Turn KDE Plasma 6 Into A Tiling Window Manager

Last week I did a video on Polonium and it wasn't a very pleasant experience but thankfully there was another option, Krohnkite, not the old version of Krohnkite but a new fork made to work on Plasma 6.

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[vaisakh_km]

WHY YOU ARE HAVING FUN BRODIE.... LINUX ISN'T SUPPOSED TO BE FUN

[jed_hed]

This almost made me cry tears of utter joy. I started off on KDE and transitioned to Krohnkite and Bismuth when I discovered the magic of WMs. When Plasma 6 crippled Bismuth, I tried Polonium and was absolutely let down by all the things it lacked so much so that I dropped KDE and went to a solely WM desktop

[Caellyan]

BTree layout is short for balanced tree - it will split each node until they all have equal number of children and then it will progress to a next layer and split each node further, i.e. all windows will be grouped into clusters of equal arity/rank.

[Riddim_glitch]

FINALLY! I can have my cool autotiling back without having to give up the comforts of KDE!

[buriedstpatrick]

The 3 column layout is just perfect for my 32:9 monitor. Bismuth was the only tiling manager to pull it off exactly how I wanted it and then it stopped working. Here's hoping this keeps being supported as it looks like it works the exact same way. I'm so tired of hopping between KDE, BSPWM and Hyprland just to get an okay tiling experience on an ultra-wide display.

[mckendrick]

The problem with Polonium is it's trying to force automatic tiling into the "tiling" system they added to Plasma rather than creating a separate tiling system. Kronkhite and Bismuth were always better, it's just they broke in Wayland when KDE added "tiling" and completely changed how things worked. I would still blame KDE for Polonium sucking – they promised that Plasma's tiling system would be a "better" method of tiling on Plasma, but it was frankly just a lie. The tiling we had with Bismuth was miles better and they destroyed it to add their "tiling" which was far less than what anyone expected it to be.

[Grav-jp]

I'm a big noob when it comes to tiling, few years back i tried i3 and didn't get warm with it. After using kronkhite for a short time, i need to say it's lot of fun. Thanks for introducing me to a better experience on my plasma DE.

[shuccle]

as a beginner, out of the box this helps a lot because i was just getting annoyed when i kept opening the terminal and would have to keep manually moving the window to the side of the screen so i could keep looking at my browser without the terminal covering it lol

[themisterchristie]

Nice to see Krohnkite is back, I used it on Plasma 5 because AwesomeWM had developed a strange issue with Steam, or rather Steam had developed a strange issue with AwesomeWM. If I switched to any other desktop and then returned to Steam, Steam wouldn't respond to any mouse interaction.

[rabahhouna]

I found the 'Dim Inactive' option in desktop effects very useful to identifying which window has the focus.

[Duckly]

Krohnkite is cool and all, but the real star is Klassy...
Honestly should be built into Plasma (as well as LightlyShaders)

[thingsiplay]

Yes, I used Krohnkite back in the days, then switched to Bismuth. Later switched fulltime to a tiling window manager, but not unlike you, I'm on KDE+Wayland now. Polonium was promising, but as you say, it was a bit buggy and had edge cases everywhere. Krohnkite and Bismuth didn't work on Wayland.

Therefore thank you for bringing this up, that Krohnkite was ported to Wayland. This is so nice, finally I have a working tiling again! Like you said, Krohnkite will be my default recommendation.

Edit: Btw, there is an option in the Krohnkite Configure, under Rules: Screen default layout

[eyupyorulmaz]

Seeing this video right after finishing writing my own tiling script.

[dreamcat]

... loving how you are discovering tiling on kde, and these tiling behavours. it is a great benefit that we can do tiling on a major gui platform on linux.

it is fine understandable to be criticising kde for all of its other specific failings, bugs or issues but as a mainstream platform that can do tiling lets say "at a sufficiently adequate level" to get by with day-to-day as a usable working system. then that is amazing!

and we need this to compete with modern mac and windows mainstream major competing platforms. since those ones *both* implement their own types of [semi] automatic window placement management. which then competes with... tiling features

kde is not perfect, but it brings also a lot of useful stuff too. which other desktops does not to so well as kde can. i love my kde desktop! having tried enough other ones to realize these things... it tends to be around practical stuff

love this stuff! & loveing these covering of such variety of different cool linux topics 🖤

[pablofreitasmachado]

As someone who has pestered you to test polonium, I am very Grateful for the video on both. I guess I'm gonna switch back to khronkite. Did not know it was alive again 😂. I used bismuth in the past and it was better than Polonium. But I think khronkite is still better. Will try krohnkite again and see if it fits me better than Polonium. Tyvm Brodie.

[prgnify]

14:03
Hi, I hate gaps. They go against the whole reason I like tiling (having more efficient use of my screen). Also, Titlebars. Cheers.

[CamonaTempest]

This was a delightful watch! Thank you very much for creating it! 😊

[JrAndroid-Tux]

ok so i just switched to kde after living in xfce for along time. and im mainly gonna stay here till cosmic. but this video saved me!! this is the best thing for kde. but i also found my favorite feature of kde that others dont' have. i can simply choose the have every window i open open in maximized state!! thank god thats the main reason i had switched to awesomwm to begin with lol. and now i get tiling in kde amazing!

[Interpause]

what i did for systemsettings was just to add a window rule that disabled the minimum size for normal windows

[YannMetalhead]

Just tried Krohnkite and it's great. If WMs didn't exist I would definitely use it.