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KDE: A Nice Tiling Environment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE

315 points by jrepinc 5y ago

GekkePrutser 5y ago
So the author is surprised that an open-source application is 'even' in F-Droid? :) Why? But anyway yeah KDE is amazing. I use it as my daily driver. It's so configurable. I don't want any opinionated software anymore.
pdenton 5y ago
Wow, I installed the tiling extension and it's much more pleasant than vanilla kwin. I first used KDE over 20 years ago, version 2.x. KDE 4 was awful, and I moved to Gnome. Since version 5 I'm back on KDE and most notably, the battery life of my laptop is twice as much! And it's configurable. And beautiful.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  I've been using KDE since 2.7 and I agree that, at least initially, 4 was awful, but primarily it was awful for the exact reasons Gnome was and is awful - they took away all the powerful functionality. They Apple-ified it. After a few point revisions it was almost back to it's former glory. 5/plasma is basically back to the power of 3.0, but I still miss Konqueror.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    Well, Konqueror is still there. Dolphin just got so capable that people don't want to switch anymore, and it was left behind as a browser.
    - fartcannon 5y ago
      I miss the browser. I miss when we cared about KHTML passing the ACID2 tests. I'm quite old now I guess :)
      - marcosdumay 5y ago
        Oh, ok. I miss having alternatives too. If it kept up, I probably wouldn't be using Firefox now.
        Zardoz84 5y ago
        Rekonq was stupidly fast and lightweight...
anyfoo 5y ago
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 those partially covered windows are still showing me what's currently going on at all times (i.e. the last few lines), and I can get their full content at a mouse click/keyboard shortcut press. Then there are partially obscured browser windows. Again the most relevant part of their content remains visible (e.g. for blogs that's usually roughly their "left half", for documentation with a content bar on the left their "right half"), and scrolling them does not require giving them focus. Then there are tiny windows like minimized views of media players that usually neatly fit into some of the open space resulting from my arrangement. And series of windows all similar to each other that are carefully arranged such that a single click reveals any of them, nearly obscuring the rest of the same series, but never hiding any of them completely. It may look "unkempt" at a first glance, but is actually very deliberate. I feel like a tiling environment with its constantly changing layout would be actual chaos... and somehow generally a step backwards. There are some dedicated situations where I tile two windows next to each other, but that's just that: A dedicated situation, often happening on another space/desktop.
- xiaomai 5y ago
  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.
  - whalesalad 5y ago
    This is all I need. I use an app on macOS called sizeup that let's me do this. I can center a window for reading text on my larger display. Fullscreen a window without using the actual native full screen on macOS. Snap left, snap right, up down etc. It can also keep track of hardware profiles, so windows will restore to their bigger sizes and positions when I plug my laptop into a display. https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/sizeup.png https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/sizeup.png
rrix2 5y ago
Khronkite is another "honorable mention" for KWin tiling and I prefer it over the one mentioned in TFA: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite 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/Using_Other_Window_Managers_with_Plasma https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/Using_Other_Window_Manage... But with things moving to Wayland, etc, this simple swap out method isn't possible right now, so I've been keeping tabs and playing with Khronkite and KWin-tiling every so often for when I inevitably swap over to Wayland. It's basically a perfectly serviceable tiling WM OS without having to deal with any of the screen locker, systray, R&R, that Sway et al force you to contend with yourself. Most of the setup is in unbinding system defaults + rebinding window management shortcuts in to better "places". I still use KDEWM=/usr/bin/i3 equivalent for now.
- indymike 5y ago
  I can second the Khronkite suggestion. It's extremely flexible.
- kbknapp 5y ago
  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 held back parts of Plasma (which means at some point they'll have it give in as well).
  - RMPR 5y ago
    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.
hello_there 5y ago
I clicked through to the tiling WM that he was using for KDE and one of the things under "Features" that got my attention was this: > Support for setting windows to floating or quitting tiling altogether, per-desktop (Meta+Shift+F11) and per-window (Meta-f) (“Meta” refers to the “super” or “windows” key here) I think this might be worth a try...
shmerl 5y ago
I'm not using tiling windows management, but KDE is great in general for sure. Currently I'm waiting for Plasma Wayland session to iron out major bugs before switching to it.
smallerfish 5y ago
One of the first customizations I make to any new KDE setup is to a) map win+1-0 to switch to desktop N; b) map shift+win+1-0 to move window to desktop N; c) set up 10 virtual desktops. I then run everything full screened and avoid alt-tab. Browser on desktop 1, terminal on 2 (with its own splits), IDE on 3, etc. Over time I found that I could get rid of the panel entirely since I know where all running applications are, and launching applications using krunner is just a win key away. System tray I ended up needing, but I added it as a widget on the desktop itself, and it works well enough there.
- el_isma 5y ago
  Does anybody know if there's a way to tag a window with win+num? I use several monitors and would like to do something like that but on the same virtual desktop. So ideally I'd select a window, shift+win+1 to save that window, and win+1 to recall that window.
bhedgeoser 5y ago
Is it still unusably buggy? Not sarcasm, I'm just curious.
- jaimex2 5y ago
  Was it ever buggy? I know Plasma had a rocky first few months but otherwise its been solid for years now.
  - detaro 5y ago
    early days of KDE4 (so ~15 years ago) weren't great
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      Middle days of KDE4 weren't great either, but at least you could tell things were getting better.
    - nachexnachex 5y ago
      3.5.10 was the pinnacle of desktop experience. But plasma is now close to that
  - shmerl 5y ago
    It's moving to Wayland now, and that is still rough. X11 session is solid though.
- approxim8ion 5y ago
  On X11 it's pretty solid. Wayland still has kinks.
HungSu 5y ago
Happy to see mention of PaperWM in the post. I'm not on Linux at the moment, but the number 1 thing I miss is PaperWM. Nothing else makes as much sense to me, including tiling window managers
- grinchygrinch 5y ago
  I can't imagine using anything else anymore.
rawtxapp 5y ago
I would also highly recommend i3 + i3-gnome combination [1]. It adds a lot of gnome features out of the box to i3, like sound control, notifications, etc. 1: https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome
unsungNovelty 5y ago
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, Inkscape. 9th for entertainment! Makes your computing life predictable and easier is all. A tiling window managers lets you: - Map different apps to different workspaces. - Open apps directly into specific workspaces. - Tiling of apps to suit your needs. - Utilizing maximum screen real estate (Uggghhh GNOME). - Have peace with no more endless search for a window cos you don't know where the app is. Alt+tab Alt+tab Alt+tab Alt+tab Alt+tab Alt+tab!!! - Have stable workflow cos they move slowly and less workflow breaks. Functional bugs could be reduced if you use old WMs like i3. - Less bloat. - First class citizen of the keyboard shortcuts workflow. - There is one for everyone - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Window_manager#Tiling_window_managers https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Window_manager#Tiling_windo... I also don't think Tiling WM's are for everyone though. If you use <4 apps open at a time, maybe you don't need one. But if you have a browser open, a text editor, a terminal, A bunch of chat apps like Slack, Discord, Telegram. Then your email client... it is already crazy. But then you open your file manager to open bunch of files and then you have have those documents. It can get out of hand. Even if you are rebooting only once every couple of months or so, you will still eventually have to redo all the organization again. Also if you do get interested in using a tiling WM, don't just jump right away (in Linux). Use it with a DE of your preference. I used XFCE and it worked well along with i3wm. It took a couple of months to remove my DE in full and embrace Tiling WM life. But it was well worth it. :)
- JNRowe 5y ago
  I believe one of the best explanations for the power of tiling WMs is "Tags are not workspaces"¹. It describes that beyond your way of working there is a parallel way which exists with no extra work. I think this is also true for different layouts. You can happily work with simple equal size window layouts, but you can also have per-project or per-app layouts should you wish. The software grows naturally with you, or if you prefer the other functionality just stays out of your way. ¹ https://github.com/w0ng/wongdev.com/blob/master/content/dwm-tags-are-not-workspaces.md https://github.com/w0ng/wongdev.com/blob/master/content/dwm-...
tomrod 5y ago
I love KDE! So much better than Gnome. I use Cinnamon as a fallback when KDE glitches (eg it's dropped all my hotkeys somehow?). But I'm really impressed with KDE overall.
approxim8ion 5y ago
For tiling, Krohnkite[1] is what I use. It integrates with KWin wonderfully, provides a ton of layouts and entries in the default system shortcut settings to set keybindings. For those more graphically oriented, there is also Bismuth[2] which seems cool. 1: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite 2: https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth
5tefan 5y ago
I'd love to experiment with tiling WMs but then, I'm on Win10 in corporate land with low res screens. My 'tiling' is a vertical split which is done easily with a shortcut and mouse follows focus. That serves me well.
- Bolkan 5y ago
  This plus workspaces works well even on large screens.
maccam94 5y ago
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?
- MayeulC 5y ago
  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-20-04-use-pop_os-auto-tiling-manager/ https://fossbytes.com/how-to-install-pop-shell-on-ubuntu-20-...
ludopot 5y ago
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ludopot 5y ago
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simion314 5y ago
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.
wanderingmind 5y ago
For gnome there is an excellent tool called PaperWM[1] that provides fantastic window tiling and customization. [1] https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
allisdust 5y ago
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.
pmontra 5y ago
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.
jcun4128 5y ago
I used i3-wm out of necessity in the past eg. piece of crap computers where I could save 300MB of RAM by not using stock Ubuntu. Maybe not directly related but I'm looking forward to learning more of KDE with Pinephone Pro and Kirigami. I would be interested in some kind of tiling manager there again for resource saving. My intent ultimately is a UI like Windows Phone if that somehow makes it snappier. I tried SxMO and it was brutal.
exceptione 5y ago
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
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  > - 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 You need to change the window decoration https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kwin/kcontrol/kwindecoration/index.html https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kwin/kcontrol/kwindecoration/... "Tip For accessibility purposes, some window decorations support extra wide borders. If this is available, you can also choose a Window border size here. The large borders are easier to see for low vision users, and easier to grab for people with limited mobility or difficulty using a mouse."
- ulimn 5y ago
  Holding ALT + right mouse button can be used to resize windows easily. (Left for moving them)
  - ProNeo 5y ago
    It's super/meta for me, not alt.
    - yaantc 5y ago
      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.
  - exceptione 5y ago
AtillaBosma 5y ago
Quick bug report, the title says "Envieonment" instead of "Environment" on the post.
maxloh 5y ago
KDE is ugly. It looks like software back then 2010s
maxloh 5y ago
KDE is ugly. It looks like software back then 2010s.
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  > 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-es-ES.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/KDE-3.1-...
- gurkendoktor 5y ago
  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.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    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.)
    - gurkendoktor 5y ago
      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.
v3ss0n 5y ago
You are using less maintained Tiling extension. Try Bismuth : https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth It is much better , properly coded and actively developed with proper features.
gal_anonym 5y ago
PaperWM is the simplest and the best tiling manager I have used. Never needed to split windows horizontally, and whole idea of PaperWM is to arrange windows side by side. 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.
plq 5y ago
Sure, KDE is awesome, but "Surprisingly Awesome"? The author is surprised that eg. "The shortcut settings in KDE really work and are impressive. " or "I can put [the panels] at the top of the screen, the bottom, or even the sides!" Seriously? Isn't it weird that people can be impressed by keyboard shortcuts working or apps being able to put an icon in the system tray in the year of 2022? Disclaimer: I have been a KDE user since the first time I managed to boot into the graphical shell on my Gentoo box back in early noughties. That's it, just a happy user. KDE has been around for 25+ years. It has a huge community: Both a substantial amount of users and a daring team that is totally chill not only about diving head-first into colossal amount of work, but also about making substantial changes to its codebase when they think it's necessary. Just look at how much work went into migrating KDE 3 to 4 or splitting kdelibs when going 4 => 5 which is the status quo now. It's also got a solid legal foundation[1], better than relying on just GPL. They got flak when they first decided to build on Qt, a commercial framework so they negotiated this deal with Trolltech. (EDIT: Here's the context[2]) The point is that their dedication to the community is also top notch, which seems rare in the open source world. So I, for one, am not one bit surprised that a team this competent managed to get keyboard shortcuts to work after all. Actually, I'll go one step further and say this: If your daily driver is Linux and you are not forced to running Fluxbox/Openbox/etc. due to resource constraints, you should be running KDE, period. What's next, we will praise Linux for doing preemptive scheduling? Come on :) [1]: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ [2]: http://openbooks.sourceforge.net/books/kde20devel/ch19lev1sec4.html http://openbooks.sourceforge.net/books/kde20devel/ch19lev1se... PS: I see comments talking about eg. how bad the early 4.x releases were. Well, that's mainly Ubuntu's fault for shipping a barely finished tech preview in its stable channel. I, for one, don't remember having a problem switching to KDE 4.something once it was offered in the stable channel by the Gentoo KDE team.
- ahartmetz 5y ago
  This article and the discussion are the first time that I hear so many detailed positive comments about the current KDE keyboard shortcut configuration that I created in, like, 2007 :) Global shortcuts existed before, but the implementation was different, and the configuration UI for both global and app-local shortcuts was different. I talked to a UX designer and implemented the new thing. In KDE3, there was conflict detection with a short, hardcoded list of shortcuts that didn't necessarily correspond to the actually configured shortcuts. I made it work with the real data (global shortcuts, standard shortcuts like copy & paste, maybe app-specific shortcuts of the current app). As always, the devil is in the details. Other people made important improvements later. One of the things that I added was a once-per-session component to remember and listen for global keyboard shortcuts, which, by luck, is exactly the right design for Wayland, where only a privileged part of system (either the compositor or a delegate) can snoop on key presses.
numbsafari 5y ago
On macOS, with no native tiling WM, I’ve been enjoying using VSCode in full screen as essentially just that while coding/debugging/etc. Typically split into 3 vertical panes: nav, editors, terminals. I mostly just use one big editor pane, but sometimes further split one way or the other depending on what I’m doing. Same for terminal sessions, though more frequently using some kind of watcher in a lower split. Anyhow, it works pretty nice.
- swaits 5y ago
  I use Amethyst on macOS. Took some getting used to, but now I won’t go back.
vanderZwan 5y ago
So the author mentions that the reason for picking KDE was its screen management. I feel like KDE does not get enough credit for that. I'm on a laptop. I regularly switch between two external monitors at home, various projectors, and of course using no external monitor or projector at all while traveling. KDE remembers each individual set-up, so once I have arranged my two external monitors, I know that the next time I plug them in they will automatically be arranged the same way. Once I have set up a particular projector to be virtually above or aside from my laptop screen, it will have the same arrangement next time I plug it in. This should be the default but back when I switched to KDE a few years ago none of the other environments I tried gave me this experience (I hope it's better now). And indeed, is was the main motivation for me to give KDE Neon a try
- tionis 5y ago
  On i3 there is autorandr which does something similar, but of course i3 being i3 you have to configure the outputs manually with xrandr the first time.
  - vanderZwan 5y ago
    Well, I wouldn't hold that against i3, since that is not really different from when I manually arrange my monitors in the display settings through a GUI the first time I plug them in. So good going i3 maintainers!
jrepinc 5y ago
And it got even more awesome with KDE Plasma 5.24 just released → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30257717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30257717
jhauris 5y ago
The author mentions how good KDEConnect is, but I don't think one can overstate how cool it is. Having a youtube video on my computer pause when my cell phone rings, and resume when I hang up; use my phone as a mouse on my computer from across the room, or use media controls on my phone to control whatever is playing; (the list goes on and on). It's the first technology that has made me feel like I'm living in the future in a good way.
Symmetry 5y ago
> xmonad itself can’t run with modern Gnome That's not really true. I use the gnome-flashback sesson and have an .desktop in ~/.config/autostart that runs xmonad --replace after I log in. It's true that logging in with a gnome session using xmonad as the WM isn't really an option any more but switching to xmonad after login continues to work great and is easier to set up than creating your own session ever was. https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles/blob/master/setup-xmonad.sh https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles/blob/master/setup-xmonad...
ArcMex 5y ago
I think TWMs work well for a mostly TUI-based workflow and DEs for a mostly GUI-based workflow. I have both workflows on separate machines. Each works well for what I want to do and I am comfortable in either environment. - Arch + DWM + St + LibreWolf (for scripting and networking) - Linux Mint + Cinnamon + Terminator + Web Apps (daily-driver at the office)

315 points by jrepinc 5y ago

So the author is surprised that an open-source application is 'even' in F-Droid? :) Why? But anyway yeah KDE is amazing. I use it as my daily driver. It's so configurable. I don't want any opinionated software anymore.

pdenton 5y ago

Wow, I installed the tiling extension and it's much more pleasant than vanilla kwin. I first used KDE over 20 years ago, version 2.x. KDE 4 was awful, and I moved to Gnome. Since version 5 I'm back on KDE and most notably, the battery life of my laptop is twice as much! And it's configurable. And beautiful.

fartcannon 5y ago
I've been using KDE since 2.7 and I agree that, at least initially, 4 was awful, but primarily it was awful for the exact reasons Gnome was and is awful - they took away all the powerful functionality. They Apple-ified it. After a few point revisions it was almost back to it's former glory. 5/plasma is basically back to the power of 3.0, but I still miss Konqueror.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Well, Konqueror is still there. Dolphin just got so capable that people don't want to switch anymore, and it was left behind as a browser.
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    I miss the browser. I miss when we cared about KHTML passing the ACID2 tests. I'm quite old now I guess :)
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      Oh, ok. I miss having alternatives too. If it kept up, I probably wouldn't be using Firefox now.
      - Zardoz84 5y ago
        Rekonq was stupidly fast and lightweight...

anyfoo 5y ago

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 those partially covered windows are still showing me what's currently going on at all times (i.e. the last few lines), and I can get their full content at a mouse click/keyboard shortcut press. Then there are partially obscured browser windows. Again the most relevant part of their content remains visible (e.g. for blogs that's usually roughly their "left half", for documentation with a content bar on the left their "right half"), and scrolling them does not require giving them focus. Then there are tiny windows like minimized views of media players that usually neatly fit into some of the open space resulting from my arrangement. And series of windows all similar to each other that are carefully arranged such that a single click reveals any of them, nearly obscuring the rest of the same series, but never hiding any of them completely. It may look "unkempt" at a first glance, but is actually very deliberate. I feel like a tiling environment with its constantly changing layout would be actual chaos... and somehow generally a step backwards. There are some dedicated situations where I tile two windows next to each other, but that's just that: A dedicated situation, often happening on another space/desktop.

xiaomai 5y ago
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.
- whalesalad 5y ago
  This is all I need. I use an app on macOS called sizeup that let's me do this. I can center a window for reading text on my larger display. Fullscreen a window without using the actual native full screen on macOS. Snap left, snap right, up down etc. It can also keep track of hardware profiles, so windows will restore to their bigger sizes and positions when I plug my laptop into a display. https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/sizeup.png https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/sizeup.png

rrix2 5y ago

Khronkite is another "honorable mention" for KWin tiling and I prefer it over the one mentioned in TFA: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite 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/Using_Other_Window_Managers_with_Plasma https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/Using_Other_Window_Manage... But with things moving to Wayland, etc, this simple swap out method isn't possible right now, so I've been keeping tabs and playing with Khronkite and KWin-tiling every so often for when I inevitably swap over to Wayland. It's basically a perfectly serviceable tiling WM OS without having to deal with any of the screen locker, systray, R&R, that Sway et al force you to contend with yourself. Most of the setup is in unbinding system defaults + rebinding window management shortcuts in to better "places". I still use KDEWM=/usr/bin/i3 equivalent for now.

indymike 5y ago
I can second the Khronkite suggestion. It's extremely flexible.
kbknapp 5y ago
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 held back parts of Plasma (which means at some point they'll have it give in as well).
- RMPR 5y ago
  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.

hello_there 5y ago

I clicked through to the tiling WM that he was using for KDE and one of the things under "Features" that got my attention was this: > Support for setting windows to floating or quitting tiling altogether, per-desktop (Meta+Shift+F11) and per-window (Meta-f) (“Meta” refers to the “super” or “windows” key here) I think this might be worth a try...

shmerl 5y ago

I'm not using tiling windows management, but KDE is great in general for sure. Currently I'm waiting for Plasma Wayland session to iron out major bugs before switching to it.

smallerfish 5y ago

One of the first customizations I make to any new KDE setup is to a) map win+1-0 to switch to desktop N; b) map shift+win+1-0 to move window to desktop N; c) set up 10 virtual desktops. I then run everything full screened and avoid alt-tab. Browser on desktop 1, terminal on 2 (with its own splits), IDE on 3, etc. Over time I found that I could get rid of the panel entirely since I know where all running applications are, and launching applications using krunner is just a win key away. System tray I ended up needing, but I added it as a widget on the desktop itself, and it works well enough there.

el_isma 5y ago
Does anybody know if there's a way to tag a window with win+num? I use several monitors and would like to do something like that but on the same virtual desktop. So ideally I'd select a window, shift+win+1 to save that window, and win+1 to recall that window.

bhedgeoser 5y ago

Is it still unusably buggy? Not sarcasm, I'm just curious.

jaimex2 5y ago
Was it ever buggy? I know Plasma had a rocky first few months but otherwise its been solid for years now.
- detaro 5y ago
  early days of KDE4 (so ~15 years ago) weren't great
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    Middle days of KDE4 weren't great either, but at least you could tell things were getting better.
  - nachexnachex 5y ago
    3.5.10 was the pinnacle of desktop experience. But plasma is now close to that
- shmerl 5y ago
  It's moving to Wayland now, and that is still rough. X11 session is solid though.
approxim8ion 5y ago
On X11 it's pretty solid. Wayland still has kinks.

HungSu 5y ago

Happy to see mention of PaperWM in the post. I'm not on Linux at the moment, but the number 1 thing I miss is PaperWM. Nothing else makes as much sense to me, including tiling window managers

grinchygrinch 5y ago
I can't imagine using anything else anymore.

rawtxapp 5y ago

I would also highly recommend i3 + i3-gnome combination [1]. It adds a lot of gnome features out of the box to i3, like sound control, notifications, etc. 1: https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome

unsungNovelty 5y ago

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, Inkscape. 9th for entertainment! Makes your computing life predictable and easier is all. A tiling window managers lets you: - Map different apps to different workspaces. - Open apps directly into specific workspaces. - Tiling of apps to suit your needs. - Utilizing maximum screen real estate (Uggghhh GNOME). - Have peace with no more endless search for a window cos you don't know where the app is. Alt+tab Alt+tab Alt+tab Alt+tab Alt+tab Alt+tab!!! - Have stable workflow cos they move slowly and less workflow breaks. Functional bugs could be reduced if you use old WMs like i3. - Less bloat. - First class citizen of the keyboard shortcuts workflow. - There is one for everyone - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Window_manager#Tiling_window_managers https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Window_manager#Tiling_windo... I also don't think Tiling WM's are for everyone though. If you use <4 apps open at a time, maybe you don't need one. But if you have a browser open, a text editor, a terminal, A bunch of chat apps like Slack, Discord, Telegram. Then your email client... it is already crazy. But then you open your file manager to open bunch of files and then you have have those documents. It can get out of hand. Even if you are rebooting only once every couple of months or so, you will still eventually have to redo all the organization again. Also if you do get interested in using a tiling WM, don't just jump right away (in Linux). Use it with a DE of your preference. I used XFCE and it worked well along with i3wm. It took a couple of months to remove my DE in full and embrace Tiling WM life. But it was well worth it. :)

JNRowe 5y ago
I believe one of the best explanations for the power of tiling WMs is "Tags are not workspaces"¹. It describes that beyond your way of working there is a parallel way which exists with no extra work. I think this is also true for different layouts. You can happily work with simple equal size window layouts, but you can also have per-project or per-app layouts should you wish. The software grows naturally with you, or if you prefer the other functionality just stays out of your way. ¹ https://github.com/w0ng/wongdev.com/blob/master/content/dwm-tags-are-not-workspaces.md https://github.com/w0ng/wongdev.com/blob/master/content/dwm-...

tomrod 5y ago

I love KDE! So much better than Gnome. I use Cinnamon as a fallback when KDE glitches (eg it's dropped all my hotkeys somehow?). But I'm really impressed with KDE overall.

approxim8ion 5y ago

For tiling, Krohnkite[1] is what I use. It integrates with KWin wonderfully, provides a ton of layouts and entries in the default system shortcut settings to set keybindings. For those more graphically oriented, there is also Bismuth[2] which seems cool. 1: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite 2: https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth

5tefan 5y ago

I'd love to experiment with tiling WMs but then, I'm on Win10 in corporate land with low res screens. My 'tiling' is a vertical split which is done easily with a shortcut and mouse follows focus. That serves me well.

Bolkan 5y ago
This plus workspaces works well even on large screens.

maccam94 5y ago

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?

MayeulC 5y ago
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-20-04-use-pop_os-auto-tiling-manager/ https://fossbytes.com/how-to-install-pop-shell-on-ubuntu-20-...

ludopot 5y ago

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ludopot 5y ago

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simion314 5y ago

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.

wanderingmind 5y ago

For gnome there is an excellent tool called PaperWM[1] that provides fantastic window tiling and customization. [1] https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM

allisdust 5y ago

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.

pmontra 5y ago

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.

jcun4128 5y ago

I used i3-wm out of necessity in the past eg. piece of crap computers where I could save 300MB of RAM by not using stock Ubuntu. Maybe not directly related but I'm looking forward to learning more of KDE with Pinephone Pro and Kirigami. I would be interested in some kind of tiling manager there again for resource saving. My intent ultimately is a UI like Windows Phone if that somehow makes it snappier. I tried SxMO and it was brutal.

exceptione 5y ago

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

nextaccountic 5y ago
> - 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 You need to change the window decoration https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kwin/kcontrol/kwindecoration/index.html https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kwin/kcontrol/kwindecoration/... "Tip For accessibility purposes, some window decorations support extra wide borders. If this is available, you can also choose a Window border size here. The large borders are easier to see for low vision users, and easier to grab for people with limited mobility or difficulty using a mouse."
ulimn 5y ago
Holding ALT + right mouse button can be used to resize windows easily. (Left for moving them)
- ProNeo 5y ago
  It's super/meta for me, not alt.
  - yaantc 5y ago
    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.
- exceptione 5y ago

AtillaBosma 5y ago

Quick bug report, the title says "Envieonment" instead of "Environment" on the post.

maxloh 5y ago

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

maxloh 5y ago

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

gattilorenz 5y ago
> 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-es-ES.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/KDE-3.1-...
gurkendoktor 5y ago
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.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  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.)
  - gurkendoktor 5y ago
    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.

v3ss0n 5y ago

You are using less maintained Tiling extension. Try Bismuth : https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth It is much better , properly coded and actively developed with proper features.

gal_anonym 5y ago

PaperWM is the simplest and the best tiling manager I have used. Never needed to split windows horizontally, and whole idea of PaperWM is to arrange windows side by side. 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.

plq 5y ago

Sure, KDE is awesome, but "Surprisingly Awesome"? The author is surprised that eg. "The shortcut settings in KDE really work and are impressive. " or "I can put [the panels] at the top of the screen, the bottom, or even the sides!" Seriously? Isn't it weird that people can be impressed by keyboard shortcuts working or apps being able to put an icon in the system tray in the year of 2022? Disclaimer: I have been a KDE user since the first time I managed to boot into the graphical shell on my Gentoo box back in early noughties. That's it, just a happy user. KDE has been around for 25+ years. It has a huge community: Both a substantial amount of users and a daring team that is totally chill not only about diving head-first into colossal amount of work, but also about making substantial changes to its codebase when they think it's necessary. Just look at how much work went into migrating KDE 3 to 4 or splitting kdelibs when going 4 => 5 which is the status quo now. It's also got a solid legal foundation[1], better than relying on just GPL. They got flak when they first decided to build on Qt, a commercial framework so they negotiated this deal with Trolltech. (EDIT: Here's the context[2]) The point is that their dedication to the community is also top notch, which seems rare in the open source world. So I, for one, am not one bit surprised that a team this competent managed to get keyboard shortcuts to work after all. Actually, I'll go one step further and say this: If your daily driver is Linux and you are not forced to running Fluxbox/Openbox/etc. due to resource constraints, you should be running KDE, period. What's next, we will praise Linux for doing preemptive scheduling? Come on :) [1]: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ [2]: http://openbooks.sourceforge.net/books/kde20devel/ch19lev1sec4.html http://openbooks.sourceforge.net/books/kde20devel/ch19lev1se... PS: I see comments talking about eg. how bad the early 4.x releases were. Well, that's mainly Ubuntu's fault for shipping a barely finished tech preview in its stable channel. I, for one, don't remember having a problem switching to KDE 4.something once it was offered in the stable channel by the Gentoo KDE team.

ahartmetz 5y ago
This article and the discussion are the first time that I hear so many detailed positive comments about the current KDE keyboard shortcut configuration that I created in, like, 2007 :) Global shortcuts existed before, but the implementation was different, and the configuration UI for both global and app-local shortcuts was different. I talked to a UX designer and implemented the new thing. In KDE3, there was conflict detection with a short, hardcoded list of shortcuts that didn't necessarily correspond to the actually configured shortcuts. I made it work with the real data (global shortcuts, standard shortcuts like copy & paste, maybe app-specific shortcuts of the current app). As always, the devil is in the details. Other people made important improvements later. One of the things that I added was a once-per-session component to remember and listen for global keyboard shortcuts, which, by luck, is exactly the right design for Wayland, where only a privileged part of system (either the compositor or a delegate) can snoop on key presses.

numbsafari 5y ago

On macOS, with no native tiling WM, I’ve been enjoying using VSCode in full screen as essentially just that while coding/debugging/etc. Typically split into 3 vertical panes: nav, editors, terminals. I mostly just use one big editor pane, but sometimes further split one way or the other depending on what I’m doing. Same for terminal sessions, though more frequently using some kind of watcher in a lower split. Anyhow, it works pretty nice.

swaits 5y ago
I use Amethyst on macOS. Took some getting used to, but now I won’t go back.

vanderZwan 5y ago

So the author mentions that the reason for picking KDE was its screen management. I feel like KDE does not get enough credit for that. I'm on a laptop. I regularly switch between two external monitors at home, various projectors, and of course using no external monitor or projector at all while traveling. KDE remembers each individual set-up, so once I have arranged my two external monitors, I know that the next time I plug them in they will automatically be arranged the same way. Once I have set up a particular projector to be virtually above or aside from my laptop screen, it will have the same arrangement next time I plug it in. This should be the default but back when I switched to KDE a few years ago none of the other environments I tried gave me this experience (I hope it's better now). And indeed, is was the main motivation for me to give KDE Neon a try

tionis 5y ago
On i3 there is autorandr which does something similar, but of course i3 being i3 you have to configure the outputs manually with xrandr the first time.
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  Well, I wouldn't hold that against i3, since that is not really different from when I manually arrange my monitors in the display settings through a GUI the first time I plug them in. So good going i3 maintainers!

jrepinc 5y ago

And it got even more awesome with KDE Plasma 5.24 just released → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30257717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30257717

jhauris 5y ago

The author mentions how good KDEConnect is, but I don't think one can overstate how cool it is. Having a youtube video on my computer pause when my cell phone rings, and resume when I hang up; use my phone as a mouse on my computer from across the room, or use media controls on my phone to control whatever is playing; (the list goes on and on). It's the first technology that has made me feel like I'm living in the future in a good way.

Symmetry 5y ago

> xmonad itself can’t run with modern Gnome That's not really true. I use the gnome-flashback sesson and have an .desktop in ~/.config/autostart that runs xmonad --replace after I log in. It's true that logging in with a gnome session using xmonad as the WM isn't really an option any more but switching to xmonad after login continues to work great and is easier to set up than creating your own session ever was. https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles/blob/master/setup-xmonad.sh https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles/blob/master/setup-xmonad...

ArcMex 5y ago

I think TWMs work well for a mostly TUI-based workflow and DEs for a mostly GUI-based workflow. I have both workflows on separate machines. Each works well for what I want to do and I am comfortable in either environment. - Arch + DWM + St + LibreWolf (for scripting and networking) - Linux Mint + Cinnamon + Terminator + Web Apps (daily-driver at the office)