Hacker News Reader

Comment by NextHendrix | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely. I, like many others, spent quite a few years in the gentoo/arch+minimal riced tiling wm camp but am now happy and comfy on "bloated" fedora 29 and kde. More than anything it just feels like i've grown out of it, and it's nice having a computer I can actually rely on for once.

View on HN

You may want to look into getting a tiling plugin for KDE. I'm in pretty much the same boat as you, used to use tiling WMs but now on Arch + KDE. The KWin tiling plugins are fairly simple - the only configuration is setting shortcuts to move windows around and resize them (I use super+WASD to move between workspaces, super+ctrl+WASD to move windows around on the screen, super+alt+WASD to move windows between workspaces, and super+Q/E to resize windows). That's it - the plugins make using the computer easier in 95% of cases without adding too much complexity, for for the other 5% you just toggle off the tiling and do it manually. And of course the mouse is still usable to move/resize windows.

Here's a newer script that overall seems to work better: https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin

And the older script I used to use: https://github.com/faho/kwin-tiling

I currently use the Sticky Window Snapping[0] plug-in which allows resizing tiled windows together (see the demo at the link) and that does most of what I need. A lot of what I do now is fairly horrendous when attempted with a tiling window manager (music production with lots of vst windows open, using mouse heavy programs like Vivado and gimp), which soured me to tilers after using them for years.

I still have my treasured xmonad config available as an xsession for when i'm just doing dev things, and use it most of the time on the laptop I do programming with, but in general plasma5 is such a step up from any older versions of KDE it just works really nicely for everything else.

I'll have a look at the KDE tiling plugins although I'll be surprised if it can replace my xmonad setup (would be nice though).

[0] https://store.kde.org/p/1112552/

I haven't used KDE for 10 years or so, but what makes you prefer that over a tiling wm? Considering you were already there, the learning curve must be zero, and nobody is forcing you to spend any time modifying anything. It kind of just works. At least it does for me.

There are a very few things that I will drop into Gnome to do (I think it's Gnome at least), and I dread it every time. Too many menus everywhere, too much animation, tiny targets that I need to hit with the mouse, etc.

KDE5 is super nice and doesn't resemble the horrors of KDEs past, at least in my opinion, you should give it a try after all this time to see all the great work they've done since you last saw it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com