I’m currently using Fedora KDE Plasma, but I’d like to try out a tiling window manager. What would you all reccomend? I use my computer for school, so I would like it to be stable.
Distro isn’t important for tiling, just the window manager. I’d start with i3 personally, it’s been around a long time, which means the documentation is fairly plentiful.
can I get that on plasma?
Possibly? Though I wouldn’t recommend it. I tried that with xfce once, and it technically worked, but tiling window manager and desktop environments tend to have different aims. A desktop environment like plasma will have everything bundled together and playing well as a whole, while a window manager like i3 will be barebones and expect you to pick out the pieces yourself. DE’s are much more beginner friendly, while WM’s are great if you want to get as much customization as possible. Which will better suit you depends on your needs.
Cool, thanks for the explanation.
You should try Fedora Sway in a Virtual Machine to see if you’d like it
In my day (today) we would create a test user, install a new WM and try it. I don’t get the “install the full distro on a VM just to try a program just a few kbs in size”…
You get the whole experience including installing your necessary software
Again, how is it different than installing directly on your machine? Especially when you have a package manager that can rollback the installation?
Well, as I said, it gives you the whole thing from scratch, in addition it doesn’t fuck with your menus. Finally, and most importantly, maybe people don’t like experimenting on their main machine.
Good idea, I’ll do that.
I’m surprised no one mentioned this if you are already using kde
It seems to be no longer updated, but I’ll try it out, it looks cool.
As a fan of both Fedora and KDE, I’d say there are better alternatives than Fedora KDE Spin.
I don’t see how this is relevant
You can easily install and configure a tiling window manager on any distro, so you should not switch an entire distribution and your base because of that. Unless off course you want to, but its not difficult. If you install a tiling window manager from your repository, then read the documentation how to set it up correctly and log out your current user session. Then in the login screen, you should be able to select what window manager or desktop environment you want to use.
But be careful, lot of window managers are still not supported in Wayland and the other way, some of the new window managers are Wayland only. The usual suspects would be probably Sway or Hyprland on Wayland? There is also Qtile, but that is for people who want to configure and write Python source code, as the configuration is in Python language (BTW my favorite tiling window manager, but not for everyone). EndeavourOS used to have a Qtile spin, but they stopped that not long ago.
But if you really must switch the distribution, then there might be a few preconfigured tiling window manager distributions:
- Fedora with Sway (on Wayland): https://fedoraproject.org/spins/sway/
- Fedora with i3 (on Legacy X11):
No idea what distro you’re currently using but generally you can install whatever window manager/desktop (gui) you want
For a tiling wm I’d recommend hyprland. It’s not the most stable but I’ve had minimal issues with it and it’s really easy to get started with. You can install it alongside gnome/kde I believe and switch between the two on login so if you break one you’ve still got the other
Cool, I’ll check out out.
Bear in mind most tiling wms don’t come with much installed by default, you’ll need a bar and a launcher at least
If you like fedora as a base, you can install the Gnome version of fedora and install the Pop Shell. It has autotiling that you can turn on and off while you get used to it if you want. Its what I run on Nobara and it works perfectly fine for me.
When using KDE, press meta-T to activate the equivalent of Windows Power Toys’ Fancy Zones.
You can then set tiling zones and when you drag a window, hold shift at the same time to lock it in one of the zones.
Little bit of a thread hijack. But maaaaaybe a recommendation for OP as well.
I’ve never tried a tiling wm before. What does it do that’s so much better than say, a gnome extension? For example, I’m running a gnome extension called grid and I LOVE it. I can tell it to break my screen up into rows and columns with a simple 5X8 or 4X4 command. Then set as many hot keys as I want to move things around and scale the size. It auto tiles and does intelligent window things. Basically I spend all my time with my entire screen tiled with random stuff, but I can move it around easily, not have to write scripts, and still have all the gnome interface stuff as well. What am I missing? If not much, maybe OP, you’re just looking for something like the extension I’m using?
I’m mostly looking for the layouts for different things, but a kwin script that someone else suggested might suffice.
