I’m currently using Fedora KDE Plasma, but I’d like to try out a tiling window manager. What would you all reccomend? I use my computer for school, so I would like it to be stable.
Distro isn’t important for tiling, just the window manager. I’d start with i3 personally, it’s been around a long time, which means the documentation is fairly plentiful.
Dude I recommend you to watch a few Youtube videos about what is a desktop, a window manager and a distro ;)
No, you cant get i3 on Plasma.
Possibly? Though I wouldn’t recommend it. I tried that with xfce once, and it technically worked, but tiling window manager and desktop environments tend to have different aims. A desktop environment like plasma will have everything bundled together and playing well as a whole, while a window manager like i3 will be barebones and expect you to pick out the pieces yourself. DE’s are much more beginner friendly, while WM’s are great if you want to get as much customization as possible. Which will better suit you depends on your needs.
The word you’re looking for is Desktop Environment (DE). KDE Plasma is one such DE. Distro is the underlying system.
- i3 has been around forever and has lots of guides on how to customize it. Only downside is it’s X11-only, so as everyone moves to Wayland, X11 support will decrease.
- Sway is i3+Wayland, though it’s newer, so I dunno how much customization content is out there or whether the i3 tutorials are forward compatible.
- Hyprland is another popular choice, and it is Wayland-based. Only downside is the project lead is a toxic asshole, despite being a gifted dev.
- Cosmic is an upcoming DE, so if you’re in no hurry, keep an eye on that one.
To install any of them, search for the project and see if they have an installation guide for your distro. If not look up “how to install <DE> in Fedora.”
Cosmic is already more usable than most Window managers, that literally just manage Windows.
I mean, it has apps… and GUI settings…
There is a guy called Ryan Brue that packages all the COSMIC apps. He created a SIG and in the channel there are some COSMIC Devs helping out.
There is a uBlue variant with COSMIC, working pretty great.
COSMIC just breaks KDE Apps a bit. Will have to see if some package may fix them, as they are so themable that missing packages make them use aome shitty fallback theme.
I know Cosmic is there, but it’s not even in beta. I can’t yet recommend it in good conscience, especially for OP, who is new enough not to know the difference between a distro and a DE.
(And if you’re reading this, OP, that’s nothing to be ashamed of.)
Hm, the compositor stuff just works
The packages also dont interfere with others, probably? So on Fedora, just add the COPR and try them
COSMIC is extremely stable. I had a single crash or something, and that was a while ago. It is mainly just lacking features, but that is likely already at least as good as most Window Managers like Sway, that are extremely barebones.
I would try a few Plasma based tiling scripts before switching to anything like Sway or i3. You’ll get a good idea of whether it’s for you. Later on if you find you need more control over the tiling you could switch to a dedicated tiling window manager.
I’m using Karousel in Plasma which is scrollable tiling. You can install and enable it like so:
Go to System Settings > Apps & Windows > Window Management > KWin Scripts > select Get New… > In search enter Karousel and wait for it to show up > select Install > select the latest version (as of now karousel-0-9-4.tar.gz).
There is a companion desktop effect that also needs to be installed like so:
Go to System Settings > Apps & Windows > Window Management > Desktop Effects > select Get New… > enter Geometry Change in search > select Install > select the latest version (as of now kwin4-effect-geometry-change-1.3.tar.gz).
Karousel and Geometry Change have configuration options and Karousel also has keyboard shortcuts (view here) which you may need to update to your liking. I don’t have a need to configure anything in Geometry Change as the default animation settings are fine. For Karousel I tend to adjust the various spacing and gaps options along with making sure the shortcuts I want are configured. That link above has a short video of what Karousel looks like in action.
Krohnkite
https://github.com/anametologin/krohnkite
https://store.kde.org/p/2144146/
I would try a few Plasma based tiling scripts before switching to anything like Sway or i3.
Agreed. I used tiling window managers for years before coming back to Plasma. Right now on Wayland I highly recommend giving Krohnkite a shot, its stable without any problems and has even multiple layouts to choose (and switch) from. I used Polonum before, but that one is not stable and was problematic. Krohnkite plugin (can be found in KWin Scripts > Get New… > then search for “krohnkite”, by anametologin) is pretty good in my opinion.
The only problem with these plugins is, that they are not well documented as a standalone tiling window manager and cannot be configured as deeply. And they might interfere with other plugins or shortcut setups and so on. I knew what I wanted and I knew how to configure stuff, that’s why its easy for me. At least it can be easily disabled without replacing entire desktop environment.
Little tip: One thing to mention, unlike Polonium, with Krohnkite one does not need to logout and login from current user session whenever settings are changed. It’s enough to disable Krohnkite in KWin Scripts, Apply, then enable and Apply again. This is basically a reload of the plugin to take any changed settings in effect.
I’ve got issues with both of them, but polonium is closer to what I want. In krohnkite I can’t use btree while also keeping the tiling part. If I drag a tile while in btree in krohnkite they just snap back to their previous position. Overall krohnkite is more polished though because it doesn’t rely on kwin for the most part to determine positioning. Whereas polonium uses only the api’s provided by kwin.
Lastly I have noticed that you don’t actually need to log out and back in for polinium. Closing all windows and relaunching them has been enough for me.
Krohnkite
In krohnkite I can’t use btree while also keeping the tiling part. If I drag a tile while in btree in krohnkite they just snap back to their previous position.
I use a 3 different layouts, one of them Btree. And drag and drop one window over the other will swap position of both windows. So functionally, it is working (for me) and maybe another plugin or configuration in Plasma is in the way?
Polonium
Closing all windows and relaunching them is from users perspective actually not too different from logging out and in again, at least from my view. From time to time I’m looking at the source in Github to see what the recent advancements are. But it seems development is on halt at the moment, with only minor changes over longer period of time.
On KDEs side I saw some update notes specifically mentioning fixes for Polonium, which is a good sign. My hope is that development of Polonium will take off soon.
You should try Fedora Sway in a Virtual Machine to see if you’d like it
In my day (today) we would create a test user, install a new WM and try it. I don’t get the “install the full distro on a VM just to try a program just a few kbs in size”…
You get the whole experience including installing your necessary software
Again, how is it different than installing directly on your machine? Especially when you have a package manager that can rollback the installation?
You can easily install and configure a tiling window manager on any distro, so you should not switch an entire distribution and your base because of that. Unless off course you want to, but its not difficult. If you install a tiling window manager from your repository, then read the documentation how to set it up correctly and log out your current user session. Then in the login screen, you should be able to select what window manager or desktop environment you want to use.
But be careful, lot of window managers are still not supported in Wayland and the other way, some of the new window managers are Wayland only. The usual suspects would be probably Sway or Hyprland on Wayland? There is also Qtile, but that is for people who want to configure and write Python source code, as the configuration is in Python language (BTW my favorite tiling window manager, but not for everyone). EndeavourOS used to have a Qtile spin, but they stopped that not long ago.
But if you really must switch the distribution, then there might be a few preconfigured tiling window manager distributions:
- Fedora with Sway (on Wayland): https://fedoraproject.org/spins/sway/
- Fedora with i3 (on Legacy X11):
