If you use cosmic desktop, you can switch the entire desktop from floating to tiling and it works very smoothly

I started out using tiling but actually like floating more now. Still, cool to have such easy switches.

You can use a dedicated tiling window manager but cosmic is a lot more "batteries included" and just works.

Also it seems that they are constantly adding new features so its exciting to see where its going.

I'm really interested in a tiling VM such as hyperland but I really like all the features of KDE. The latest release is absolutely massive and comes with "Save current theme"

krohnkite + kde rounded corners :3

hyprland looks good for screenshots but as soon as you update your system you'll see that beautiful error box on top of your screen

I've settled for lxqt + niri because I was too lazy to rice my desktop and lxqt looked good enough, I don't know what features I'm missing but until I need them I'm doing good.

Looks good, I'm going to try it out. I've almost good a complete zero mouse setup on my computer and i only use it for websites. I go as far as to use the terminal to connect to BT headphones and to play/pause music.

Not my screenshot, but yeah, this seems to be several standard KDE widgets bundled together. You can always open System Monitor app, though, if you want to check your system through a customizable, organized dashboard. Or, like it's done here, group standard widgets to enjoy them all in a neat fashion.

(Both can be set up to show you literally anything, and you'd be surprised how many sensors are in your computer)

Plasma's Activities make up for some of my monitor shortfalls.

Why not use time shift?

I run Plasma 6. Not because I like it but because I dislike it less than Gnome infuriates me.

If lack of features and customizability is my biggest gripe with Gnome, crazy instability is my gripe with KDE. Plasma is fine on defaults, but once you customize (the way it's supposed to work), KDE becomes plain unstable. The Wacom pen input settings panel is way better in KDE than Gnome. That's the biggest reason I stay.

KDE is stable in my experience, but I don't enjoy the window management and the shitloads of embedded packages. Now I'm on river for the time being.

While I agree with you, it's not like GNOME consumes so many ressources that it affects the average person's experience.

Personally, I think GNOME is much more self explanatory. Whatever environment you come from, even if you have no computing experience at all, you will probably get stuff done with GNOME.

With Plasma, I noticed that people with low tech-skills struggle a lot more, because they are less crazy about making everything super duper extra obvious (especially how to configure stuff)

thats cool :3

Basically a zoetrope at that point.

Reminds me when I first started pc gaming. I even doubled my RAM to 512mb! I found a mod that basically turned everything into basic polygons where the walls were just red planes, characters looked like minecraft, the guns looked like they were done by a brutalist architect after being verbally described to them. Ran a mean 45 fps, but you had to use something like CCleaner to clear the ram in between rounds.

Oh I wasn't aware I can configure what kinds of things it searches for. now it's almost instant. thanks for the tip!

Distros might package some stuff for you, yes.

Omarchy is the most complete package for Hyprland, I have seen so far. Installs in under 10 minutes and comes with everything you need installed, nicely configured, and good documentation.

Niri implements a scrolling windowmanager like PaperWM instead of tiling like Hyprland. Tiling resizes your windows constantly, while scrolling only resizes when you want it to. If you keep opening windows, Niri opens them to the right of the last one on an infinitely wide workspace. Workspaces are organized vertically downwards. There’s no fixed number of workspaces, they grow on demand. There’s also a zoomed out overview showing you all workspaces and windows. Niri and Hyprland have some similarities though otherwise like lots of keyboard commands to move, resize, arrange windows.

Niri is friendlier overall I would say. It’s worth trying both since they are distinct.

This actually confuses me, I’ve got one monitor I specifically use for messages(email client, work chat, personal chats, etc.) and another dedicated to media(music, podcast, streaming). The others are all varied depending on what I’m working on. Why would I want those to swap desktops with the other 3-4 which will always be doing many differing things?

Set a window rule to have those particular windows be on all desktops. Then the others can switch while those stay the same.

KDE has lots of shortcuts, and they can he customized endlessly

It's one of the main things I like about it

But why would I want them all to change? I just don’t see how that’s useful, the others are monitors are all flexible for my needs in the moment.

KDE is neat and does what I want a DE to do

It doesn't even have to be a distain for hyper aesthetic window managers. It can easily just be a love for simplicity and/or function too.

Sure

tiling goes brrrr tho

also, special workspaces. Love me some special workspaces

Aaand pyprland zoom is also pretty handy for a sight-impaired guy like me

Well, for me, each virtual desktop is dedicated to a different ongoing project. When I want to switch from one project to another, I just switch virtual desktops. Each project can have all kinds of windows open on multiple monitors, and none of them are relevant to the other projects.

I guess that makes sense, sounds stressful but like I said you do you. Thanks for explaining!

Brodie Robertson just made a video about Niri.

So I tried out Noctalia shell.

I just love it. Beautiful, responsive, enough settings in the GUI. I think it's a keeper.

I went Windows > Xfce > Plasma > Gnome

What distro are you running Niri and Noctalia on? Did you find it easy to install?

What do you do to it so it becomes unstable?

Where is maximize? Where is minimize? I see windows on the screen but no window buttons other than close.

It’s windows 8 all over again. A touch interface whether you like it or not.

I use EndeavourOS. Both are in the AUR, so it was really simple. (obligatory mention of the greatness of Arch Wiki)

The hardest part was figuring out how to get
Waybar to disappear. It was showing below the Noctalia menubar.

KDE can be considered heavy only if your idea of a desktop use is to launch it and stop right there.

But normally after that you launch apps and that's where the magic happens: it is so integrated, apps barely add any more RAM usage on top.

So instead of comparing DE x and y, compare what a desktop actively used looks like: browser? office suite? file manager? drawing app?

Only then will you be able to compare you RAM usage from one DE to another. Everything else is comparing cars fuel economy when they're all idle.

Yeah I dont get the obsession with optimization

Hyperland is the definition of a tiling WM thats just as heavy if not heavier than KDE (depending on your config)

And if you’re trying to be economical about RAM usage, things like fancy window decorations, window animations, and other purely aesthetic stuff like that can of course go.

That's negligible at best and imaginary at worst. Themes that aren't used, aren't loaded into RAM.

The difference being that in the one of those cases you still need to open a browser instance before you are able to browse the web.

Firefox is absolutely unusable on that PC. Falkon runs much better.

RAM was the last thing on my mind when I switched to a tiling WM.

With actual hardware, yes. But I use tiling WMs since where 2–4GB Ram was all my thinkpad has.

kde has zoom features

not sure what hyprland's zoom specifically is tho

Nothing weird. Create panels, application launchers, add spacers, etc.

Plasmashell crashes often enough any feelings of superiority are due to poor meat space memory.

For what it's worth, I was in a similar boat. I wanted to try WMs/compositors, but the configuration seemed daunting. Then I gave Dank Material Shell a try and it just configured the vast majority of the system very nicely. I still had to change some window rules in the config file, but even that has a GUI now. I also heard great things about Noctalia, and I'm sure there are others as well.

I still think KDE is a top-tier option, to be clear. :P And adding tiling to KDE is also a great way to get the best of both worlds, just from the other direction.

Omg! CCleaner nostalgia!

I also had some sort Windows background process suppression software that would squeeze 2–3 more fps out for me. At the cost of occasionally bluescreening me lol

Kids these days don't know how easy they've got it with native Linux game support and Steam Proton!

Seriously, you can always just buy more RAM…

^(oh. oh dear me.)

Tbh most optimizations save so little ram thats its impossible to notice, if you have 16gb or hell even 8gb of ram its hard to notice the minuscule amounts saved with a WM especially a Wayland WM such as Sway/Niri and especially Hyperland.

Not sure about his experience but if he consider kde heavy. I can't even imagine him using Cinnamon or (God forbid) Gnome.

On my crappy N100 netbook (8 GB RAM), I use Plasma by default, but shut it down and use either raw TTY or Sway, for heavier tasks. Sometimes you need every percent CPU, but sometimes you just want to boot and have your network working by default.

https://codeberg.org/anametologin/Krohnkite

heres the link for anyone interested in tiling for KDE