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Tiling Distro Suggestions (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm currently using Fedora KDE Plasma, but I'd like to try out a tiling window manager. What would you all reccomend? I use my computer for school, so I would like it to be stable.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Krohnkite

https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite

https://store.kde.org/p/2144146/

I would try a few Plasma based tiling scripts before switching to anything like Sway or i3.

Agreed. I used tiling window managers for years before coming back to Plasma. Right now on Wayland I highly recommend giving Krohnkite a shot, its stable without any problems and has even multiple layouts to choose (and switch) from. I used Polonum before, but that one is not stable and was problematic. Krohnkite plugin (can be found in KWin Scripts > Get New... > then search for "krohnkite", by anametologin) is pretty good in my opinion.

The only problem with these plugins is, that they are not well documented as a standalone tiling window manager and cannot be configured as deeply. And they might interfere with other plugins or shortcut setups and so on. I knew what I wanted and I knew how to configure stuff, that's why its easy for me. At least it can be easily disabled without replacing entire desktop environment.

Little tip: One thing to mention, unlike Polonium, with Krohnkite one does not need to logout and login from current user session whenever settings are changed. It's enough to disable Krohnkite in KWin Scripts, Apply, then enable and Apply again. This is basically a reload of the plugin to take any changed settings in effect.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I've got issues with both of them, but polonium is closer to what I want. In krohnkite I can't use btree while also keeping the tiling part. If I drag a tile while in btree in krohnkite they just snap back to their previous position. Overall krohnkite is more polished though because it doesn't rely on kwin for the most part to determine positioning. Whereas polonium uses only the api's provided by kwin.

Lastly I have noticed that you don't actually need to log out and back in for polinium. Closing all windows and relaunching them has been enough for me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Krohnkite

In krohnkite I can’t use btree while also keeping the tiling part. If I drag a tile while in btree in krohnkite they just snap back to their previous position.

I use a 3 different layouts, one of them Btree. And drag and drop one window over the other will swap position of both windows. So functionally, it is working (for me) and maybe another plugin or configuration in Plasma is in the way?

Polonium

Closing all windows and relaunching them is from users perspective actually not too different from logging out and in again, at least from my view. From time to time I'm looking at the source in Github to see what the recent advancements are. But it seems development is on halt at the moment, with only minor changes over longer period of time.

On KDEs side I saw some update notes specifically mentioning fixes for Polonium, which is a good sign. My hope is that development of Polonium will take off soon.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I use a 3 different layouts, one of them Btree. And drag and drop one window over the other will swap position of both windows. So functionally, it is working (for me)

That is cool and I didn't know about that, but that is not what I meant. In most tiling window managers, regardless of the layout. You can increase the size of any individual window and all other windows will adjust in size.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Oh, you was talking about resizing. I see. Yes, Btree does not allow resizing. Trying so will snap window back to position, just as you were saying. When I read "drag", I thought you meant placing the window. The default "Tile" or "Quarter" could be used instead if window resizing is a requirement. But off course they do not function exactly like Btree.