KDE Plasma "Tiling" Is Neat But Isn't Tiling
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- Опубліковано 7 кві 2024
- If there's one thing I'm an expert in it's tiling, and I'm here to say that what KDE Plasma does is not tiling, however that doesn't mean it's bad and it can be made much better even without implementing tiling.
Yes I'm gatekeeping the definition of tiling
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I will be doing a video on polonium when 1.0 is actually ready, i know it exists but i wanted to discuss the native "tiling" first
hey you should talk about what is going on between freedesktop and vaxry, this is unacceptable look at vaxry's blog post.
yeah but when will you make a video on why holo is the superior wolf girl.
@@tato-chip7612 that would be a very short video
there will be no 1.0. it is already usable.
@@rizkyadiyanto7922 There will be a 1.0, that is that the dev is currently working on. What is shipping right now is the beta
I saw Nicos reaction to your Plasma video. All in all, it was quite funny seeing the combination of you 2. But in the end I don't care about who's right or wrong as long as this feature gets better. I just wanna see desktop environments with full tiling support. If Plasma doesn't do this then lets cross fingers for Cosmic
Well, Nico gets thinks done so I'd prefer him
whats the full channel name?
@@ShowierData9978nicco loves linux
Cosmic does have full tiling support since the developers are fans of tiling.
Even their Gnome 42 fork has decent tiling support already.
@@Problematist It wasn't quite a fork, it was an extension on top of GNOME. And it worked since GNOME 3 btw
This looks like someone looked up on Wikipedia what a tiling window manager is, then implemented a proof of concept of their idea of one, and then somebody just shipped it without asking.
I heard that's the life of QA. Developer push out before going through QA and then QA still gets the blame 🤪
I was so happy when I saw plasma supported tiling.
Then I tried it...
Then I wasn't happy anymore...
I can give you a single very very import fact that you missed. And it's fair that you missed it -- the devs have mentioned it a few times and it gets discussed, but it doesn't get much press. And it's obscure enough that, while it has been mentioned on Planet KDE, you really have to delve into merge requests and code comments to find it:
KDE's inherent tiling primatives are intended to be a foundational standard that actual tiling and mixed mode code gets built upon. It has been explicitly stated that it is not intended to be a full tiling system and that creating one is outside the scope of what is being developed. *_It is intended to provide only the necessary platform for others to build a variety of different interfaces upon, including (but not limited to) full tiling systems._*
This has been the stated goal for at least the last year and confirmed to still be the intent in comments within the last couple months. A year ago, Marco Martin said he created a quick and dirty script for autotiling to make sure that it was working as a system to build upon. His comment at the time was, "My idea is to allow a good amount of control to this (both creating/deleting tiles and tile windows) to scripting and let 3rd parties do that trough scripting and extensions as there are already a ton of them that autotile each other with slightly different logic and behaviors, as this is really an hardcore tweaker territory." Speaking of Marco, he last committed code to improve the tiling base about seven hours ago, so it is very much actively being worked on.
You can disagree with this as a goal, but it is misleading to claim they don't know what a tiling manager is. They didn't intend to build one. They built an interface and platform to allow others to build many different tiling managers. Time will tell if that was a good idea or not.
My issue is calling it tiling, if you want to not implement tiling that's ok but call it anything else
@@BrodieRobertson Agreed. That is exactly my point - it is "tiling," but in the same sense that X or Wayland is "what Linux uses for a desktop." Or, for that matter, Linux versus Linux+GNU. Plasma is providing a software layer that sits underneath and provides a raw tiling protocol intended for other software to interface with and provide the actual user experience. And yes, I understand this is confusing, but how many people still can't wrap their head around the difference between a Wayland compositor versus an X window manager? You're absolutely right in objecting. I object. But it's a problem with clarity, messaging -- and probably terminology. There isn't an easy way to phrase this, as it doesn't fit the model of what came before, a la compositor versus WM. It doesn't mean that Plasma's -- or Wayland's -- model is broken, just that our terminology and mental model has to adjust to the new abstraction.
I make the comparison because it's very similar to the objections that Wayland needs to provide all the services to mirror what X provided or else it is doomed to fail. At that point, you're just reinventing what came before. Here, again, is a break in the expected model to create a new model of abstracted layers that interact in a different way, with expected features moved to different layers than before. Messaging that conceptual change is near impossible... and hasn't been done well here.
@@BrodieRobertson You can take a window and putting it in a tile. Yes its some form of tiling.
Lets call it a tiling framework
What's there now is useable and I would say it counts as tiling for many people. Saying that, I think all your points are valid. The fact you can't have a separate layout on different desktops is a massive oversight.
What I liked about the cosmic extension for gnome was that it was a toggle so that I could tilling when I felt it was easier to use or floating when that was easier to use.
I have just migrated to plasma 6 coming from Gnome, and I am used to that very cosmic plugin, and I am lost right now. I found myself not using floating at all with that plugin, but I do not want a full tiling window manager because I still want to use desktop stuff that it's a pain in the neck in a tiling wm.
I get the feeling different people use the term "tiling" to refer to different things. Does "tiling" mean the existence of tiles that windows go in, or does it imply the workflow typical of a tiling window manager? Well, that depends on your definition. I don't know if it makes sense to fight about semantics.
What I do agree on is that the Plasma workflow isn't for me, from what I can tell. For me, the most important aspect of tiling WMs is maximizing the use of screen real estate, and minimizing the amount of effort you have to put into positioning windows on your screen. I don't really care about having my windows positioned in fancy or complicated ways at all. If I were to use Plasma, I don't think I'd be using this feature at all.
The other day my dog got stuck at the top of the tree. People said it is not a dog but a cat. Well, that depends on their definition. I don't know if it makes sense to fight about semantics.
@@joaomaria2398 well that’s just not a fair comparison. My point is, to someone unfamiliar with tiling WM lingo, the term “tiling” sounds perfectly reasonable here.
@@joaomaria2398 If your dog meows like a cat, and behaves like a cat, I think it's very fair to get mistaken if you don't have a clear view of it. Semantics fights can go both ways lmao
tiling means putting windows/frames together without overlapping like actual tiles in construction. stacking means overlapping windows.
Disingenuous argument. It doesn’t matter what people define it as. A tiling window manager and a window manager that uses tiles is different. You can choose to ignore reality for the sake of cope, but you’re just being difficult for no reason in that case.
i think when you split a floating tile it should create a new tile tree with the floating tile as the root of it
What it looks like is a way for people used to a GUI and mouse to dip their toes into the tiling workflow. It's lets them use a familar interface to configure it, rather than a text based config. Which is fine, it might broaden the appeal and increase interest in tiling. Frankly I only use it half the time myself: some things lend themselves to tiling, others don't.
I think what Plasma needs here is a few building blocks and a scripting / extension API for people to build nice tiling experiences with.
So many tiling window managers work in slightly different ways that there will be no one-size-fits-all solution.
What is definitely needed (in order of importance):
- fix loading and saving layouts so they work properly
- add the possibility for window rules or quick tile hotkeys to use the tiling layout, or at least, for extensions to be able to add such rules. there needs to be a way to automatically add new windows into a tile, at least using an extension API
- per-monitor and per-workspace tile layouts. This can be disabled by default, but needs to be accessible to at least extension developers
- finally, add some kind of system or hook for extensions to build dynamic tilers
If the tiling system in Kwin is able to fulfill these or at least some of these suggestions, users will be able to build tiling extensions that mimic the workflows tiling users expect in a way that is consistent with Kwin and in a way that does not need brittle hacks.
Not all of this needs to be done by KDE or Kwin devs on their own, but if they can provide a good extensible base layer, I expect it will explode in popularity.
We already have a script named Polonium.
I agree. Calling it tiling is bit of a reach. it's like edging the user on tiling
Polonium is a great kwin extension that gets most of the way to ticking all Brodie's points in this vid.
Give it a go broadie it would be good to get your thoughts on the project.
A comment to boost your comment🗿
Yeah I was using it too but I was having weird issues with my keybindings for resizing windows.. it would keep turning my tiled windows into regular windows and I’d have to manually set the window to a tiled window again and then I try again to resize .. I messed with the kde settings and stuff but couldn’t get it to work smoothly. It definitely could be improved tho.
it's not good
I've never used this feature in plasma (barely even use plasma) and tbh I find it kinda funny arguing about if they should call it tiling or not. At the end of the day it doesn't matter how they call it. They don't say they're a tiling window manager, they just provide the option to create a tile based layout where you can drag windows to. I think most of the points you make in this video are great and could improve the current feature a lot (and make it actually useful) so arguing about how it's named should imo not be the headline of the video.
Maybe I should have focused on this more but the reason why I take issue with calling it tiling is tiling has a clear definition under Linux and I don't want tiling users to be disappointed by KDE because what they get is far from a tiling experience
I miss bismuth.
try polonium
@@tato-chip7612 i've been daily driving polonium for the best part of last year, and short of a few quirks.... i love it.
@@tato-chip7612 I have. It didn't work half the time, doesn't seem to support dragging windows around, and it doesn't have gaps.
@@Puzzlers100 Use plasma's tiling editor (Super+T to configure polonium's gaps)
@@tato-chip7612 It's simply not as good.
Thanks for making this! For whatever reason you seem to be the ONLY source on the Internet saying how to use this. Everyone else is talking about KDE3 tiling scripts for some reason, despite the recent release of KDE6
Next up - Yeeting Window Managers
The only comment that I have, is that it sounds like you would be the perfect person to implement exactly what you're talking about
Started using Linux with GNOME, switched over to KDE, and now happy at Hyprland!
And btw, I use Arch! 🙂
FancyZones does (kinda) have auto-tilling. There's an option you can enable to "Move recently created windows to the last known zone". You do need to first snap the window to a tile, but after the first time it will always open on that tile.
Nicco doesnt get a break 😂
Breaks are for gnome developers.
Brodie is trying to fight Nicco
Who is Nicco?
@@tristen_grantniccoavocado
The KDE dev that called Brodie out on the tiling vs auto tiling. I imagine it had a part in the creation of this video
@@tristen_grant nicoloveslinux. a kde dev thats also a youtuber
Came here to cause havoc in the comments by saying "well at least it's better than i3" but holly shit this is bad...
Ta for this. I couldn't quite work out how to place open windows, when I tried it last. 🙂
Do you think Cosmic will make a really good TW for those who want to use one but not have the hassle of configuring it?
That makes me so angry! Those non-tilers, faux-tilers even, stealing our word. That we probably stole from mathematics FIRST. You are fighting the good fight, it's not gate-keeping when you want to keep the annoying people out. Stay strong, you are making a real difference here.
While i disagree with your definition of "tiling", I do agree with the changes that you want, I used to use Bismuth back in Plasma 5, it doesn't work anymore as it went EOL and Polonium is nowhere close to be a replacement at the time being, i'll wait for an actual solution or for Polonium to mature enough.
For plasma to be useful as a tiler, it really needs the workspace per screen ability, can't say I'd switch from i3 if this were the case though. I used Plasma August to December last year after a distro switch, and was getting a full system freeze ups at least twice a week, sometimes every two days. I initially thought my 2017 built machine was in need of a service or parts replacement, but when I got around to rebuilding my i3 config and switched to that, my system became much more reliable.
That would also be great
The stability must be a distro issue. I use plasma as my daily driver and up until very recently was using a machine that was built in 2012 with zero issues.
@@zBrain0 It's almost certainly not a distro issue, it's likely a race condition and for whatever reason your configuration does cause the issue to occur
What's the use case for per-screen workspaces? I've yet to see a compelling argument for it.
@@Treviath let's say you're taking notes on one monitor and want to easily switch between multiple full screened research windows on another monitor, if you say just use the task switcher, what if they not full screened and you've multiple windows open on each virtual desktop instead
Man, Bismuth was working so well until it completely broke. I was hoping the built-in zone system would work in a similar way with native support. Oh well, sticking with Hyprland for now (which is great but not without issues).
I use arch btw
>I use arch btw-ACK!!
me too.
I also use rust btw
Me 2
me 3
Me 4
I was about to comment on the video to say you are a window manager die hard but then I actually watched the video unlike some people.
And I think you did a better job of explaining your view on kde "tiling" then your last video.
I watched Nicco love Linux video and he did bring up some points of what you messed up on with installing kde plasma
And I do agree with them and I am glad you made this video as far as the tiling
Anyways have a great day or night I do not know which 😃 God bless
remapped meta + T to spawn a terminal so I never seen that menu lol
but the more Brodie talks about tiling, the more I feel like I've been missing on tiling my whole life, I constantly push windows in halves or corners with meta + up,left,right,down
Give it a shot in a VM and see how you feel about it
I've already got my fair dose of tiling window management using years of Blender 3D. It's more hardcore distilled tiling experience than any tiling window managers provide: it does not even support floating panels to this day and everything is just extremely tiled whether you like it or not.
ever used emacs ;)
@@slalomsk8er397 I know how to exit emacs. Does that count?
@@xard64 only if you know, what a frame, window and a buffer is and how to manipulate them. It isn't vim and can be closed just by closing its frames just like any GUI application with the mouse ;)
I tried tiling a while ago but it wasn't for me, I'm not really a fan of how my web browser will get resized to half the screen when opening my file manager, and if you have more than three windows open then they become too small to be usable, so you have to make use of workspaces, I much prefer floating window managers that have smart window placement, or minimal overlapping as kde calls it.
same experience for me, only place where i am using tiling rather is tmux in terminal, otherwise i prefer everything do be in full screen
@@ky3ow You can configure hyprland to open windows in new full screen workspaces by default and then you can manually merge if desired.
whats wrong with workspace?
@@rizkyadiyanto7922 I just don't see the benefit, you have to move a new application to another workspace, which is not really any different from just minimizing a window you don't want to see to the panel, and then you don't know how many windows you have open on the other workspaces, where if you minimize to the panel then you can always see how many windows you have open just by looking at the panel, plus the workspace switcher takes up a decent amount of room on your panel, especially if you have 9 workspaces.
i typically always have my browser in its own workspace.
i also quick toggle maximise layout
One of the things that FancyZones does better than this system is windows across multiple zones. In KDE you can only drop a window on exactly one tile. In FancyZones you can drop a window on the edge or the corner between tiles to make the window 2 tiles wide/tall or 2x2 tiles big. This allows for you to create a 2x3 grid on one monitor and size the windows as needed. (Great for discord and a browser on a secondary monitor)
Also you can show/hide tiles by tapping right click (equivalent to holding shift in KDE) while holding left click on the menu bar of a to-be-resized window. This allows for advanced resizing with only one hand.
Have to say I agree with all of this. Save layouts, number the panels should be a no-brainer and I'm positive we still just seem the beginning of it and we will see improvements.
I've used a lot of TWMs in the past but now I'm just a Gnome user and I use Kitty as a replacement for tiling. Kitty is always fullscreen on my second workspace and I create splits and tabs as I need them instead of tiling windows on the compositor level.
I think another good reason why most people don't use tiling is because you need quite a big monitor for it to make sense, no? On my laptop more than two windows in splitscreen just wouldn't work very well, I think.
Also, another reason is that apps are just not made with tiling in mind. They have, for example dialog boxes that are extra windows which probably doesn't work too well without additonal user configuration on a tiling wm
I used it on a 13inch laptop just fine, but I guess that depends on your eye sight
@@BrodieRobertsondepends on your apps and workflow as well. I have different layout needs for each of my workspaces, which is for different purposes each. For Browser and VM workspace, they obviously should have full screen. For my file + search workspace, Dolphin should get the most of it, with FSearch being just enough to see the important columns. For my WPS Office + MasterPDF workspace, I just need them to be snapped, so that I can adjust it based on what the spreadsheet/document and PDF sizes.
KDE has been perfect for that, with the Window Rules. The tiling works well too, so I can define the zones and then use window rules so that the apps are started to the correct workspaces and area.
Autotiling in comparison is just a PITA for my workflow. Just give me something simple by default, based on my lifetime of Windows use, and then let me define what I want when I need to gdi.
mom: “we have tiling at home”
tiling at home:
I use Hyprland with Hy3 which makes it a manual tiler. Dynamic tiling is nice too, but I like having a bit more control since I use a 55" screen as main.
Any desktop that doesn't have proper tiling (so basically everything except maybe Cosmic?) is pretty much out for me as a daily driver. Same goes for per screen workspaces. If plasma properly implements both in the future, or if extensions do so, I'll gladly give it a long term try.
I have slightly different layouts depending on my workspace in Hyprland. Also different layouts per-monitor.
Hy3 the GOAT
I use (MS) Windows FancyZones, but resizing a pinned/tiled window does not change the configured tiling/zones. Also, with a hotkey while dragging a window, I can have a window span multiple zones/tiles without changing the configured zones/tiles. One small peeve I have is that the area to work with to split up is spanned across all monitors. It would be nice to have the option to manage each monitor separately and independently (without having to manually split between monitors)
I never understood what the big deal about tiling was and setting up a WM, always seemed to be huge pain in the ass. But when I switched to Pop!_OS, I gave tiling a try and now I use it almost all the time. I already have the pre-Alpha of the new COSMIC DE on my second notebook, and tiling there is even better/smoother.
This kind of "tiling" looks like something that could get me to start using it.
Maybe some day I'll go to actual tiling :)
KDE rocks.
Glad you found something you like
This is like calling source available open source, just use the proper term and we are all happy...
Thanks for pointing this out :)
I currently am a user of this Plasma feature. I use a 49 inch 5440x1440 super ultrawide monitor as a replacement for my old triple 1080p monitor setup. I personally call it “Psuedo-Tiling” I have a 2560x1440 space right in the middle and then have the empty 1280px spaces for stuff like Discord, Spotify, etc. My biggest complaint is that there’s no option to specify how many pixels you want each space to be. If KDE devs had an option to type in a specific number for horizontal and vertical it would be perfect IMO. I’m unsure if I would really enjoy using traditional tiling on a monitor like this. I would like more traditional tiling for a laptop though.
I use the tiling extension available for KDE Plasma (I'm actually a long-time GNOME user), I'm just waiting for COSMIC to release their desktop.
Back to awesome or hyprland? I use river btw. I want that tabbed feature from hyprland.
On your comments about the split floating window part, maybe if he just removes that option on the floating ones ppl don't have to question themselves about it and the issue with the unreachable buttons doesn't exists anymore. Just create another floating one and continue...
Using a random gnome extension called forge for the last days I realized that all those fancy configs are surperfluous for me, just a simple dynamic tiling with workspaces may be sufficient. This Forge extension is buggy tho, waiting for cosmic.
there should be ability to save layouts and also using different layouts for different virtual desktops
I agree with you it is a mess. Even though I don't use tiling it would still be nice to have it there. I tend to use one window per desktop and no more than 2 windows side by side on a desktop, so the simple snapping and split works fine for me.
I would love to see some algorithms and rule checkers for different arrangements. I am tiling enjoyer
I generally agree, as I favor precise language over letting language change. While plasma may let you define "tiles" with regard to screen space, in the context of window management I would not prefer to not call it tiling either.
As far as what I'm using, at the moment I'm using Cardboard but I also use Hyprland. Once Niri is in the stable repo on NixOS, I'll probably use that.
we need to wait for either microsoft or mac to implement tiling
Not gonna happen
Yeah, with AI to learn what program goes where. Linux people never seem to come up with things like that.
In his video, Nicco suggested you should use one of the Kwin tiling scripts if you want auto tiling (there is a Kwin scripts section in the KDE settings).
I think tiling window managers and tiling capabilities need not get mixed up. Sure, KDE is floating by default but it's not a reason these features need to be immediatelly dismissed as not tiling
3:34 Subtlewm has that. I mean, minus the bit where you can't control the obscured window.
i tried tiling before, i can see the potential, but i also want to have some floating, even if it is set on a program basis so if i say open a calculator everything does not jump around the screen, if i got used to it i'm sure it would be overall better though
Tiling wm's like Hyprland allow for configurations where a specific app will always open as floating, or full screen, or open automatically in a specific workspace, or any combination of the aforementioned.
I like that they attempted it and in some ways it can be useful, but it becomes an immediate annoyance when you realise you can't just completely disable it. No idea how they arrived at that decision. Being able to entirely toggle it between legacy behaviour (quadrants or half screen each) and the new 'tiling' layout, would be ideal.
Scrolling window managers are the GOAT tho
TRUE
Especially on laptops with touch gestures. I'm seriously considering switching to GNOME so I can use PaperWM. (Currently on Karousel)
My mom is a happy PaperWM user, which I think shows how intuitive scrolling WMs can be
as i remember there was a extension, called bismuth, when i tried plasma last time. Did'nt it work under wayland?
Bismuth broke with the API changes in 5.27 and the dev no longer uses KDE
@@BrodieRobertson ah ... ok ... did'nt know that ... real tiling user ;-)
Maybe that's what they are aiming for in the future? I would expect as much.
I like the fancy zone style placement on one or two workspaces and then just a generic tile split on others. I have two 32:9 stacked monitors so, to me, dynamic tiling ends up being a mess. Like, I don't want a 1440p kitty window. I started using wayfire as my daily driver because I can use the ipc scripts to cut my monitors into left, right, center, or in quarters and, of course, floating for things like vmm. I'm surprised how well wayfire works, gave it a try for independent monitor workspaces and haven't looked back. Tiling is great for my laptop but just doesn't translate well to larger screens for my workflow.
KDE Plasma allows you to place windows into tiles. It doesn’t tile them automatically, nor works like a classic manual window manager, so it’s not a tiling window manager. However, I don’t think we should be “fighting” over words. The KDE team could likely change the name of this feature, and you could likely not bug them about it and let it slide. It’s not like it causes any harm to call the fancy-zone-like feature as tiling, as it uses tiles anyway.
But I get your view, and as such, I propose a new terminology:
- Manual Tiling (i3 for example)
- Auto Tiling (DWM)
- Layout Tiling (plasma/fancy zones)
This way, both are tiling, and there’s no more confusion.
By the way, I like your content a lot, please keep making these awesome videos. I’m not criticising you, but I do want everyone to get along so we can actually improve things, together. :)
quick tiling with the arrow keys is meta + shift + arrow, not shift + arrow, shift arrow is splits not tiles
I use XFCE and use its pseudo-tiling quite a lot. For me, that's a better option than an actual tiling window manager.
In cases like this I just load up Terminator at full screen... Tiling! 😋
I think this just supposed to be an API that developers can use to build their own tiling scripts.
Since i started to use PaperWm a scrolling, auto-tiling windows manager for gnome, i cannot use normal auto tiling managers.
There's also a kwin script that gives similar functionaity to plasma and it's what I've been using since I transferred from gnome to plasma recently.
@@douchgekzk1943what is it called?
I'd be willed to give tiling a try if a) KDE would make it more like you said and/or b) if tiling WMs had actual easy to handle set up tools.
I recently moved my arch machine to i3 because I liked the concept but KDE just wasn't doing it, for all of the reasons you pointed out here. I decided on i3 because Wayland is slowly replacing x11, I can play with the old stuff and later transition to sway. Once I get the swing of things who knows I may try them all but probably not. Now that I have the resolution and wallpaper setup the way I wanted, I can barely be bothered to attempt transparency, theming etc. My laziness has a tendency to stifle my grand plans.
Judging by what I saw, odd tiling in Windows 11 works more conveniently in many of my usecases 😅
There is just way too much mousing and menuing involved here for me to consider it as an alternative to a real tiling wm. No matter what you want to call it. The real beauty of my dwm setup for me is that it basically entirely removes window management from my mental stack.
KDE is a tiling window manager because it manages windows in tiles.
Every windowing system approach is about tradeoffs. Tiling window managers take the approach of making the management of window layout highly efficient and generally keyboard driven by combining window movement/creation and tile management into a unified, albeit arcane, process.
Floating windowing managers take the approach of making the window layout process highly accessible to mouse-centric users with efficiency and keyboard shortcuts taking a backseat to more natural interactions, allowing the user to create the windows and then place them on screen in various ways with the mouse.
KDE seems to have fundamentally misunderstood literally everything about the entire concept of tiling by making two horrific mistakes:
1. Making the control of with tiling layout completely separated from process of window creation and positioning in the tiles, drastically increasing the amount of effort necessary to create and place windows. Not only is the "tiling" process slower than any real tiling system, it's slower than the floating window process!!!
2. They made the MOUSE the driving control device for the entire process! Talk to ANY tiling user at all and say "what do you think about making mouse interaction fundamentally central and necessary for window management" and you'll get at best jeering laughter and mockery, and at worst an expletive laden rant.
The ENTIRE POINT is making interactions with the windowing system fast, efficient, and removing the mouse from interactions where it's not necessary.
It truly seems that they took the worst parts of floating and tiling window management and somehow combined them into what can only be described as a Cronenberg-esque abomination screaming "KILL -9 ME!"
hey brodie! my 10,000 word tiling software design document is still sitting here on my PC... waiting to be completed. It's been sitting there for the last 6+ months now. Last 30% needs proof reading, cleaning up. And no diagrams however. Thing is... the main takeaways are ended up quite similar to what cosmic has already done. (More or less)
did you actually write an entire essay on tiling?
The holy tiling
Thanks for demonstrating the KDE jank. Fanboys pretend there is nothing wrong. That kinda attitude won't make Plasma go mainstream.
I wish UA-cam let you filter comments from people who didn't finish watching the video
I like the idea of tiling, but I've never gotten around to trying it. Outside of moving files around, I don't often find myself needing to see multiple windows at once, and in the few other cases where I do, I'd likely be better off with a second monitor instead. Then again, I don't have any kind of workflow, or even any real concept of the term's meaning.
I don't really care, because I use all apps fullscreen, like a tablet. I even use kde window rules to hide window decorations for maximized apps. 🙂
Even so, I agree that the plasma "tiling" manager is not very useful.
I'd love for Plasma to get proper auto tiling.
what do you think about awesome wm?
he used to use it back on x11
I'm new here, so do you remember why he changed to i3?
@@akak5128 He doesn't use i3, wdym?
@@RealShadowreaper I am literally using KDE Plasma in this video lol
@@BrodieRobertson hey can you do a video of how your setup is today, i mean customisation and everything for newbies. anyways love your channel, thanks for the great takes and videos.
I just use quick tiling with a left-right split. I rarely need more than 2 windows on a screen since I have 4 screens.
basically never, once a month maybe.
There's no tiling editor available
It would have helped if you as first thing had demonstrated what you think tiling should be or do.
While the current system has been useful for me, for snapping different windows to a programming layout, I do agree that it's too basic.
Reading the comments here, apparently it's meant as a base for proper tiling extensions, which will be interesting to explore once ready.
I'll be sticking to Plasma 6 and looking how it develops, while in some ways it's been a downgrade from 5, interesting times are ahead and I do like that.
I don't plan to hop DE but Polonium sounds interesting enough to play with and trying the concept, for which I'll wait for your opinions on it.
I guess it's like you're having to reconfigure a new tiler from scratch every time you open a "tiling" layout. Kinda eats the whole advantage of frontloading config time and then having your stuff just working...
Better work flow for you, not for me😉No tiling, no floating, but Xfce. I don't need tiling or work spaces with only Thunderbird and Firefox open.
have you tried polonium?
I vaugely remember brodie acknowledging Polonium's existence on his switching to KDE6 video, but saying he wouldn't use it because he wanted to judge Plasma itself.
Which is weird, because plasma's main attraction is extreme customization in the form of color schemes, panels, desktop effects, and *KWin scripts*
I never said I won't use it, I said I wanted to experience vanilla plasma first and then I'll look at polonium
@@BrodieRobertson you should definitely do a video on it lol. In my experience it just didn't tile anything properly most of the time. Acted much like your example of how windows randomly overlapped once you switched the layout from one 3 way split to another.
i actually really wanted to try a iling mamager, but as someone coming from KDE, I had no idea that there was more to it than say just typing "dnf install hyprland". So I got an empty screen with the default Hyprland backgrounds... and nothing else. The setup for a desktop like this is baffling to anyone that's just been using KDE or Gnome. I'd love to see something more like what KDE is going for here, but that acts more like what you would expect from an actual tiling window manager. Or for that matter, to have an install for Hyprland that kinda' acts like other desktop installs where you get a base config that gives you the tools to use the desktop and you cancustomize it from there.
You might like COSMIC when the alpha comes out but Vaxry is also working a desktop environment like experience with Hyprland as a base
@@BrodieRobertson I'll have to look into that, thanks for the heads up.
You also have the option of using an install script that does most of the setup for you to make it act like a desktop environment. There's a dude named JaKooLit on UA-cam that has done pretty cool Hyprland install scripts for a bunch of different distros. There are others that have done the same if you search around.
Another option may not be the popular choice here, but gnome has a few really good auto tiling plugins that actually work. There's PaperWM which turns your desktop into a side scrolling tiler. There's the ever popular pop shell (from the creators of cosmic) and then there's a newer entry that is my favorite of the bunch called Forge.
I personally just switched to Hyprland because I love how light and customizable it is, but if you want 95% of the experience. Gnome with an extension or two will absolutely do the trick.
It's not about configuring tiler. I have 1080p monitor. How am I supposed to split it, so it makes sense for anything productive?
Most people have one screen and not very large one. This is the secret, why people don't use TWMs.
Personally I think each DE should implement both, and user should be able to set it on per workspace,
cause there are group of apps that simply work shitty on TWMs for example Steam (with popup windows).
real tiling is also having your entire config in a couple of text files, I don't think KDE or GNOME will ever be able to do that.
I like the option of a gui config tool, if you want to you can modify the config files by hand
Hang on, thats not tiles
Thats windows powertoys panel management and fancyzones
Oh you mentioned, oops
Maybe you could use it for a cctv system. LOL!!!!
Is this feature in KDE "tiling? It's a good start. I can see how and why it isn't there yet for tiling users.
I use Polonium and it's nice. Only problem I have with it is that it crashes Kwin when a display goes into sleep mode. Otherwise it's really nice.
There's a few crashes that are stopping me from using it just yet
so plasma tiles windows but that's not tiling,
it's only tiling when it automatically tiles the windows but that's not auto-tiling
Is it safe to say KDE Plasma Tiling is for people who want Tiling but don't actually want Tiling?
I'm puzzled how you'd actually use automatic tiling? Do you somehow define that only certain apps tile or do you exclude certain apps? Otherwise you'd just have many very small rectangles for every open window. The thought that tiling (on Windows in my case) could actually be useful never crossed my mind before.
You use multiple virtual desktops
I guess I'm just old but I can't wrap my head around why tiling is so great? Honestly most of the time when I'm programming I need to have my code window full screen. I suppose it might be somewhat useful on my third monitor. I suppose I would have to try it to find out but in my head it just doesn't seem to make sense
Give COSMIC a try in a VM when the alpha comes out