KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

I usually have 3 windows open at a given time, either a terminal/IM/notes program at the bottom right corner, vlc/deadbeef/copyq/scrcpy at the top right corner, and everything else is the main program I'm working with (2/3rds of the screen width, 100% of height, so stuff like Firefox, Krusader, vscode, Godot, Blender/Krita/GIMP/Inkscape, Audacity, qemu/Virtualbox, etc). I use 3 hotkeys to put a window into one of those 3 spots, via wmctrl, everything else is floating. If things get messy (like if I need a few virtual machines and seeing their contents all at once) I use virtual desktops. I also assigned hotkeys that either open or focus specific programs (like meta+X to focus Konsole or launch it if it doesn't exist, meta+E for Krusader...) so I can quickly switch to them even if they are at the bottom of the stack or aren't opened yet. Got all sorts of custom launchers, clipboard processing and a lot more functions available to key combinations I can do with my left hand only (it's the "alt+tab" hand so I extended it to all important shortcuts). The layout is a standard Windows style bottom panel (Used to have an Unity-style left sidebar but that gave me whiplash when using other computers) full of info/alert plasmoids, including custom ones. All support scripts are fairly universal and mostly work in other desktops, but KDE has nice configuration options to automate window settings, so it works better with it. Also got custom themes but I have no idea how to port them out of KDE. So KDE it is.

Anyway with the description out of the way, tiling might work fine if all you work with is terminals, a browser and other text sources, but for that I'd rather just have tmux managing the important stuff and extra Konsole tabs for the minor operations (or to passively display output of updates in a new self-destructing tab so it gets rid of itself if I forget to close after seeing the output). Because I work with many visual tools that need plenty of space (and don't like sudden resizing) the tiling workflow just can't work for me, anyway. I can see why some would prefer it, though. As I said my use case is unusual. (Yeah I know artists would rather use Windows or Macs but my job requires Linux. My creative things are a hobby, but I wanted to have my cake and eat it. KDE has enough flexibility to let me hack it into submission, so it's not bad at all.)

It's just windows. You put roughly where you want them when you need them to have what you want visible. They stack. If one is out of your sight and you need it, you use the list or expose to find it and move it where it will be useful. It's like manipulating documents in the physical world except it's always easy to find a window in your stack of windows. It's a very natural flow.

Tiling is the solution imposing an unnatural cognitive burden on the user. With tiling you need to constantly think about exactly what you want to see, where you want your windows and you constantly need to fiddle with the arrangements and spend time preemptively positioning your windows. It gets very annoying to me as soon as I want more than one full screen window.

I have used i3 before, but setup and configuration was painful, and some applications had problems, like ex. KeePassXC was showing with very small font etc. PaperWP is Gnome based, so I never had any problem with any Ubuntu application.