Comment by ducktective
4 years ago
At this point, it has become evident that they don't "want" to support this feature. So you're limited to what KDE has to offer if you need this.
Personally, I've bailed on the whole DE thing. Take the tiling-wm-pill and move on. Now I have to deal with tumblerd random high-cpu usages and thunar's unexpected crashes.
I've not seen anyone using a tiling window manage with 32" and larger 4k displays. It's just an awful experience.
I would use a tiling window manager (and have) on something like a chromebook or if I'm a youtuber that does everything in a VM at 1080p. I have a hybrid approach that I use with XFCE (aggressive window snapping with custom shortcuts), but it's hardly a typical tiling window manager experience.
Regarding Thunar, I don't have any issues, but if you are not using it in XFCE, you might want to try and see what plugins you are loading. Some expect XFCE and could be the root of your issues.
> I've not seen anyone using a tiling window manage with 32" and larger 4k displays. It's just an awful experience.
I'm using i3 / sway on both, my Workstation's 40" 21:9 (5120x2160) and my private 32" 16:9 4K displays, and see no reason why a bigger display, or one with a higher DPI, would make using a tiling window manager working worse, on the contrary, for me, it's all the more important to have good management if I got more "screen estate" to handle.
IME using tiling WMs on bigger/HiDPI screens is a fantastic experience.
i’m also enjoying sway specifically on large displays. 34” ultrawide (21:9) 3440x1440. i had gnome running on it for a while but i specifically switched to sway because it’s easier to make use of the ridiculous real-estate. i can have like 4 separate vertical splits before it gets cramped. no one wants to manually position 4 windows on a screen.
i also run sway on my 14” laptop simply because i share my OS config between the two machines. i like its workspaces and notifications and being able to tweak `waybar` exactly how i want it, but the actual tiling functionality is pretty useless. at _most_ i’ll do two panes per workspace — at which point you’re in territory any DWM would do well in.
When you have a single window in a workspace, isn't it too big? I feel like it would be weird having all my text on the left side of a huge monitor when I only have a single terminal in the workspace
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I’ve never been able to make tiling work for me regardless of screen size. Windows constantly end up being awkward sizes that cause scrolling that would be unnecessary in a floating WM, and I’m constantly tweaking window sizes to try to make it less awkward. It’s very micromanage-y, and it drives me nuts.
But I don’t live in a terminal and/or text editor — my most frequently used programs are IDEs, VCS UIs, and graphics editors… stuff with lots of panes and palettes and such. Simpler apps get use too, but it’s skewed enough that popping some apps into floating mode in a tiling WM isn’t enough. My ideal environment is floating-first with light optional tiling, like macOS with something like Moom installed.
You could do floating for all windows or for specific app in sway, that I'm using now, with for_window directive.
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> I've not seen anyone using a tiling window manage with 32" and larger 4k displays. It's just an awful experience.
I do this. How is it a bad experience? If anything I get more mileage out of my tiling WM on my large screen than I do on my laptop, where I tend to just use a lot of full screen apps and change tag/workspace a lot.
Something like i3 would work great on a monitor like that. Something like dwm maybe less so.
I don't (because I have 3 24" displays), but at least two of my coworkers have 32" and larger 4k displays and use i3
Meh, I'm so disilluded that I've resorted to using nautilus as my file picker and just drag 'n dropping files from it into the program I want to open the file with.
Maybe you’ve tried it, but Xfce as DE plus i3 is for me the dream team.
I've done this. First I did pure BSPWM, then pure i3. Frankly, it's just too light for me. I spent so much time having to handle all these one-off scenarios like, hot-plugging multiple monitors, bluetooth, audio volume (with switching output when I plug into my big monitor). I had cobbled together so many scripts and I was constantly fighting with something that had worked the prior day. Having an actual environment under the hood made it much nicer.
I've had some weird issues with thunar too. Currently using spacefm after trying several options.
> Take the tiling-wm-pill and move on.
But that doesn't really solve the issue with the file picker...
Yes but in a tilling setting, a new window (say Thunar), right beside your main app is just a single key-combination away. And it places the window correctly too. So you can drag-drop the file and close the auxiliary window.
Also, since a twm is not tied to a DE, you can pick KDE set of apps for example in i3. Then you'd have a file picker with thumbnails.
That said, I do neither of those things and I suffer from this bug. So you are right in a sense.
I'm beyond grateful the Qt is not engineered by KDE.
I am now running a hybrid setup with KDE + i3. It works really well because I get to have all my network settings, display settings, etc on the fly, I can use konqueror, and i still get i3 nicely.
Except... It is. There are a lot of contributions by KDE volunteers to Qt.