Tomorrow's news: "50k Linux nerds across the world were found dead of alcohol poisoning. Security researchers say to expect major problems across the IT space, and three major waifu body pillow manufacturers have already announced layoffs due to a loss to their core customer base."
KDE plasma 6 is my dektop of choice and will be for a long time. If you are like me, who need BOTH non-blurry fractional scaling AND input methods to work out of the box (not sending any parameters to electron applications) under a wayland session, KDE plasma is the only choice. Gnome can't achieve both at the same time. There are too many electron based applications, and the move to wayland seems inevitable. This leaves users who need input methods in a hard place. KDE is the only safe haven for me.
I’m basically in the same boat when it comes to fractional scaling (I own a Framework Laptop 13). I don’t *have* to run Steam games at pixel perfect resolution, but I really would prefer them to not be blurry. Meanwhile Windows users don’t even have to *consider* needing to compromise with blurry games…
Could you elaborate how these problems manifest? I'm using fractional scaling (though only on Wayland apps, Xwayland ones don't use scaling) and fcitx5 for IME input and other non-IME languages from Hyprland. It did take some time to figure out how to setup it up initially, but so did Plasma.
@@BrodieRobertson You can configure edges and corners to do stuff when the mouse hits the edge without clicking. There's a default action to present all the windows when the mouse bumps the top left corner. That option highlights the "hot corner/edge" when the mouse approaches.
what I understand its currently kinda limited and mainly as it's legacy stuff and KDE team hasn't yet done a proper plasma 6 version (other than lazy port), I did read that they are ...someday...going to make a proper rewritten version for Plasma6. also it was really close that KDE was going to scrap the whole Activities thing for Plasma6, because the code was so bad and it never really work properly according to the devs
@@AlexanderAhjolinnaI don't see the reason why they don't remove it already and port the most important features of Activities to Overview already. I had the same experience as Brodie in the video and for me it looks like redundancy and CBA to learn it.
If we treat virtual workspaces as y-axis screens, I treat activities as z-axis screens with potential for changing battery status and screen timeouts etc
Its really a shame that KDE isnt the default desktop for more distros, if for no other reason than this. I feel like the majority of people are hesitant to change windows version if its mucks with the ui too much, and trying to push people to something like unity/gnome (or really anything that substantially different) just isnt an approach I think works for most people.
@@BrodieRobertson Cinnamon feels even more like a mismatch of header bar apps and traditional apps, even more so than KDE apps. And they still are around 2 years away from having proper Wayland support. On my desktop, I need Wayland support given the refresh rate differences on them being unusable on XOrg.
I do still have to use Windows a lot, mostly at work because everything is based on it and I develop mostly in the C# language. But at home I have become a total Linux user almost all the time, mostly Arch btw, but everything is set up dual boot because I know exactly how to do that. So I am also naturally more used to the Desktop Metaphor as they actually call it. For a long time I have been using Xfce, for it's unbelievable stability, simplicity and customizability, but I have really started to appreciate Plasma as it became much better on Wayland, and I really wanted to go for a Wayland desktop, so that made me eventually actually move to Plasma 6 now, and I plan to stay here. :) I keep exploring all kinds of other graphical environments and distributions too, but not as my main environment to work on. However, I can completely see that Plasma is subobtimal for tiling window manager oriented people though. So just go for what suits you. FOSS is about choice.
as a plasma user i can say that krunner is absolutely amazing. depending on what i'm doing it tends to shave off anywhere between 20 and 80 percent of the time i need to get started. directly open files, make simple calculations, search the internet, run shell commands without a terminal, i can go on forever. it's not necessary at all but it's a huge quality of life improvement and it's one of the things that makes plasma so great.
I like how KDE Plasma is standardised, but also customisable. I can get everything I need to do done without weird quirks or having to learn a bunch of keystrokes. It's stable, works out of the box compared to Gnome or others.
14:30 Thumbnail Aside I actually used it a few times, its one of the functionality I was missing from GNOME before. Its to monitor some window and have it in your sight without it blocking. The mouse will not interact with the thumbnail, plus its semi transparent. Especially useful if you have a tiler that always stretches windows to the corners. I can click through the Thumbnail to interact with the window behind it, and still watch what the thumbnail is doing.
Screen edges refer to the feature where you can bind some functionality to putting your mouse cursor in the corner of the screen. If you search screen edge in the settings menu to find it. You can see it in the video actually when you opened the mouse settings
Oh thats what it bloody is. Its not something I really wanted to do on my workstation, so I never found its true purpose either. Because it wasent a thing I was searching for.
I've been using Plasma for years. As someone with sight issues that Zoom feature is one of the main things that's made me stay. The only one that I've found that's comparable is the one found in Cinnamon. Though, unlike Cinnamon, on Plasma I also get HDR, 4k@120hz, good Wayland + Plasma support, and the ability to customise things how I want (or need, to help with disability). I don't foresee me moving anytime soon.
it may appear random but is your native tongue german? especially the "i don't foresee me" sounds very german to me. it's like you tried to use the verb foresee as a reflexibe "sich" verb. i'm not that good at german tho still struggling with b2 and may even fall back to b1+. just my two cents.
I ported the minimal desktop indicator to Plasma 6. Now if you want something a tad bit more smooth, I also created GINTI. Try it and see if it's up to your liking.
I daily drive plasma and it's almost always a smooth experience, outside of crashes that 99% of the time come from me running bleeding edge mesa or kernel. It's a really good experience for people who left windows for more customization reasons or lack of- looking at you win 11 taskbar.
15:10 fun thing about the zoom button: in earlier versions of Plasma 6, there was no upper bound for how far you could zoom in. I found this out the hard way when a cat sat on my keyboard for a while and I came back to see my monitor just showing a single solid color. When I moved the mouse, the color changed slightly. I thought something was broken, turns out my cat zoomed in by like 7 million percent or something and so I was seeing just one single pixel. And KDE apparently saves the current zoom value in the config when you restart it... I reported it as a bug and after some discussion it was decided that 100x is a reasonable upper limit.
Plasma was the first ever DE I've ever used when I switched over to linux for a while as a daily driver. And aside from the little bugs, I've enjoyed the DE so far. I personally like the KDE app ecosystem with a lot of customisation options such as changing actions in the top bar of an app and so much more is the only reason why I like Dolphin more than the new Windows 11 explorer. Only problem I had with Plasma 5 was that vsync was always forced even on full screen so i had to use a kwin script to fix it but now in Plasma 6.1, it is a built-in option. It personally is the desktop I want if I want to have an adwaita-free/gnome experience
Everytime i tried KDE i got so annoyed after just a few hours or days that i ditched it for something else. I liked the general idea, look and feel, so i gave it many tries over the years and checked different iterations. But to me it always just feelt extremely bloated and broken, as half of the features either didn't seem to work at all or i just didn't understand what they were _supposed_ to achieve. Long time ago i went with Cinnamon for quite a while but it always felt like a crotch for the lack of better alternatives. Now i'm on Hyprland and super happy - first time that it feels like having arrived and so far i never felt the desire to ditch or switch. Finally something that just does what it advertises to do and is neither ugly nor majorly broken nor bloated by default. Zero gaps, 1px border with focus color (i agree with you there) and mostly floating windows - the kind of mess i enjoy - and when i rly want/need tiling... it does that, too 😁
Dude, Thank you. KDE is my Comfort Desktop, as when I originally came over from windows Vista, it resembled what I was familiar with, and ive just stayed with it since. and these videos youve done about Plasma 6 have actually taught me things about Plasma. you have set things up in a way I didnt know I could. (making the taskbar Dodge windows is a good example) and ive made changes to the way I operate because of it.
Since I've started using KDE one year ago, I never bothered to learn what activities were. I started today, and there are "great". They help separate things we do on our desktop a bit like Workspaces do.
The system settings GUI makes me really jealous. But thats about it. I'm happy to see that other desktop environments "slowwwly" are catching up. (But they really could speed up a bit) Things like that are super important for bringing more people onto linux.
Re: Thumbnail Aside, when i was DM'ing from a laptop and a portable monitor, thumbnail aside was great to know what was on the screen that was actually pointed at the table instead of me.
Activities is like a poor man's workspace, you can use it to separate apps that you open (apps on other activities wont be visible on the screen and taskbar), set up a shortcut for each activity and boom, quick shortcut to "homework", default or any activity. You can also set different wallpaper and pinned apps on taskbar for each activity. I use it as quick shortcut to a bunch of apps accordingly. Note that it is VERY BUGGY when you try to show the apps in taskbar on specific activities only, you have to sometime unshow it. Also KDE is customizable, but as soon as you go outside the default settings and plugins, its a landmine
The idea dated back to KDE 4, primarily for Netbooks, where the screen was small and you would have completely different layout, including panels and widgets, for "work" and "play". Netbooks didn't work, and Activities never finds its place in a more traditional PC desktop.
Since all monitors now are wider than they are tall, I like my panel on the left, vertically. IMHO better use of screen real estate. Any UI that doesn't let me do that makes me angry. (Looking at you, Win 11!)
I am a KDE user since KDE 1.1.0 when I started with Linux back in '98 and continue to use it as my daily driver for desktops. I can appreciate that you (Brodie) have a very specific configuration for your day-to-day. Heck one of my roommates in the past had a very similar workflow where they used more terminals than GUI apps, but to each their own :)
One sin I simply can't forgive is not having the ability to copy/clone/duplicate panels. If I want to have identical panels with the same settings on all three screens (yes, it's a Windowsism, fight me), I have to manually recreate and configure every single widget. I've tried using the Javascript API, but it broke the notification bar.
The missing feature of keyboard shortcuts for the tyling setup is one of the sorest points for me as well. Activities: these are not for everyone, and that's fine - but I use these all the time and when I have to use a desktop with no activities (i.e. anything other than Plasma) I get really annoyed really quickly. Unfortunately - a lot of KDE devs don't use activities either and there're some missing integration points and every so often someone goes "nobody uses activities, let's get rid of that" and we have to have that fight all over again😢
Dolphin is like the best KDE app if I had to choose. And also, I don’t have window management issues since I only have one ultra wide monitor, 1080p is something I had in 2004. But if I wanted to tile terminals, Konsole already has it built in
I've been using kde since its golden yrs from the 3.5 series back in 2003 and I moved through mostly all interfaces along the years and I always end up coming back to kde, I do share the some thoughs you have and I totally get it, I have xfce as my second desktop but kde let me tweak each pixel of my screen just exactly as I want in case I need. Thanks for the review.
If you had been using Plasma 5 with latte, you would have more panel-dock options. Auto-hide was way better there, also it had plenty of notification settings and so on. Basically, latte was changing so much, that you were experiencing more like Latte DE, not a Plasma DE, which is... primitive compared to what latte offered. That is so sad that latte is abandoned and not working on Plasma 6. Some people trying to resurrect it, but how it goes, you never know.
Did you try KDE connect? I liked it (before I was forced back to windows). It's got this awesome integrations for music (and videos or anything with playback controls) that is just "magic".
@@leaderbot_x400 Wow. The fact that KDE is straight-up making cross-platform stuff now is wild. They really have branched out. It kind of reminds me of when Google first started making desktop apps, for some reason. ...I wonder if it would work as a replacement for Warpinator/Winpinator for getting files between my Linux and Windows PCs.
Colored border You don't need anything to install to get colored border for active window. There is a setting in Plasma (config file only) that allows to configure this. I did that for use with Krohnkite. Nothing to compile or install, its stock Plasma feature.
Ooh, long-time Xfce user. That Window Rules thingy is awesome. I just have scripts I do with that. Email on 2nd monitor, Remmina and Teamviewer in the upper right corner next to each other. I have another set for Jack, pavucontrol when I'm going to do music. I also wrote a minimal tiling tool with hotkeys for the four quadrents, centered on main, swapping monitors, maximize/unmaximize. Frankly your KDE desktop isn't much different from my Xfce desktop. Never used KDE, but it finally looks almost stable enough that I'd consider giving it a try. Maybe someday I'll get a spare computer to install Kubuntu on.
@@cameronbosch1213 Sorry, but that's two levels of derivation down from where I'm comfortable. Ubuntu is derived from Debian, but is one of the biggest distros and I've been running that for 10 of the last 12 years. Debian was the other two years.
11:40 one thing config file are better compared to gui configuration, is that it's extremely easy to backup that configuration. In kde it's crazy complex to backup what you want, unless you backup the entire .config folder, but that's just crazy to me. That makes it way easier to clean install. IE: when i install hyprland, i have a script which takes the config files and put them back in place. In kde i always end up just losing 15 minutes going through the setting to change everything i need
@excidium_ i do have written a bash script which read from a file a list of files or directories which i want to backup, and if i run it with certain flags, i can make copy of them, and then save them with git, and store them on github I tried stow but it was missing features i wanted, and at the end writing my own script means i know 100% how it works, and it doesn't do any weird stuff. Also: it completely avoids any symlink, which is something i reeeeeeally hated.
Plasma has been my DE ever since plasma 6 came out (I was using gnome before that), actually functional fractional scaling was the big factor for me considering I use a laptop. Aside from that there's not much difference between how I used gnome and kde, I'd be fine on any DE as long as it had a good search function, allowed me to change the icon theme and set accent colours. I tend to mix and match QT and gtk applications using flatpaks (eg- I prefer foliate over arianna), kde applications are fine, kdeconnect especially is very useful but except that one application I could interchange them with anything else and be just fine.
I've been on Plasma for a number of years -just love it. Some configurations I never use, some I set up a while ago and never touched again, mainly because I'm happy with the way things look and feel. At work I have to use XFCE, and I've played around with GNOME now and then. I've also used OpenBox. None of these are as comfortable for me to use as Plasma
I find it funny how you and I found different answers to the age old question: "Why would I put an entire panel on each monitor, if all I want is the clock?" Yea... I actually did put panels there, but I made them with different properties... My main one was just a typical panel... but for the ones where I just wanted a clock, I made them shorter but thicker, made the panel "fit to content", and I just had the clock and a start menu, all together which I set to dodge windows. It essentially achieves the same thing... but I've always had a bad taste from setting widgets directly on the desktop, and I like this solution.
My last holdout on switching to linux was HDR support. Since KDE Plasma was the first to have that easily available I've been using that ever since, & it's been pretty great imo. Had some major issues at first, but when I switched HDR was still only available with EVERYTHING updated to the unstable versions. As HDR support moved it's way into stable I moved right along with it & the issues I had went away. Coming from windows using 3rd party tools like DisplayFusion & Fences I have no real complaints anymore & having these kind of tools built right in is already a HUGE upgrade. There are definitely things that could be done better, but I've been able to do everything I need without issues & haven't felt the need to try anything else yet.🤷♂
I have been using plasma with opensuse tumbleweed for a while now, never had any problems, the default plasma design looks good for me and all the features work with no problem
Been using KDE since 3.x days and don't see myself using anything else. Arch does packaging right. I have installed only the packages I require and have a very minimal yet fully functional DE.
Screen edge is for when your panel is hidden. I turned it off so that it doesn't have a blue glow when my cursor is next to the edge where my panel is.
You can make a particular window spawn into the tile with window rules. You just need to click detect in the window rule screen. Also i have shorctus that let me tile it Also there are hotkeys that allow you to snap it into any of the four corners. I habent found one for resizing with keyboard tho The point of krunner is to search for files and google stuff from the desktop. Its for us noobs that cant script it lol Activities allow you to have different workspaces, wallpaper, panel and widgets. I use one activity for work/school stuff and another for media, gaming, etc. Can quickly switch between them with a keyboard shortcut or a hot corner. Very useful
14:50 "screen edge" works when you are using front corners. Hot corners is a featuer that lets you bind actions to corners of the screen. When you approach the corner with the mouse it performs the action. The screen edge makes them highited when you approach. I use those all the time, bottom right for activating desktop grid / overview with all of my virtual desktops and bottom left for overview of windows on current desktop. (Tho that said, I find that desktop grid unfortunately changed a lot for the worse on plasma 6 since Kubuntu 22.04 which I'm using right now. There's now weird stutter when you activate it with a hot corner, windows in the desktops are smaller and rendered much more poorly, so it's much harder to see and manipulate them and there are now very few optoins for costumization)
Multi monitor behavior in Karousel is pretty bad, but I see how it could be great for a single monitor set up. It's really horrible with dual or more, though. All your windows are always together one monitor m, but jumps from monitor to monitor when you move the mouse, unless you exclude them entirely from tiling, then what's the point? I have no systems with a single monitor, so it is just not usable for me. I installed it after a week or two.
Yeah I think scrolling window managers are really probably the future as being somewhat of a middle ground between tiling and maximization. That said, PaperWM for GNOME is a much better implementation than Karousel (imo), though I refuse to use GNOME myself. Niri is probably the best, but it's a whole separate wayland window manager and has its own growing pains relating to that. I've been using Hyprscroller on Hyprland for my own workflow and that's worked best for me. Traditional tiling window management is just kinda problematic with how it splits the window into endlessly smaller pieces such that the pieces quickly become unusably small. I think generally vertical splits don't make sense for most people on a horizontal screen because of how limited vertical space already is. I could also see scrolling window management being a solution to the floating vs tiling paradigm if they just allow windows which need individual floating windows to spawn windows within its own large horizontal tile.
While watching this video I had an idea for how to fix the virtual desktops (maybe) If a plugin would set "On all desktops" for every window not on the monitor the cursor is on, and switch it off for the monitor where the cursor is, you should be able to switch desktops independently for each monitor and have windows stay on the other monitors It wouldn't let you arbitrarily map virtual desktops to monitors, but I could see it coming in handy. I used to use Sway and Wayfire, and do miss using my virtual desktops when I have an external display connected to my laptop (which is quite often)
I'm using plasma 6 on my tablet, the tablet mode is great and things like autorotate function properly ootb, unlike in gnome; it's also less laggy. The only issue is that there's no onscreen working properly under wayland (Maliit is not a functional keyboard at all) while in X11 the tablet mode is a disaster. I guess the better ground to assess non-tiling environments is in touch screen form, rather than making them tiling by force.
17:52 I was looking at them earlier because I'd really like something like multiple desktops where I can have different wallpapers... Activities are kind weird. You create an activity on that screen (only need a name). The shortcuts for switching them are unbound by default, so you bind them, then switch to it, and then you have to set up all your customisations from scratch. :/ Each activity has its own desktop setup, so you can have different panel layouts, wallpapers, and desktop icon layouts and sizes. I suppose also different window tiling. It's just really annoying to set up since you can't create one from an existing setup.
Regarding sticking and unsticking windows on secondary monitors. There is a kwin script for that called "Virtual Desktop Only on Primary Display" that does the job for me. However you must set up the primary display yourself.
I've used "touchpad" setting to setup "natural scrolling" - it inverts scrolling if it's done from touchpad. So good. I've had problems on plasma 6 after some upgrade where power settings no longer detected that firefox's youtube is running full screen and turned off the screen. I even had a python script at one point which checked dbus every 15 seconds and if found firefox playing, it would disable screen dimming and enabled it if firefox was not found. Honestly editing config text file was easy, making KDE to reread it was something I spent several hours on - there were several solutions found on internet and they didn't work.
The way the virtual workspaces is super annoying to me too. I like to use it the way you described. That is how it works on Mac (I have to use it at work) and that is how I am used to it. The way it works in KDE is how it works in Windows. It's dumb. Why does it change everything on every window? I never understood how that could be more useful that individual window workspaces.
So what are you switching too now? I have been using KDE Plasma ever since switching to linux and have had very little issues with it. Really like it actually. Tried Hyprland and although its nice, I always find myself logging out and back into Plasma-Wayland. Trying KDE Fedora40 on my laptop and so far liking it. Miss the AUR though. Gonna be hard switching to anything w/o the aur now.
You mentioned not using the game controller panel; I wouldn't either if I had an alternative. My Kubuntu setup is still on Plasma 5, so maybe they finally improved it, but last time I checked, it was still laid out like the one in Windows 10, which in turn is still laid out like the one in Windows 98, i.e. designed for big fat joysticks with a hat. Right stick is relegated to a pair of sliders instead of a second crosshair. Oh, and the crosshair is exactly the right color to be almost completely invisible against Breeze Dark. 🤦♂ And in Cinnamon, there just isn't one at all. I have no idea what GNOME offers.
COSMIC Epoch has earned its spot as my Wayland DE of choice for the foreseeable. I'm 48 hours in on running it on Arch, and it's way more functional and stable than I was expecting for an alpha release, with better multi-monitor support than I have *ever* had on Linux. Feels like they learned a lot from Plasma 6 in terms of what _not_ to do in terms of keeping things flexible for multiple workflows while not burying the user in layer upon layer of confusing config. I haven't tiled on my workstation since Windows 3.1, and so far I love COSMIC's flexible hybrid approach (complete with a dock applet that lets you swap settings and reminds you of the keyboard shortcuts). Pantheon will always be my bae, and Wayland-first elementary 8 should be out in the next few weeks, but I gotta be honest-if they don't adopt the COSMIC tiler, I'm not sure I'll be switching back. That said: it's pretty funny how bad some mainstream software (GIMP, JetBrains) still is on Wayland.
cosmic epoch is just the name of the repo cause there's a cosmic repo for the gnome soft fork cosmic desktop is the name of the thing you're talking about
Screen Edge highlight hot corners/edges when the mouse is nearby. I used to put thumbnails of terminal windows running compilers aside, to keep an eye on when they stop, but now I use desktop notification for this instead.
Plasma has been my DE of choice for years. While I like GNOME I find Plasma to be better. As for tiling window managers, I just don't get the obsession with them. Yeah, they work, but they seem far less intuitive than a DE to me.
I tried Hyprland, and didn't like the auto tiling workflow; it just wasn't for me. I guess I just prefer floating window managers. KDE Plasma is probably the best in that regard imo.
Gnome has an option to have the second monitor be one workspace and only have the main monitor have workspaces, and I believe there's a KWIN script to do the same thing, idk if it's been updated or works with plasma 6 though.
From what little I know about Activities, I'm pretty sure it's like adding a 3rd dimension to workspaces. Like, you can go up, down, left and right in the workspace grid, but with activities you can go to the back and to the front as well.
It is something like that. It also saves some settings which are specific to some activity, e.g. folder shortcuts in file open/save dialogs, power managment settings, which windows are open ... It is very useful to separate different computer usage environmnets better. For example work, home, presentations mode, gaming mode...
0:24 I agree, except on touch screen devices like tablets and 2 in 1s (because on those, I do use touch gestures). It kind of makes it more dock like, which is important since Latte Dock still hasn't been replaced or brought back for Plasma 6 and I couldn't find any other good Wayland options. Apart from that, I agree that I don't really like floating panels on traditional laptops and desktops. It feels like too much wasted space. Thank goodness we can choose on Plasma!
I run Plasma on both my laptop and my primary desktop VM. I'm looking at some other options but have yet to find something I like more. On my desktop I do think I'd benefit from some better tiling, but my laptop's screen isn't worth bothering, side by side is plenty. While watching this I setup a VM for Endeavour with Budgie, we'll see if I like that more than the Ubuntu version, which was prettier by default but has the Canonical handicap. lol These days I'm playing around with a lot of stuff in vm, it's a no commitment way to check out alternatives and learn the differences.
The screen edge effect shows a highlight when the mouse cursor nears an edge where a panel is auto-hidden, as an example. Or hot corners. It’s a notification that something will be revealed or activated. I ended up disabling it. Kept appearing when I was messing with my browser tabs, because my main panel is on top. The distance that triggers it is much too large.
14:29 Never looked into Thumbnail Aside before this video, but now I use it for Picture in Picture for UA-cam videos in my browser. Yes, I know PNP is a built-in feature in most browsers (including mine), but some fullscreen apps actually draw over the browser's PNP window, so this being rendered as an overlay rather than a window with pointer interactions is actually super useful.
Actually the panel does hide when you fullscreen an app, even on "Always visible". There is a difference between fullscreening and maximising. I have fullscreening set to Ctrl+Alt+F because that's what it is on cinnamon, I'm not sure how to fullscreen without a keyboard shortcut. By default I don't think there is a shortcut set.
For me this works correctly on Plasma here. I have the panel configured to always be visible, but still when I press F11 in firefox or when I run a game full screen (or at least the one that I tried now, supertux), it does work well and actually takes the full screen, panel is behind it. Oh and this video of course, by pressing F. This is all on Wayland however, I haven't fully checked it on Xorg yet. I know from other desktops that it does not always work so nicely, for example on Xfce I never got this right. So KDE gets very much my appreciation here.
Gnome is by far my preference, once its configured and my extensions are installed and setup. The charme of Plasma is, its just working out of the box. Its the most comprehensive DE out there. And it has good desktop scaling. There is a reason why its running the Steam OS...
I only use KDE Plasma these days, have tried GNOME AND all the other desktops at some point. They all have their shortcomings and I feel KDE has LESS of those. However when it comes to Wayland... well I still have outlier issues before I make the switch. Atm use a 4090. PS. Not into tiling because of the odd shapes and sizes I use for my apps at times but I can definitely see it being useful for productivity purposes in the future (editing/dev etc).
Not a dev here: Tiling is a productivity boost for everyone, not just devs or video editors. The tiling itself is not the most important aspect about tilers. It's the fact that by sending windows to specific workspaces that correllate to (typically) someModifierCombination + 0-9 keys on your keyboard transforms the ol "alt tab - hunt a window in a list of 20 windows" from a workflow of: press alt tab, let eyes look at information, brain process information, decide how many times to alt tab, and then let go. into: I know firefox is on workspace 3, because I sent it there. I press someModifier+3, and I'm there. It reduces the friction between your brain and the computer. From there you can set up rules on which workspace windows with a certain windowClass/Title should spawn etc. I will always have have terminals/editors on 1, firefox on 3, games on 4, and discord/teamspeak/signal on 9, spotify on 10. Most of the time, you stop hunting for windows and fighting the desktop environment. You can use that workflow entirely independent of forcing windows to tile. Any windowmanager worth its mettle will let you configure tiling on a per workspace basis, and even entirely turn it off.
I've been using the Git version of Plasma 6 on openSUSE Tumbleweed since the beta days. Currently, the Wayland experience with my Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti is really good now (mainly thanks to 560.31.02 driver release), though not perfect. There are still some (Wayland) features that would be nice to see merged into Plasma 6.2 whenever it's released.
@@AlexanderAhjolinna NVIDIA needs to get VRR working correctly still. AND it be nice if x11 apps like Barrier and all of its off-shoots could work under Wayland which has no function for those kinds of apps (no api). There are also issues with many of the desktop sharing apps. On top of that Wayland still hasn't got a global shortcut system. (this is due to security concerns, thus it should be app specific imo)
Brodie -- I got a couple questions for ya, sir. * Where did you get that cool wallpaper with the sunken castle? * Since you come from a tiling background, can you advise why my quarry tile in the kitchen always cracks in high traffic areas and how to prevent that?
You don't like the floating bar, but I like it. As someone who just switched over from Windows, it's so refreshing that neither of us need to compromise on small things like that :)
Right now, there's something wrong with Panel Auto-Hide. It's very eager to close, especially when doing something like dragging a window icon, and sometimes you have to tickle the edge to get it to raise. I keep waiting for this to be fixed; I've seen it on two different computers.
Im using KDE plasma 6 as i switched to Linux, because it is familiar to Windows. Everything works as expected without any problems. Im using it with an Nvidia Card and the Dynamic Kernel Modules, because i have an 3080 Ti so its supported and it works like a charm. The Desktop is smooth, animations play smooth, Gaming works great. I will continue to use it.
I'm currently dealing with a bug where I get horrible graphical artifacts if I don't enable a color profile for KDE no idea why but its very annoying other than that KDE 6.1 is super solid
3:52 It took me a hot second to find it, since I personally don't use tiling, but you can configure them by pressing Meta+T (default shortcut) Edit: Hold shift when dragging a window and it will let you snap it to a tile position.
Finally the best and sanest review of plasma desktop hahaha, I've been using this desktop since 2014 because it's much easier to setup the shortcuts, and for the matter of fact until this day, I still not freaking idea how that activities work.
SHOUTOUT TO AUSSIES OR JUST BRODIE FOR HAVING A SANE, LOGICAL DATE FORMAT AS DAY, MONTH, YEAR LIKE WE DO HERE THANK YOU PS: I use Krunner. It's fantastic for me, I type half a word and it selects or pre selects the last thing I opened with that name (for the most part). I can open things quickly without navigating through the launcher, which I have on the panel, just because I can put a Lion icon on it. That said, you don't have to feel sorry for not using it. If you use an alternative that you can set up cross platforms (or environments)... by all means go ahead with that. I know I'm not going to use anything else than KDE, but if you are one to try out different layouts or DEs or review them... having one solution that can work on all without much issue is SUCH a killer feature. I wouldn't blame you one bit.
I personally prefer the all window swapping, over individual ones. As for sticky I do use window rules which make most things I want sticky sticky and on a specific spot. However, I wish there was a way to do it with kwrite with a certain file open, or firefox with a certain tab open, sadly I know of none. Meanwhile, I kill animations in general. Activities, yea don't even know if they work.
I recently started using Plasma again after a month and a half with Hyprland. Overall I really like Plasma and have from the moment I started using Linux earlier this year. I took the things I liked from Hyprland like keybinds and use them on Plasma now. The biggest thing I wish Plasma had is the workspaces tied to each monitor. I don't know why they haven't put this in, or refuse to, but if someone knows why I'd love to hear it. While I love Hyprland, I like Plasma a bit more. I need to start using Cosmic a bit more now it is "out", it might be the middle ground I want.
I have used KDE for 15 years, and I don't touch krunner either, but I use desktop icons. Not having dolphin though, I'm amused. My main complaint - I do wish they would take the stick out though and allow editing files as root. Something good though, hit F4 and you get the console under it, which is how I deal with root actions generally.
> allow editing files as root. It's still that way. wowie. I never find myself launchin a gui fm with elevated privileges nowadays, but back when I tried linux the first time, that was what made me switch away from kde. I was still too scared of getting stuff done on the terminal.
Wait just a moment, you're saying you don't have keyboard shortcuts for tiling, yet there is a setting for that, I use it to move the windows around: (settings->shortcuts->kwin: quick tile window to xxxxx), you can use window rules to make a program that opens, move to a particular area by remembering the window position, but ya, there's no property for a particular tile yet, nor are they indexed. I wonder if I could whip up a kwin script for that.
@@BrodieRobertson Oh .. oh.. I had my tiles setup in a rather default way, and never noticed that. You're right. Why in the world would they call it "Move window to tile" in the settings, when it doesn't even respect the tile layout? grrr I did find a kwin script called "Shortcuts for KDE's built-in tiling feature" by de-ander-dog that looks rather promising. Haven't tried it just yet, but figure I'd check the options before I go re-creating the wheel. just as an aside, in case you're wondering why I don't just use Khrohnkite. I did give it a try, but ran into a lot of margin and decoration inconsistencies. I think due to my zoom being at 200%
The fact you can't make a window rule for tiles is a crying shame. Yeah I can have my windows open up where they would end up in the tiles, but they aren't in the tiles, so if I resize the tile layout that window is just ignored completely. Regardless, the kwin tiling is pretty close to what I want from tiling, even if it is rough around the edges.
Plasma "tiling" is a step in the right direction, but it falls short of useful for me. It's like it climbs 99% of the way up a mountain and then steps off a cliff. Trying to mix and match floating behaviors and the tiling is a mess, especially with any screen edges active. I'd rather completely disable Plasma native tiling (or override it with a script.) But, there's a lot about KDE Plasma that I like that isn't related to window placement and handling. I just wish I had the time to get involved with the project myself to contribute to Kwin.
Thumbnail aside might allow you to have a picture in picture for an application that doesn't have the feature. it might come in handy, but probably should be an extension that nobody uses instead of baked into KDE plasma
I've used KDE and the first thing I always did, after checking for updates, was disabling the animations. I hate them. And install Fluent dark theme and Papirus icon theme. I don't use tiling. Like you I don't like the floating panel. I don't use KDE anymore, I went back to Xfce. And I don't use Arch, BTW.
I dont like the "Breeze" Window buttons. Its just as cutomisable as usual, And not really as buggy as people make it out to be. Yeah, Some of those "Desktop Effects" are weird, Like the Thumbnail aside one, and the Screen Edge one does not appear for me either. I just think those are silly, and I turn a lot of them off. The Zooming, and other stuff is very useful indeed.
The more I hear your issues with plasma the more I realize just how much I like plasma for the reason it doesn't work for some people. I like plasma, I like the workflow it has, and I prefer floating. I dislike gnome because it's menu UI looks cool, but isn't for me. I like customizing things, and plasma lets me customize things until it breaks. It's great. as for tiling... Never enjoyed it, didn't give it much of a shot either, mostly because I'm used to sorting through dozens of floating windows at once.
Yup I love KDE Plasma. it is the best desktop environment in existence and it would do a lot of good for encouraging people to switch from Windows to GNU/Linux if it was the default presented to them when they hear about GNU/Linux. Despite this yeah I agree with you that more of that goodies from tiling windows managers would be nice to have. Also what I miss a lot that they did have was tabbed windows, like in BeOS. The combination of more tilling goodies and tabbed windows would be quite awesome for me.
on the window snapping thing, you shouldn't have to use your mouse. Holding the Windows key and hitting arrow keys should snap the active window in that direction. Or at least that's how it worked in Plasma 5. Haven't used Plasma 6 but I can't imagine that was something likely to change. But anyway, Win+Left or Right should snap the window on half the screen in that direction. Win+Up should maximize, Win+Down should un-snap. I might be mixing it up with Windows a little bit, but from memory it works basically the same way. Or a bit later it looks like you're doing that and before you were talking about a different system that seems to do the same thing, only purely mouse-driven? That seems kinda dumb and useless tbh.
So its close to perfect, just need per screen desktops. I admit I want that one too, tho I just hack and put the windows on every desktop if I want to switch have that on all, its a different workflow, but you would be more effective, and it doesn't seem like there should be so much work as people put it out to be if its implementet by just hack the share stuff - atleast on wayland, and I think that can even be scripted. And for you, a better tiling mod (seems like there is being put work into this).
When I installed it over Mint Linux, after about a half a month, the software updater installed something causing KDE to startup in an all black screen with a cursor. I went back to a basic Mint setup afterward. In general, my switch to Linux had been a series of botch jobs.
Yeah support for KDE Plasma and KDE apps in general is very bad in Mint and also in PopOS. This is the main reason I do not recommend these to new GNU/Linux users. I want them to have freedom and an easy as possible job to switch to other desktops like KDE Plasma so they can easily try them out.
Take a shot everytime Brodie says "From a tiling background"
Are you trying to kill people?
And now I'm drunk, 2 minutes into the video.....
Tomorrow's news: "50k Linux nerds across the world were found dead of alcohol poisoning. Security researchers say to expect major problems across the IT space, and three major waifu body pillow manufacturers have already announced layoffs due to a loss to their core customer base."
do you want me to get liver failure?
@@GSBarlev Don't forget the dropping view numbers on Brodies channel.
KDE plasma 6 is my dektop of choice and will be for a long time. If you are like me, who need BOTH non-blurry fractional scaling AND input methods to work out of the box (not sending any parameters to electron applications) under a wayland session, KDE plasma is the only choice. Gnome can't achieve both at the same time. There are too many electron based applications, and the move to wayland seems inevitable. This leaves users who need input methods in a hard place. KDE is the only safe haven for me.
I’m basically in the same boat when it comes to fractional scaling (I own a Framework Laptop 13). I don’t *have* to run Steam games at pixel perfect resolution, but I really would prefer them to not be blurry.
Meanwhile Windows users don’t even have to *consider* needing to compromise with blurry games…
I never encountered input issues on gnome with electron apps (obviously i use wayland), could you explain what are they about?
Could you elaborate how these problems manifest? I'm using fractional scaling (though only on Wayland apps, Xwayland ones don't use scaling) and fcitx5 for IME input and other non-IME languages from Hyprland. It did take some time to figure out how to setup it up initially, but so did Plasma.
@@Adiee5PrivNon asic input aka Chinese, Korean, Japanese, RTL Arabic, Hebrew, …
14:18 I use the effect "Wobbly Windows" - just because I like those silly animations that serve no practical purpose.
It makes me giggle every time. Love it
I dont think its silly personally it makes it look way better
it adds latency to my workflow or general use, so I don't like it. I'm the type of person who speeds up animation but doesn't entirely turn it off.
Only thing I dislike about it is that it disables blur during the animation.
The eye candy is worth it though.
All hail the CUBE!
15:00 You never configured a screen edge nor hot corner - the effect is a hint for nearing any configured instance of these two.
I assumed that the thing that highlights the screen edge, highlights the screen edge, I didn't realize there was a feature called a screen edge
@@BrodieRobertson You can configure edges and corners to do stuff when the mouse hits the edge without clicking. There's a default action to present all the windows when the mouse bumps the top left corner. That option highlights the "hot corner/edge" when the mouse approaches.
@@BrodieRobertson Yeah, I didnt know what the purpose of it was either. So I just thought it was something silly, and just turned it off.
Terrible name for a feature
Activities are like different profiles, work, personal, gaming, development., you can have different themes, programs open, window positions, etc
what I understand its currently kinda limited and mainly as it's legacy stuff and KDE team hasn't yet done a proper plasma 6 version (other than lazy port), I did read that they are ...someday...going to make a proper rewritten version for Plasma6.
also it was really close that KDE was going to scrap the whole Activities thing for Plasma6, because the code was so bad and it never really work properly according to the devs
Yeah another part of KDE Plasma that I absolutely love to use and would like to see developers support and expand a lot more.
@@AlexanderAhjolinnaI don't see the reason why they don't remove it already and port the most important features of Activities to Overview already.
I had the same experience as Brodie in the video and for me it looks like redundancy and CBA to learn it.
If we treat virtual workspaces as y-axis screens, I treat activities as z-axis screens with potential for changing battery status and screen timeouts etc
Probably a dumb reason but i use kde because its basically the windows gui. Made my transition from actual windows to linux a lot smoother
Completely sensible reason if you ask me, it's why a lot of people opt for cinnamon
Its really a shame that KDE isnt the default desktop for more distros, if for no other reason than this. I feel like the majority of people are hesitant to change windows version if its mucks with the ui too much, and trying to push people to something like unity/gnome (or really anything that substantially different) just isnt an approach I think works for most people.
@@BrodieRobertson Cinnamon feels even more like a mismatch of header bar apps and traditional apps, even more so than KDE apps. And they still are around 2 years away from having proper Wayland support. On my desktop, I need Wayland support given the refresh rate differences on them being unusable on XOrg.
I do still have to use Windows a lot, mostly at work because everything is based on it and I develop mostly in the C# language.
But at home I have become a total Linux user almost all the time, mostly Arch btw, but everything is set up dual boot because I know exactly how to do that.
So I am also naturally more used to the Desktop Metaphor as they actually call it.
For a long time I have been using Xfce, for it's unbelievable stability, simplicity and customizability, but I have really started to appreciate Plasma as it became much better on Wayland, and I really wanted to go for a Wayland desktop, so that made me eventually actually move to Plasma 6 now, and I plan to stay here. :)
I keep exploring all kinds of other graphical environments and distributions too, but not as my main environment to work on.
However, I can completely see that Plasma is subobtimal for tiling window manager oriented people though.
So just go for what suits you. FOSS is about choice.
KDE feels more windows than windows 11
as a plasma user i can say that krunner is absolutely amazing. depending on what i'm doing it tends to shave off anywhere between 20 and 80 percent of the time i need to get started. directly open files, make simple calculations, search the internet, run shell commands without a terminal, i can go on forever. it's not necessary at all but it's a huge quality of life improvement and it's one of the things that makes plasma so great.
(Also go to browser tabs if you install the extension.)
I like how KDE Plasma is standardised, but also customisable. I can get everything I need to do done without weird quirks or having to learn a bunch of keystrokes. It's stable, works out of the box compared to Gnome or others.
14:30 Thumbnail Aside
I actually used it a few times, its one of the functionality I was missing from GNOME before. Its to monitor some window and have it in your sight without it blocking. The mouse will not interact with the thumbnail, plus its semi transparent. Especially useful if you have a tiler that always stretches windows to the corners. I can click through the Thumbnail to interact with the window behind it, and still watch what the thumbnail is doing.
Screen edges refer to the feature where you can bind some functionality to putting your mouse cursor in the corner of the screen. If you search screen edge in the settings menu to find it. You can see it in the video actually when you opened the mouse settings
it should be more clearly communicated because now it is just confusing
Yeah, if the panel is set to auto hide it also highlights the area when the cursor approaches it.
Maybe rename to "hot screen edge"?
@@softwarelivre2389 It can be put with the needed setting. It's just a setting that does nothing by itself so it's in the wrong place.
Oh thats what it bloody is. Its not something I really wanted to do on my workstation, so I never found its true purpose either. Because it wasent a thing I was searching for.
I've been using Plasma for years. As someone with sight issues that Zoom feature is one of the main things that's made me stay. The only one that I've found that's comparable is the one found in Cinnamon. Though, unlike Cinnamon, on Plasma I also get HDR, 4k@120hz, good Wayland + Plasma support, and the ability to customise things how I want (or need, to help with disability). I don't foresee me moving anytime soon.
it may appear random but is your native tongue german? especially the "i don't foresee me" sounds very german to me. it's like you tried to use the verb foresee as a reflexibe "sich" verb. i'm not that good at german tho still struggling with b2 and may even fall back to b1+. just my two cents.
I ported the minimal desktop indicator to Plasma 6.
Now if you want something a tad bit more smooth, I also created GINTI. Try it and see if it's up to your liking.
I daily drive plasma and it's almost always a smooth experience, outside of crashes that 99% of the time come from me running bleeding edge mesa or kernel. It's a really good experience for people who left windows for more customization reasons or lack of- looking at you win 11 taskbar.
GNOME challenge when
i love the idea that having to use GNOME is like a challenge😭
@@vitasomething It honestly is.
In KDE’s Plasma so bright,
Floating panels take flight,
With a flick or a glide,
They follow your stride,
Making folks love the new sight!
ChatGPT ass poem
15:10 fun thing about the zoom button: in earlier versions of Plasma 6, there was no upper bound for how far you could zoom in. I found this out the hard way when a cat sat on my keyboard for a while and I came back to see my monitor just showing a single solid color. When I moved the mouse, the color changed slightly. I thought something was broken, turns out my cat zoomed in by like 7 million percent or something and so I was seeing just one single pixel. And KDE apparently saves the current zoom value in the config when you restart it...
I reported it as a bug and after some discussion it was decided that 100x is a reasonable upper limit.
Plasma was the first ever DE I've ever used when I switched over to linux for a while as a daily driver. And aside from the little bugs, I've enjoyed the DE so far. I personally like the KDE app ecosystem with a lot of customisation options such as changing actions in the top bar of an app and so much more is the only reason why I like Dolphin more than the new Windows 11 explorer. Only problem I had with Plasma 5 was that vsync was always forced even on full screen so i had to use a kwin script to fix it but now in Plasma 6.1, it is a built-in option. It personally is the desktop I want if I want to have an adwaita-free/gnome experience
Everytime i tried KDE i got so annoyed after just a few hours or days that i ditched it for something else. I liked the general idea, look and feel, so i gave it many tries over the years and checked different iterations. But to me it always just feelt extremely bloated and broken, as half of the features either didn't seem to work at all or i just didn't understand what they were _supposed_ to achieve. Long time ago i went with Cinnamon for quite a while but it always felt like a crotch for the lack of better alternatives. Now i'm on Hyprland and super happy - first time that it feels like having arrived and so far i never felt the desire to ditch or switch. Finally something that just does what it advertises to do and is neither ugly nor majorly broken nor bloated by default. Zero gaps, 1px border with focus color (i agree with you there) and mostly floating windows - the kind of mess i enjoy - and when i rly want/need tiling... it does that, too 😁
Dude, Thank you. KDE is my Comfort Desktop, as when I originally came over from windows Vista, it resembled what I was familiar with, and ive just stayed with it since. and these videos youve done about Plasma 6 have actually taught me things about Plasma. you have set things up in a way I didnt know I could. (making the taskbar Dodge windows is a good example) and ive made changes to the way I operate because of it.
Since I've started using KDE one year ago, I never bothered to learn what activities were. I started today, and there are "great". They help separate things we do on our desktop a bit like Workspaces do.
The system settings GUI makes me really jealous. But thats about it. I'm happy to see that other desktop environments "slowwwly" are catching up. (But they really could speed up a bit)
Things like that are super important for bringing more people onto linux.
Re: Thumbnail Aside, when i was DM'ing from a laptop and a portable monitor, thumbnail aside was great to know what was on the screen that was actually pointed at the table instead of me.
Activities is like a poor man's workspace, you can use it to separate apps that you open (apps on other activities wont be visible on the screen and taskbar), set up a shortcut for each activity and boom, quick shortcut to "homework", default or any activity. You can also set different wallpaper and pinned apps on taskbar for each activity. I use it as quick shortcut to a bunch of apps accordingly.
Note that it is VERY BUGGY when you try to show the apps in taskbar on specific activities only, you have to sometime unshow it. Also KDE is customizable, but as soon as you go outside the default settings and plugins, its a landmine
That being said, I feel like coming back to hyprland and I hope to try cosmic later this year, or xfce my beloved if its ever happening
The idea dated back to KDE 4, primarily for Netbooks, where the screen was small and you would have completely different layout, including panels and widgets, for "work" and "play". Netbooks didn't work, and Activities never finds its place in a more traditional PC desktop.
Since all monitors now are wider than they are tall, I like my panel on the left, vertically. IMHO better use of screen real estate.
Any UI that doesn't let me do that makes me angry. (Looking at you, Win 11!)
Ive been a KDE fan since 2.0 and it just keeps getting better.
I am a KDE user since KDE 1.1.0 when I started with Linux back in '98 and continue to use it as my daily driver for desktops. I can appreciate that you (Brodie) have a very specific configuration for your day-to-day. Heck one of my roommates in the past had a very similar workflow where they used more terminals than GUI apps, but to each their own :)
One sin I simply can't forgive is not having the ability to copy/clone/duplicate panels. If I want to have identical panels with the same settings on all three screens (yes, it's a Windowsism, fight me), I have to manually recreate and configure every single widget. I've tried using the Javascript API, but it broke the notification bar.
The missing feature of keyboard shortcuts for the tyling setup is one of the sorest points for me as well.
Activities: these are not for everyone, and that's fine - but I use these all the time and when I have to use a desktop with no activities (i.e. anything other than Plasma) I get really annoyed really quickly. Unfortunately - a lot of KDE devs don't use activities either and there're some missing integration points and every so often someone goes "nobody uses activities, let's get rid of that" and we have to have that fight all over again😢
Okay... the window rules configuration system is VERY cool...
Dolphin is like the best KDE app if I had to choose. And also, I don’t have window management issues since I only have one ultra wide monitor, 1080p is something I had in 2004. But if I wanted to tile terminals, Konsole already has it built in
I've been using kde since its golden yrs from the 3.5 series back in 2003 and I moved through mostly all interfaces along the years and I always end up coming back to kde, I do share the some thoughs you have and I totally get it, I have xfce as my second desktop but kde let me tweak each pixel of my screen just exactly as I want in case I need. Thanks for the review.
3:33 you can snap the windows to either side with super+(arrow keys)
If you had been using Plasma 5 with latte, you would have more panel-dock options. Auto-hide was way better there, also it had plenty of notification settings and so on. Basically, latte was changing so much, that you were experiencing more like Latte DE, not a Plasma DE, which is... primitive compared to what latte offered. That is so sad that latte is abandoned and not working on Plasma 6. Some people trying to resurrect it, but how it goes, you never know.
A personal favorite widget is the color picker - very convenient just having one whenever you need it.
Did you try KDE connect? I liked it (before I was forced back to windows). It's got this awesome integrations for music (and videos or anything with playback controls) that is just "magic".
KDE connect is also on windows. IIRC not as well featured, but pretty good
@@leaderbot_x400 Wow. The fact that KDE is straight-up making cross-platform stuff now is wild. They really have branched out. It kind of reminds me of when Google first started making desktop apps, for some reason.
...I wonder if it would work as a replacement for Warpinator/Winpinator for getting files between my Linux and Windows PCs.
Colored border
You don't need anything to install to get colored border for active window. There is a setting in Plasma (config file only) that allows to configure this. I did that for use with Krohnkite. Nothing to compile or install, its stock Plasma feature.
Oh I was not aware of that, Klassy has some other nice features like fixing the close, minimise and maximise so I'll keep using it anyway
Do you think you can contribute and get it in the settings?
@@prgnify No, I not able to do that. But hopefully someone else who is reading this is able to do it.
Ooh, long-time Xfce user. That Window Rules thingy is awesome. I just have scripts I do with that. Email on 2nd monitor, Remmina and Teamviewer in the upper right corner next to each other. I have another set for Jack, pavucontrol when I'm going to do music. I also wrote a minimal tiling tool with hotkeys for the four quadrents, centered on main, swapping monitors, maximize/unmaximize. Frankly your KDE desktop isn't much different from my Xfce desktop. Never used KDE, but it finally looks almost stable enough that I'd consider giving it a try. Maybe someday I'll get a spare computer to install Kubuntu on.
I would try Tuxedo OS instead of Kubuntu. It is basically Linux Mint but with KDE Plasma instead of Cinnamon.
@@cameronbosch1213 Sorry, but that's two levels of derivation down from where I'm comfortable. Ubuntu is derived from Debian, but is one of the biggest distros and I've been running that for 10 of the last 12 years. Debian was the other two years.
11:40 one thing config file are better compared to gui configuration, is that it's extremely easy to backup that configuration.
In kde it's crazy complex to backup what you want, unless you backup the entire .config folder, but that's just crazy to me.
That makes it way easier to clean install. IE: when i install hyprland, i have a script which takes the config files and put them back in place. In kde i always end up just losing 15 minutes going through the setting to change everything i need
even better with git and stow
@excidium_ i do have written a bash script which read from a file a list of files or directories which i want to backup, and if i run it with certain flags, i can make copy of them, and then save them with git, and store them on github
I tried stow but it was missing features i wanted, and at the end writing my own script means i know 100% how it works, and it doesn't do any weird stuff.
Also: it completely avoids any symlink, which is something i reeeeeeally hated.
Plasma has been my DE ever since plasma 6 came out (I was using gnome before that), actually functional fractional scaling was the big factor for me considering I use a laptop. Aside from that there's not much difference between how I used gnome and kde, I'd be fine on any DE as long as it had a good search function, allowed me to change the icon theme and set accent colours. I tend to mix and match QT and gtk applications using flatpaks (eg- I prefer foliate over arianna), kde applications are fine, kdeconnect especially is very useful but except that one application I could interchange them with anything else and be just fine.
I've been on Plasma for a number of years -just love it. Some configurations I never use, some I set up a while ago and never touched again, mainly because I'm happy with the way things look and feel.
At work I have to use XFCE, and I've played around with GNOME now and then. I've also used OpenBox. None of these are as comfortable for me to use as Plasma
I find it funny how you and I found different answers to the age old question:
"Why would I put an entire panel on each monitor, if all I want is the clock?"
Yea... I actually did put panels there, but I made them with different properties... My main one was just a typical panel... but for the ones where I just wanted a clock, I made them shorter but thicker, made the panel "fit to content", and I just had the clock and a start menu, all together which I set to dodge windows.
It essentially achieves the same thing... but I've always had a bad taste from setting widgets directly on the desktop, and I like this solution.
My last holdout on switching to linux was HDR support. Since KDE Plasma was the first to have that easily available I've been using that ever since, & it's been pretty great imo. Had some major issues at first, but when I switched HDR was still only available with EVERYTHING updated to the unstable versions. As HDR support moved it's way into stable I moved right along with it & the issues I had went away. Coming from windows using 3rd party tools like DisplayFusion & Fences I have no real complaints anymore & having these kind of tools built right in is already a HUGE upgrade. There are definitely things that could be done better, but I've been able to do everything I need without issues & haven't felt the need to try anything else yet.🤷♂
I have been using plasma with opensuse tumbleweed for a while now, never had any problems, the default plasma design looks good for me and all the features work with no problem
Been using KDE since 3.x days and don't see myself using anything else. Arch does packaging right. I have installed only the packages I require and have a very minimal yet fully functional DE.
Screen edge is for when your panel is hidden. I turned it off so that it doesn't have a blue glow when my cursor is next to the edge where my panel is.
I agree with wanting a "dodge fullscreen" panel option, that's also what would fit my use case. Yes I also use tiling WMs.
You should put your close button on the left side of the window decorations bar, _and nothing else._ All other buttons should go on the right side.
You can make a particular window spawn into the tile with window rules. You just need to click detect in the window rule screen. Also i have shorctus that let me tile it
Also there are hotkeys that allow you to snap it into any of the four corners. I habent found one for resizing with keyboard tho
The point of krunner is to search for files and google stuff from the desktop. Its for us noobs that cant script it lol
Activities allow you to have different workspaces, wallpaper, panel and widgets. I use one activity for work/school stuff and another for media, gaming, etc. Can quickly switch between them with a keyboard shortcut or a hot corner. Very useful
14:50 "screen edge" works when you are using front corners. Hot corners is a featuer that lets you bind actions to corners of the screen. When you approach the corner with the mouse it performs the action. The screen edge makes them highited when you approach. I use those all the time, bottom right for activating desktop grid / overview with all of my virtual desktops and bottom left for overview of windows on current desktop. (Tho that said, I find that desktop grid unfortunately changed a lot for the worse on plasma 6 since Kubuntu 22.04 which I'm using right now. There's now weird stutter when you activate it with a hot corner, windows in the desktops are smaller and rendered much more poorly, so it's much harder to see and manipulate them and there are now very few optoins for costumization)
Karousel has been the only tiling WM i've enjoyed using on kde. the whole scrolling is such a nice improvement
Multi monitor behavior in Karousel is pretty bad, but I see how it could be great for a single monitor set up. It's really horrible with dual or more, though. All your windows are always together one monitor m, but jumps from monitor to monitor when you move the mouse, unless you exclude them entirely from tiling, then what's the point? I have no systems with a single monitor, so it is just not usable for me. I installed it after a week or two.
Yeah I think scrolling window managers are really probably the future as being somewhat of a middle ground between tiling and maximization. That said, PaperWM for GNOME is a much better implementation than Karousel (imo), though I refuse to use GNOME myself. Niri is probably the best, but it's a whole separate wayland window manager and has its own growing pains relating to that. I've been using Hyprscroller on Hyprland for my own workflow and that's worked best for me. Traditional tiling window management is just kinda problematic with how it splits the window into endlessly smaller pieces such that the pieces quickly become unusably small. I think generally vertical splits don't make sense for most people on a horizontal screen because of how limited vertical space already is. I could also see scrolling window management being a solution to the floating vs tiling paradigm if they just allow windows which need individual floating windows to spawn windows within its own large horizontal tile.
@@MNbenMN ah yeah im just using a laptop with karousel. it's been amazing
While watching this video I had an idea for how to fix the virtual desktops (maybe)
If a plugin would set "On all desktops" for every window not on the monitor the cursor is on, and switch it off for the monitor where the cursor is, you should be able to switch desktops independently for each monitor and have windows stay on the other monitors
It wouldn't let you arbitrarily map virtual desktops to monitors, but I could see it coming in handy.
I used to use Sway and Wayfire, and do miss using my virtual desktops when I have an external display connected to my laptop (which is quite often)
I'm using plasma 6 on my tablet, the tablet mode is great and things like autorotate function properly ootb, unlike in gnome; it's also less laggy. The only issue is that there's no onscreen working properly under wayland (Maliit is not a functional keyboard at all) while in X11 the tablet mode is a disaster. I guess the better ground to assess non-tiling environments is in touch screen form, rather than making them tiling by force.
17:52 I was looking at them earlier because I'd really like something like multiple desktops where I can have different wallpapers... Activities are kind weird.
You create an activity on that screen (only need a name).
The shortcuts for switching them are unbound by default, so you bind them, then switch to it, and then you have to set up all your customisations from scratch. :/
Each activity has its own desktop setup, so you can have different panel layouts, wallpapers, and desktop icon layouts and sizes. I suppose also different window tiling. It's just really annoying to set up since you can't create one from an existing setup.
I come from an XFCE background on a very old PC and I actually plan on switching to KDE plasma in the future
Regarding sticking and unsticking windows on secondary monitors. There is a kwin script for that called "Virtual Desktop Only on Primary Display" that does the job for me. However you must set up the primary display yourself.
I've used "touchpad" setting to setup "natural scrolling" - it inverts scrolling if it's done from touchpad. So good.
I've had problems on plasma 6 after some upgrade where power settings no longer detected that firefox's youtube is running full screen and turned off the screen. I even had a python script at one point which checked dbus every 15 seconds and if found firefox playing, it would disable screen dimming and enabled it if firefox was not found.
Honestly editing config text file was easy, making KDE to reread it was something I spent several hours on - there were several solutions found on internet and they didn't work.
I use and love KDE Plasma, but I just wish it had ONE IMPORTANT FEATURE: Key Chords!! (I also like Brodie's idea of having per-monitor workspaces 🙂)
The way the virtual workspaces is super annoying to me too. I like to use it the way you described. That is how it works on Mac (I have to use it at work) and that is how I am used to it. The way it works in KDE is how it works in Windows. It's dumb. Why does it change everything on every window? I never understood how that could be more useful that individual window workspaces.
So what are you switching too now? I have been using KDE Plasma ever since switching to linux and have had very little issues with it. Really like it actually. Tried Hyprland and although its nice, I always find myself logging out and back into Plasma-Wayland. Trying KDE Fedora40 on my laptop and so far liking it. Miss the AUR though. Gonna be hard switching to anything w/o the aur now.
Not too sure yet
You mentioned not using the game controller panel; I wouldn't either if I had an alternative. My Kubuntu setup is still on Plasma 5, so maybe they finally improved it, but last time I checked, it was still laid out like the one in Windows 10, which in turn is still laid out like the one in Windows 98, i.e. designed for big fat joysticks with a hat. Right stick is relegated to a pair of sliders instead of a second crosshair. Oh, and the crosshair is exactly the right color to be almost completely invisible against Breeze Dark. 🤦♂
And in Cinnamon, there just isn't one at all. I have no idea what GNOME offers.
COSMIC Epoch has earned its spot as my Wayland DE of choice for the foreseeable. I'm 48 hours in on running it on Arch, and it's way more functional and stable than I was expecting for an alpha release, with better multi-monitor support than I have *ever* had on Linux.
Feels like they learned a lot from Plasma 6 in terms of what _not_ to do in terms of keeping things flexible for multiple workflows while not burying the user in layer upon layer of confusing config.
I haven't tiled on my workstation since Windows 3.1, and so far I love COSMIC's flexible hybrid approach (complete with a dock applet that lets you swap settings and reminds you of the keyboard shortcuts).
Pantheon will always be my bae, and Wayland-first elementary 8 should be out in the next few weeks, but I gotta be honest-if they don't adopt the COSMIC tiler, I'm not sure I'll be switching back.
That said: it's pretty funny how bad some mainstream software (GIMP, JetBrains) still is on Wayland.
cosmic epoch is just the name of the repo cause there's a cosmic repo for the gnome soft fork
cosmic desktop is the name of the thing you're talking about
@@FlanPoirot Today I learned! I though it was the release codename (I'd seen references to "Epoch 2" scheduled for some time in 2025)
Screen Edge highlight hot corners/edges when the mouse is nearby. I used to put thumbnails of terminal windows running compilers aside, to keep an eye on when they stop, but now I use desktop notification for this instead.
Plasma has been my DE of choice for years. While I like GNOME I find Plasma to be better. As for tiling window managers, I just don't get the obsession with them. Yeah, they work, but they seem far less intuitive than a DE to me.
I tried Hyprland, and didn't like the auto tiling workflow; it just wasn't for me. I guess I just prefer floating window managers.
KDE Plasma is probably the best in that regard imo.
Gnome has an option to have the second monitor be one workspace and only have the main monitor have workspaces, and I believe there's a KWIN script to do the same thing, idk if it's been updated or works with plasma 6 though.
I love GNOME's aesthetic, but KDE is just so much more productive and less fiddly to set up; plus it's so much more Wayland compliant.
From what little I know about Activities, I'm pretty sure it's like adding a 3rd dimension to workspaces. Like, you can go up, down, left and right in the workspace grid, but with activities you can go to the back and to the front as well.
It is something like that. It also saves some settings which are specific to some activity, e.g. folder shortcuts in file open/save dialogs, power managment settings, which windows are open ... It is very useful to separate different computer usage environmnets better. For example work, home, presentations mode, gaming mode...
You can import and export your keyboard shortcuts under plasma. That’s what I do.
0:24 I agree, except on touch screen devices like tablets and 2 in 1s (because on those, I do use touch gestures). It kind of makes it more dock like, which is important since Latte Dock still hasn't been replaced or brought back for Plasma 6 and I couldn't find any other good Wayland options.
Apart from that, I agree that I don't really like floating panels on traditional laptops and desktops. It feels like too much wasted space. Thank goodness we can choose on Plasma!
I run Plasma on both my laptop and my primary desktop VM. I'm looking at some other options but have yet to find something I like more. On my desktop I do think I'd benefit from some better tiling, but my laptop's screen isn't worth bothering, side by side is plenty. While watching this I setup a VM for Endeavour with Budgie, we'll see if I like that more than the Ubuntu version, which was prettier by default but has the Canonical handicap. lol
These days I'm playing around with a lot of stuff in vm, it's a no commitment way to check out alternatives and learn the differences.
The screen edge effect shows a highlight when the mouse cursor nears an edge where a panel is auto-hidden, as an example. Or hot corners. It’s a notification that something will be revealed or activated. I ended up disabling it. Kept appearing when I was messing with my browser tabs, because my main panel is on top. The distance that triggers it is much too large.
14:29 Never looked into Thumbnail Aside before this video, but now I use it for Picture in Picture for UA-cam videos in my browser. Yes, I know PNP is a built-in feature in most browsers (including mine), but some fullscreen apps actually draw over the browser's PNP window, so this being rendered as an overlay rather than a window with pointer interactions is actually super useful.
Actually the panel does hide when you fullscreen an app, even on "Always visible". There is a difference between fullscreening and maximising. I have fullscreening set to Ctrl+Alt+F because that's what it is on cinnamon, I'm not sure how to fullscreen without a keyboard shortcut. By default I don't think there is a shortcut set.
I don't want to fullscreen a browser for example, I want to maximise it. Most apps treat these identically but the browser does not
For me this works correctly on Plasma here.
I have the panel configured to always be visible, but still when I press F11 in firefox or when I run a game full screen (or at least the one that I tried now, supertux), it does work well and actually takes the full screen, panel is behind it. Oh and this video of course, by pressing F. This is all on Wayland however, I haven't fully checked it on Xorg yet.
I know from other desktops that it does not always work so nicely, for example on Xfce I never got this right. So KDE gets very much my appreciation here.
Gnome is by far my preference, once its configured and my extensions are installed and setup. The charme of Plasma is, its just working out of the box. Its the most comprehensive DE out there. And it has good desktop scaling. There is a reason why its running the Steam OS...
Now that you're done with Plasma, I'd really like to see you try out niri. It's in its early days but it's a very interesting tiling compositor.
I only use KDE Plasma these days, have tried GNOME AND all the other desktops at some point. They all have their shortcomings and I feel KDE has LESS of those. However when it comes to Wayland... well I still have outlier issues before I make the switch. Atm use a 4090.
PS. Not into tiling because of the odd shapes and sizes I use for my apps at times but I can definitely see it being useful for productivity purposes in the future (editing/dev etc).
Not a dev here:
Tiling is a productivity boost for everyone, not just devs or video editors. The tiling itself is not the most important aspect about tilers.
It's the fact that by sending windows to specific workspaces that correllate to (typically) someModifierCombination + 0-9 keys on your keyboard transforms the ol "alt tab - hunt a window in a list of 20 windows" from a workflow of:
press alt tab, let eyes look at information, brain process information, decide how many times to alt tab, and then let go.
into:
I know firefox is on workspace 3, because I sent it there. I press someModifier+3, and I'm there.
It reduces the friction between your brain and the computer. From there you can set up rules on which workspace windows with a certain windowClass/Title should spawn etc.
I will always have have terminals/editors on 1, firefox on 3, games on 4, and discord/teamspeak/signal on 9, spotify on 10. Most of the time, you stop hunting for windows and fighting the desktop environment.
You can use that workflow entirely independent of forcing windows to tile. Any windowmanager worth its mettle will let you configure tiling on a per workspace basis, and even entirely turn it off.
I've been using the Git version of Plasma 6 on openSUSE Tumbleweed since the beta days. Currently, the Wayland experience with my Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti is really good now (mainly thanks to 560.31.02 driver release), though not perfect. There are still some (Wayland) features that would be nice to see merged into Plasma 6.2 whenever it's released.
@@AlexanderAhjolinna NVIDIA needs to get VRR working correctly still. AND it be nice if x11 apps like Barrier and all of its off-shoots could work under Wayland which has no function for those kinds of apps (no api). There are also issues with many of the desktop sharing apps. On top of that Wayland still hasn't got a global shortcut system. (this is due to security concerns, thus it should be app specific imo)
The more you dig into it, the more you realise Wayland has still a ways to go.
Brodie -- I got a couple questions for ya, sir.
* Where did you get that cool wallpaper with the sunken castle?
* Since you come from a tiling background, can you advise why my quarry tile in the kitchen always cracks in high traffic areas and how to prevent that?
You don't like the floating bar, but I like it. As someone who just switched over from Windows, it's so refreshing that neither of us need to compromise on small things like that :)
Right now, there's something wrong with Panel Auto-Hide. It's very eager to close, especially when doing something like dragging a window icon, and sometimes you have to tickle the edge to get it to raise. I keep waiting for this to be fixed; I've seen it on two different computers.
Im using KDE plasma 6 as i switched to Linux, because it is familiar to Windows. Everything works as expected without any problems. Im using it with an Nvidia Card and the Dynamic Kernel Modules, because i have an 3080 Ti so its supported and it works like a charm. The Desktop is smooth, animations play smooth, Gaming works great. I will continue to use it.
Which distro are you using?
@@korzinko Arch Linux
I'm currently dealing with a bug where I get horrible graphical artifacts if I don't enable a color profile for KDE no idea why but its very annoying other than that KDE 6.1 is super solid
You can set hotkeys for pretty much everything, including Windows snapping
3:52 It took me a hot second to find it, since I personally don't use tiling, but you can configure them by pressing Meta+T (default shortcut)
Edit: Hold shift when dragging a window and it will let you snap it to a tile position.
Finally the best and sanest review of plasma desktop hahaha, I've been using this desktop since 2014 because it's much easier to setup the shortcuts, and for the matter of fact until this day, I still not freaking idea how that activities work.
SHOUTOUT TO AUSSIES OR JUST BRODIE FOR HAVING A SANE, LOGICAL DATE FORMAT AS DAY, MONTH, YEAR LIKE WE DO HERE
THANK YOU
PS: I use Krunner. It's fantastic for me, I type half a word and it selects or pre selects the last thing I opened with that name (for the most part). I can open things quickly without navigating through the launcher, which I have on the panel, just because I can put a Lion icon on it.
That said, you don't have to feel sorry for not using it. If you use an alternative that you can set up cross platforms (or environments)... by all means go ahead with that. I know I'm not going to use anything else than KDE, but if you are one to try out different layouts or DEs or review them... having one solution that can work on all without much issue is SUCH a killer feature. I wouldn't blame you one bit.
I personally prefer the all window swapping, over individual ones.
As for sticky I do use window rules which make most things I want sticky sticky and on a specific spot. However, I wish there was a way to do it with kwrite with a certain file open, or firefox with a certain tab open, sadly I know of none.
Meanwhile, I kill animations in general.
Activities, yea don't even know if they work.
I recently started using Plasma again after a month and a half with Hyprland. Overall I really like Plasma and have from the moment I started using Linux earlier this year. I took the things I liked from Hyprland like keybinds and use them on Plasma now. The biggest thing I wish Plasma had is the workspaces tied to each monitor. I don't know why they haven't put this in, or refuse to, but if someone knows why I'd love to hear it. While I love Hyprland, I like Plasma a bit more. I need to start using Cosmic a bit more now it is "out", it might be the middle ground I want.
From what I understand, the reason there's no per monitor workspaces is because it would require a major refactor and nobody wants to touch that code.
Oh my understanding is that wayland is missing a necessary extension for this to work, but apparently its being worked on
I have used KDE for 15 years, and I don't touch krunner either, but I use desktop icons.
Not having dolphin though, I'm amused. My main complaint - I do wish they would take the stick out though and allow editing files as root.
Something good though, hit F4 and you get the console under it, which is how I deal with root actions generally.
> allow editing files as root.
It's still that way. wowie. I never find myself launchin a gui fm with elevated privileges nowadays, but back when I tried linux the first time, that was what made me switch away from kde. I was still too scared of getting stuff done on the terminal.
@GotekSC To be fair, I installed kio-admin from the Arch repos and now it is an option.
yeah kio-admin allows at least for dolphin and kate root privileges
Wait just a moment, you're saying you don't have keyboard shortcuts for tiling, yet there is a setting for that, I use it to move the windows around: (settings->shortcuts->kwin: quick tile window to xxxxx), you can use window rules to make a program that opens, move to a particular area by remembering the window position, but ya, there's no property for a particular tile yet, nor are they indexed. I wonder if I could whip up a kwin script for that.
KDE calls window snapping, quick tiling, this is different from the tiling editor
@@BrodieRobertson Oh .. oh.. I had my tiles setup in a rather default way, and never noticed that. You're right. Why in the world would they call it "Move window to tile" in the settings, when it doesn't even respect the tile layout? grrr
I did find a kwin script called "Shortcuts for KDE's built-in tiling feature" by de-ander-dog that looks rather promising. Haven't tried it just yet, but figure I'd check the options before I go re-creating the wheel.
just as an aside, in case you're wondering why I don't just use Khrohnkite. I did give it a try, but ran into a lot of margin and decoration inconsistencies. I think due to my zoom being at 200%
The fact you can't make a window rule for tiles is a crying shame. Yeah I can have my windows open up where they would end up in the tiles, but they aren't in the tiles, so if I resize the tile layout that window is just ignored completely.
Regardless, the kwin tiling is pretty close to what I want from tiling, even if it is rough around the edges.
Plasma "tiling" is a step in the right direction, but it falls short of useful for me. It's like it climbs 99% of the way up a mountain and then steps off a cliff. Trying to mix and match floating behaviors and the tiling is a mess, especially with any screen edges active. I'd rather completely disable Plasma native tiling (or override it with a script.) But, there's a lot about KDE Plasma that I like that isn't related to window placement and handling. I just wish I had the time to get involved with the project myself to contribute to Kwin.
Thumbnail aside might allow you to have a picture in picture for an application that doesn't have the feature. it might come in handy, but probably should be an extension that nobody uses instead of baked into KDE plasma
I've used KDE and the first thing I always did, after checking for updates, was disabling the animations. I hate them. And install Fluent dark theme and Papirus icon theme. I don't use tiling. Like you I don't like the floating panel. I don't use KDE anymore, I went back to Xfce. And I don't use Arch, BTW.
I dont like the "Breeze" Window buttons.
Its just as cutomisable as usual, And not really as buggy as people make it out to be.
Yeah, Some of those "Desktop Effects" are weird, Like the Thumbnail aside one, and the Screen Edge one does not appear for me either.
I just think those are silly, and I turn a lot of them off. The Zooming, and other stuff is very useful indeed.
The more I hear your issues with plasma the more I realize just how much I like plasma for the reason it doesn't work for some people. I like plasma, I like the workflow it has, and I prefer floating. I dislike gnome because it's menu UI looks cool, but isn't for me. I like customizing things, and plasma lets me customize things until it breaks. It's great. as for tiling... Never enjoyed it, didn't give it much of a shot either, mostly because I'm used to sorting through dozens of floating windows at once.
Yup I love KDE Plasma. it is the best desktop environment in existence and it would do a lot of good for encouraging people to switch from Windows to GNU/Linux if it was the default presented to them when they hear about GNU/Linux. Despite this yeah I agree with you that more of that goodies from tiling windows managers would be nice to have. Also what I miss a lot that they did have was tabbed windows, like in BeOS. The combination of more tilling goodies and tabbed windows would be quite awesome for me.
on the window snapping thing, you shouldn't have to use your mouse. Holding the Windows key and hitting arrow keys should snap the active window in that direction. Or at least that's how it worked in Plasma 5. Haven't used Plasma 6 but I can't imagine that was something likely to change. But anyway, Win+Left or Right should snap the window on half the screen in that direction. Win+Up should maximize, Win+Down should un-snap. I might be mixing it up with Windows a little bit, but from memory it works basically the same way.
Or a bit later it looks like you're doing that and before you were talking about a different system that seems to do the same thing, only purely mouse-driven? That seems kinda dumb and useless tbh.
So its close to perfect, just need per screen desktops. I admit I want that one too, tho I just hack and put the windows on every desktop if I want to switch have that on all, its a different workflow, but you would be more effective, and it doesn't seem like there should be so much work as people put it out to be if its implementet by just hack the share stuff - atleast on wayland, and I think that can even be scripted. And for you, a better tiling mod (seems like there is being put work into this).
I've never used I3 and have used KDE3 and KDE5 extensively. I never use KRunner, either. You're not alone.
When I installed it over Mint Linux, after about a half a month, the software updater installed something causing KDE to startup in an all black screen with a cursor. I went back to a basic Mint setup afterward.
In general, my switch to Linux had been a series of botch jobs.
Yeah support for KDE Plasma and KDE apps in general is very bad in Mint and also in PopOS. This is the main reason I do not recommend these to new GNU/Linux users. I want them to have freedom and an easy as possible job to switch to other desktops like KDE Plasma so they can easily try them out.
"Dodge windows but only for Fullscreen", that I guess is the "Always Visible" option when I think about it.
I should have said fullscreen and maximise
breeze has colored borders! Is just very weird to setup. I use breeze with colored borders for active windows
It would be great to have instructions on how to set up this.