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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

#101

Post by exceptione »

ulimn wrote: post #89
exceptione wrote: post #87

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)

Wow! ALT +right works for me, Left doesn't (perhaps that is disabled on my system).

Great tip!

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

#102

Post by MayeulC »

rrix2 wrote: 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/…

Hmm, with layer-shell, you can run some parts from other DEs under a given wayland compositor. I'm not sure what parts support the protocol, but I'm fairly sure you can run krunner, and probably the KDE status bar under sway. I think you can also run xfce's equivalents.

I don't see why all of that couldn't be integrated in nice, modular packages and sets of configuration. Some say that wayland made everything more monolithic. If anything, I think it helped make everything more modular by forcing to specify the interfaces into wayland protocols.

Now, of course some DE prefer using private interfaces instead of proper protocols...

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

#103

Post by gattilorenz »

maxloh wrote: post #96

KDE is ugly. It looks like software back then 2010s.

> It looks like software back then 2010s.

According to me (and I think many other HN commenters), go back another 10 years and it'll be great :)

I personally still prefer the glossy and somewhat kids-appropriate KDE3 [1] over the latest superflat trends

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/KDE-3.1-...

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

#104

Post by gurkendoktor »

maxloh wrote: post #96

KDE is ugly. It looks like software back then 2010s.

I've been meaning to try KDE several times, but I can never get over its look, or the silly names for everything, like "Kontact" and "Kdenlive".

I wish there was a project like elementary OS, which takes the tech of GNOME and applies its own theme, naming etc., but for KDE/Qt. (I know, I know, elementary is doing way more than just that.)

If something like this exists, I'd love to try it out.

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

#105

Post by oblio »

xiaomai wrote: post #7
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'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.

Sooo... Windows? :-D

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

#106

Post by oblio »

lostmsu wrote: post #68
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…

Disclaimer: I am the author. For Windows 10+ I made Stack WM: https://losttech.software/stack.html I works differently from i3: you predefine screen zones (possibly overlapping), and then just move your windows between them with keyboard shortcuts or middle mouse button. IMHO, covers the problems you mentioned. You can have: - multiple windows in one zone with normal Z ordering - an improvised taskbar for any zone or…

This looks really cool!

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

#107

Post by MayeulC »

maccam94 wrote: post #67

I just upgraded to a big 4K monitor and I'm trying to figure out my options for migrating from GNOME+Wayland on Ubuntu 22.04. It seems like there's sway (i3 ported to Wayland) along with some sort of sway-GNOME session config that looks like a WIP. Or there's a GNOME extension called ShellTile but it needs to be ported to GTK4. Does anyone else have recommendations for a GNOME-ish tiling setup under Wayland?

Whatever POP! OS does with their gnome tiling extension [1]. I've heard a lot of praise for it.

GNOME... uses D-Bus for a lot of stuff where wlroots uses wayland protocol, which makes it hard to integrate under other compositors.

[1]: Random link from a search: https://fossbytes.com/how-to-install-pop-shell-on-ubuntu-20-...

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

#108

Post by jmchuster »

stormbrew wrote: post #50
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…

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…

So if everything is visible or not, then isn't the cognitive load now on keeping track of all the windows that aren't visible? How do you handle "secondary" windows, so like something you don't need right now, but will in a bit, or you're checking in on it or using it from time to time.

So then overlapping windows serves the requirements of:

- constant visual reminder of which secondary windows you have

- but occupying minimal window space so as to be effectively ignorable if you're concentrating on your primary windows

- that might be able to show some visual indication in the corner of your eye when focus is required

- that can be easily switched to be the primary window when such indication happens, and then back again to the secondary state

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

#110

Post by MayeulC »

markstos wrote: post #36
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…

Sway supports both tiling and floating windows and you can define the rules and defaults as you wish. For example a browser window tiled with an editor and a media player floating on top. You could have one virtual desktop that defaults to tiling and another to floating. With a keyboard shortcut you can toggle a window between the two states. I was aware of tiling window managers for a decade before I switched from G…

As someone who switched from KDE in ~2017 mainly to try wayland, and stayed for the configurability and tiling aspect... Is there a way to make KDE ingest my sway configuration? I would get the best of both worlds this way. Bonus points if the resulting config is compatible with both!

I'm pretty sure kwin's window rules support everything you can express in a sway configuration.

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