with menus and other always visible items.

But hey, i'd argue that my current setup only has manageable cognitive load because i use overlapping windows managers as "optionally tileable" and due to the amount of monitors have a maximum of 8 open windows without any overlapping. Someone might achieve the same with a single (albeit larger) monitor and a proper tiling manager.

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

#98
post #93
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holding ALT + right mouse button can be used to resize windows easily. (Left for moving them)

It's super/meta for me, not alt.

Yes, it's changed recently as Alt was interfering with too many applications (e.g.: Inkscape use it). Using the Super (Windows) key is less problematic. So it depends on your KDE version. Or you own settings: I have an "old" (Debian stable) KDE version with Alt by default, but changed it to use the Super key as the new default, for the same reason.

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

#99
post #60
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree.. but if only we could stop windows from stealing focus.

Ah well. Stealing focus is happening more and more in macOS. A great annoyance…

Indeed. I switched from macOS to Windows about a year ago now and I have to say I really appreciate how on Windows stealing focus is much, much more rare than it was on macOS.

I honestly found it infuriating on my Mac.

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

#100

KDE is fantastic. But there are two things that irks me: - how can I see that a screen/dialog is active? It is with the default theme extremely hard to see - why is drag handle area impossibly small? When I need to manually resize a window (or column) I need to have the mouse pointer on the specific pixel of the window border, or else I wouldn't get the resize pointer

> how can I see that a screen/dialog is active

I use "Dim inactive" desktop effect which darkens windows that aren't focused. You can configure the strength of dimming, so that difference active vs. inactive is clearly visible but you can still (somewhat) read the content of inactive window without activating it.

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