I am on Kubuntu 24.04.1 (which uses KDE 5.27.11 as of this writing) and have tried a few auto-tiling KWin scripts such as Polonium, Krohnkite, and Bismuth.
Of those, Polonium is the only one that is fully functional, but it is very fragile and breaks regularly in many possible ways: wake from sleep, unlock screen, move window with mouse by accident, Plasma or some KDE component crashes or restarts, etc.
Are there any stable, working auto-tiling KWin scripts for KDE 5.27.11?
(While 5.27 has built-in tiling, it is very primitive, not automatic, and a bit buggy.)
Tricky one. I’m mostly on 5.27.4 and Bismuth, at least for my very occasional needs, seems to work fine. Dunno it’s because of the plasma version or it running on Debian, but what can I say. It works. Again, for my needs.
Wow, your KDE setup looks like something straight out of r/unixporn, very nice!
I gave Bismuth another shot, and I almost got it working after discovering the deb package is not built correctly (sorry, can’t post links since my account is new, but it is the only bug listed for the deb package). Sadly like one of the comments there mentions I am also missing a section for Bismuth keyboard shortcuts and so I can’t issue any commands.
But this gives me hope that the deb package can be fixed and maybe all can be saved after all!
Hello, I have kronhkite fork for kde 6. I use it and it works fine. In window decoration A user brought the Bismuth window decoration to kwin6. This makes it very nice to use. Unfortunately you can’t change the window decoration colour like in KDE 5. It doesn’t work in Kde 6. So you have to manually edit the files in the window decoration itself for the colours.
But no shortcuts in, well, shortcuts.
If that’s the case, you’ll be restricted to the set default layout. As you can see in those previous screenshots, I made some desktop applications ( I hate keyboard stuff). The one to toggle a tiled view doesn’t require shortcuts. It switches the kwinrc file by using the script.
Of course, if you require shortcuts for other tiling stuff…you’ve got a problem.
Thanks for suggestion! This will be useful to me when KDE 6 is (hopefully) released with Kubuntu 26.04 (in 2026), but I need an LTS release for a daily driver so I’ll be sticking with Kubuntu 24.04 / KDE 5.27. I suspect KDE 6 won’t come to 24.04, but who knows.
You are spot on! Using scripts to toggle bismuth in the absence of standard keyboard shortcuts is an interesting workaround. If bismuth had a CLI interface it might be possible to use a combination of custom shortcuts and scripts to recreate all the needed keyboard functionality.
I’ll keep an eye on the Bismuth deb package and hope once it receives an official fix then it will “Just Work”. Until then I’ll manually tile when using KDE, and probably use Qtile hen I really need auto-tiling. I’ve seen a few posts where people have successfully replace kwin with Qtile, that would be the best of both worlds.
Well, I’m on X so the few things I occasionally need in Bismuth (and since I’m no keyboard fan), are actually xdotool commands in a desktop app. The tiling toggle and quarter layout, the ones I mostly use, are just two singles that are in my menu.
I have some Bismuth desktop application…somewhere, with a bunch of bismuth commands in a dropdown menu, all xdotool emulated. Only the toggle tiling isn’t.
