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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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know right? Especially when you've just booted up and half your apps are still realising they've just been opened and screaming for attention. They should just open in the background and only appear when I look for them. I don't understand why they haven't tackled that in 18 macOS versions. Simply launching an app with a flag saying "this is not a user-initiated launch but a reopen, stay back" would fix it. At leas…

Apps used to open in the background in macOS. Also OS dialogs would not steal focus iirc, or maybe those modal dialogs dood not exist. Not stealing focus used to be one of the top rules in the Apple human interface guidelines.

I’m really not sure what happened.

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

#182
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/…

You may want to have a look at Bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth . It's the successor to Khronkite.

thanks; i spent some time yesterday trying to build this from source in NixOS but didnt get it enabled. i'll keep it on my shortlist and keep working on packaging it when i have spare cycles. it looks like a nice shine-up of khronkite

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

KDE is probably the desktop environment with the widest range of themes. (I like the "K" names. They usually mean the application fully integrates with KDE.)

I don't mind the K per se. It's great branding! But the specific apps shown on kde.org are Krita, Kdenlive (needs a pronunciation guide), Kontact (looks painfully asymmetric), Kdevelop, GCompris (needs an explanation, a pronunciation guide, and looks like GNOME branding).

We don't have the same opinion on what looks good and what doesn't. That's fine - but I wish someone from "my side" had tried to build a KDE-based distro. I've found some KDE distros with alternative theming, but nothing that leans towards the elementary/Apple style.

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE is probably the desktop environment with the widest range of themes. (I like the "K" names. They usually mean the application fully integrates with KDE.)

I don't mind the K per se. It's great branding! But the specific apps shown on kde.org are Krita, Kdenlive (needs a pronunciation guide), Kontact (looks painfully asymmetric), Kdevelop, GCompris (needs an explanation, a pronunciation guide, and looks like GNOME branding). We don't have the same opinion on what looks good and what doesn't. That's fine - but I wish someone from "my side" had tried to build a KDE-based…

KDE's theming support means you don't need a distribution to build anything, you install the themes yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX_gQTQLUZc

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind the K per se. It's great branding! But the specific apps shown on kde.org are Krita, Kdenlive (needs a pronunciation guide), Kontact (looks painfully asymmetric), Kdevelop, GCompris (needs an explanation, a pronunciation guide, and looks like GNOME branding). We don't have the same opinion on what looks good and what doesn't. That's fine - but I wish someone from "my side" had tried to build a KDE-based…

KDE's theming support means you don't need a distribution to build anything, you install the themes yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX_gQTQLUZc

Not bad, but right at 9:10 in the video, you have white text on a bright translucent background with terrible contrast (in the widget list). This is not an issue with this particular theme... Building a theme that looks great across the operating system, including common third-party apps, is an endless game of whack-a-mole that requires a dedicated team.

I guess I wish Ubuntu had picked KDE as its replacement DE, I really liked their theme around 20.04, and they put a lot of work in the details (like just getting desktop icons back).

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Every time I try a tiling WM again the cognitive load of memorizing new key bindings and trying to get various apps to cooperate with this exotic scheme pushes me away again. Also many apps have their own built in tiling or separation. I use emacs, I use CLion, irsii, etc and I use a web browser. None of them have agreement on how tabs/documents/windows can be broken up. I like the idea. The practice of any of them h…

> Every time I try a tiling WM again the cognitive load of memorizing new key bindings and trying to get various apps to cooperate with this exotic scheme pushes me away again.

Some tiling WMs are really into the whole "a keyboard should be all you ever use" thing and I don't personally like that. One of the reasons I like i3wm in particular is it's not extremely mouse-hostile and the number of key bindings I have to keep track of is pretty low and most of them make intuitive sense (mostly variants of -.

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

#187
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's because you're first overlapping windows experience was Windows for sure. With virtual desktops you just have 2 opened windows at most per workspace.

> With virtual desktops you just have 2 opened windows at most per workspace.

My first experiences with overlapped windows was actually probably Turbo C for DOS. :P Windows 3.0 and Macintosh System.. 6? after that. I've been through a lot of them.

I find nearly all overlapped windowing system's concepts of virtual desktops nearly unusable and incomprehensible, and I have used many. I'm a daily polyglot with operating systems, I use macs and linux for work, windows for play, and linux for everything else.

The only version of virtual desktops that's ever actually worked for me is i3's, because it's simple and easy to use.

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