I have been a tiling window user for more than 6 years now, and the features of a tiling window manager are always lacking or just not smooth enough in tiling of any other desktop environment I have used. Though, a full fledged desktop environment is extremely important to me. I do not want to stitch together a bunch of tools for a makeshift DE. That stitching is bound to have a lot of bugs and is always a pain to keep it running. In that respect, I have had the best experience replacing kwin with bspwm on kde plasma. I know that I am using X11 and not Wayland, but some features like separate workspaces for separate monitors is a dealbreaker for me - topic (16241). I have tried using other window managers like Hyprland, but as I said the experience has never been that great.
It seems like it will take a while for wayland DE to come to completion. I am waiting on Cosmic to get to version 1, though I am guessing there will be a wide variety of bugs before it will be pretty usable. Also, apps like Zoom and screensharing is always so buggy in wayland, and that is a no go for me. But for now, if KDE plasma can be made a little bit more friendly to be able to replace kwin, that would be great and allows users who like tiling window manager to stick to plasma. In my experience KDE plasma has definitely been the best DE, not just in terms of a cohesive settings manager, but the overall widgets to control the rest of the system (though pim seems to be a little lacking, but not a big deal for most imo). Even now, my dailydriver is BSPWM with kde plasma. I would like some small things fixed, because the rest once setup works flawlessly. For example this bug I raised (493181) (Unable to use the system power menu at all). What do you all think? And what has been your experience of replacing kwin with another window manager?
Hi! Just one thought here, and then I’ll defer to folks with more direct experience on the topic…
You mentioned that a full-fledged desktop environment is important, as you don’t want to have to cobble together pieces that weren’t really built to fit together. I totally get that, as choosing an esoteric setup means you inevitably run into more rough edges, and have more hard-to-reproduce problems.
Replacing a desktop environment’s featured window manager with a different one seems destined to put you in that position, though. I’d be pretty surprised if there are many KDE Plasma developers regularly using a window manager other than KWin, so you’re more likely to be the first one who runs into a problem, and more likely to be one of the ones having to figure out how to solve it.
If being in that position doesn’t concern you, then, best of luck and hope you enjoy using your device (I’m 100% with you that Plasma is my favorite way to experience using a PC)! And there may be a bunch of folks with similar mindsets ready to dive in and help develop solutions to those edge cases - just wanted to moderate expectations if that isn’t the case
it’s encouraging to see ppl interested in tinkering with plasma and sharing their experiences with improvements that can come from it.
then watching those discussed features and capabilities make their way into plasama and become the default proves to me that i made the right choice in DE when switching to linux.
please keep sharing what you consider the benefits of bspwm over kwin.
I’ve done kde with openbox in the past. Required the openbox-kde-session…something, but it worked pretty good. I added some stuff to get corner bindings, overview, tiling and some…
At some point I thought about running kde but with a compiz wm. I’ve done compiz standalones in the past but it should be theoretically possible. The session manager could be a bit tricky though.
The shared “benefit”, if you’d wanna use that word, in both cases would be speed.
To give you an idea…Openbox’ speed is somewhere between jwm and fluxbox. Compiz is slightly faster than xfce. And, of course, the load of compiz’ (useless for me wizardry).
In the end, are their “improvements” as such? Nah, not really. At least, not how I see it. For me it’s simple, pick a DE and stick with it. Or. Pick a non-de and put on whatever you like. If that happens to be the core apps from kde, so be it. You see some frankenstein-ish stuff on lxqt sometimes. Many use kwin instead, which leaves a settings mess to begin with and hardly adds to the experience. I’m not into that kind of tweaking.
I’d be very surprised if there are young developers who ever heard of wm’s other than the ones used in kde, gnome, xfce…at all. There are current gen devs that grew up with nothing but full blown linux DE’s and more than likely Chrome OS/windows at school. I can assure you that there are Gnome devs who don’t have a single clue what icewm or pekwm is. Not a clue whatsoever. They don’t have to of course but um…I was watching this old linux veteran the other day and there was this one thing he said. “Linux ain’t as much fun as it used to be”. And I understand what he meant.
wizardry).