I’ve been using Linux for a over a decade, but haven’t used anything Gnomey in a while. I gave PopOS another try the other day because I needed a simple distro to put on a home PC for my partner to use. This is the most usable Gnome distro I have ever found!
I won’t be switching myself anytime soon, but I really like the way the tiles on Cosmic expand to always keep the screen full. I know KDE can tile using shortcuts, but have ant of you come across something on KDE that autoresizes the tiles like Pop does?
KDE has native tiling built in. Simply press the (default) hotkey Win+T to set up your tiling zones, and then hold shift while moving a window and it’ll snap into that area.
Should note that this is still a manual process. For auto-tiling, you want e.g. Krohnkite.
That’s manual tiling with the mouse. It’s not the same as auto tiling like PopOS does.
This is a cool tip. Not the autoexpanding tiling that Pop has, but still very useful. I wish I had had this on my work computer.
Not familiar with PopOS Tiling, but my goto tiling for KDE is Krohnkite It can be installed inside of KDE via Settings / Kwin Scripts / “Get new…” It has lots of keyboard shortcut and of course you can change them.
The one you linked is only for KDE Plasma 5. For Plasma 6, you would use this fork: https://codeberg.org/anametologin/Krohnkite
How do you change the keyboard shortcuts in Krohnkite?
You change the shortcuts in the Plasma shortcuts window. Just type in the KDE shortcuts search bar “krohkite” to show matching entries only.
If I you’re using the 24.04 version you’re not using gnome, you’re using COSMIC. It is much smoother than the gnome-based DE was.
Oversimplification. COSMIC lacks like 95% of what GNOME has that is important for regular users, like the vast extension ecosystem, GSConnect or remote RDP login as simple examples.
Just to clarify: the “much smoother” is subjective and might be an oversimplification, but the “not using Gnome” part is correct.
Personally I don’t use any Gnome extensions and have much preferred Cosmic to the old Pop Shell. YMMV.
Yes, Krohnkite on KDE auto-resizes window tiles and keeps the screen full. It’s a default setting (monocular view) but can also be turned off.
To use krohnkite you can add it from within KDE - go to Settings > Window Management > KWin Scripts. Then top right select “Get New…” and type K in the search box and it’ll be one of the top options.
It works well but you may need to log out and and back in after enabling it to see some of the changes. Also you will probably want to change other KDE panels and layouts to fit how you want to use the desktop in a tiling set up (and there are plenty of widgets available and window animations to add - like Geometry - if you want to a specific tiling set up and look).
KDE is incredibly customisable, but for tiling it may take a little work to get it exactly where you want it. Also worth backing up your settings folders once you’ve got it how you want it (Konsave for example, or manually)
Thanks for the primer on KDE tiling. It’s been a while since I tried, but this will give me a better starting point!
Cosmic runs its own window manager called
cosmic-comp, whereas Gnome uses Mutter. The tiling is baked into the Cosmic window manager, whereas you’d need to use an extension to get the same functionality on Gnome.Glad to hear you’re liking it, though! While I currently use Gnome with the PaperWM extension, Mutter is frustratingly behind on some current WM improvements (without good reason, IMO).
If you enjoy the tiling aspects, check out similar projects like Niri, as their window management shares some of the same codebase! Lots of neat projects out there, these days.
By “shares some of the same codebae”, I assume that you mean both COSMIC and Niri use the Smithay Wayland support library? Or that both Niri and GNOME use xdg-desktop-portal-gnome?
Smithay, yes
Interesting that you are using PaperWM but recommending Niri.
It’s in my plan to switch, actually. The only reason I haven’t is because I need to make sure I know how to use certain Pipewire inputs with the window manager. I’ve seen that it does work, but I need to know how to do it myself before I make the switch.
Used to be that KDE would let you run other window managers than the default kwin. If that capability still exists, you might just be able to borrow Cosmic’s WM and implant it in your KDE session.
BTW back in KDE 5 I did that, used an alternative tiling window manager (I think it was i3wm) instead KWin. It worked, but it had its own set of problems. Not sure if it is still possible, but based on my prior experience I wouldn’t recommend it anyway. Instead the tiling script / addon Krohkite should be used, as people recommend. I use it myself (and I am a tiling window manager guy) and it works well, as it is well integrated and smooth experience in KDE.
