- I am very unlikely to switch away from KDE Plasma 6
- I would anyways like to try Sway or the like
- I dont use virtual desktops and find just navigating through a bottom taskbar makes more sense for me
- I have many apps fullscreen, and would never tile more than once vertically, as I am on a Laptop
- I want: NightLight, tray icons, a good app menu, many KDE Apps (Dolphin, Kate, Ark, Gwenview, Spectacle Edit feature at least)
Are Wayland WMs ready for this use case? What would you recommend to fill these exact requirements?
Can you tell what your motivation is? KDE Plasma fulfills these requirements. Do you just want to try something more lightweight? Do you want a tiling window manager?
Even if you want tiling, Krohnkite is available for Plasma 6. It was enough for me to switch away from Sway, since I care less about minimalism.
Is Krohnkite available for Plasma 6? My understanding is that Kwin Scripts need to be updated, or at least re-uploaded, as Plasma-6-compatible. Presumably that’s not the case for Krohnkite, since it’s been unmaintained for a while…?
Personally, I’m using Polonium.
- I want an automated Window manager that is light. KWin rules dont work that well for me, as I get tons of dialog windows in fullscreen.
- More lightweight. Plasma is a dependency mess, I opened a Goal to make this less bad, and I am experimenting with a minimal, Qt6 and Wayland only install
Automatable (configuration-less) is indispensable. I got used to it with bspwm, and after using that for a while, switched to herbstluftwm and realized I’m stuck. I don’t think I can go back to a WM with a configuration file anymore. Even the different between i3 and fully config-less like hlwm is stark once you’re on the other side.
What does this mean? You do a manual action once and it always uses that position?
Alright, well, I haven’t looked into the Wayland tiling window managers yet, so I can’t say, if there’s maybe something that fits exactly right, but anyways.
KWin rules dont work that well for me, as I get tons of dialog windows in fullscreen.
You should be able to customize the rule to fix that. In the property “Window types”, deselect “Dialog Window” (or frankly probably everything except “Normal Window”).
As for a more lightweight option, you could keep an eye out for LXQt. They don’t have Wayland support ready yet, but plan a release this autumn: https://lxqt-project.org/blog/2024/04/15/wayland_faq/
It integrates various things from KDE and the KDE apps should feel at home there, while they’re also pursuing the goal of using few resources.
I don’t know how that impacts which dependencies are being used, but there probably is an impact.
LXQt kind of lets you choose what window manager you want to use inside of it. See “Which compositor is used?” and following questions in the link above.
I don’t believe, it comes with a NightLight feature out if the box, but there’s probably sone standalone application for that.
And well, whether its app menu is good, that’s certainly a matter of taste. It’s definitely serviceable, as far as I remember, but it doesn’t have the amazing search of Plasma, for example.
you could keep an eye out for LXQt.
I did. Looked at the desktop and it looks horrendous. pcmanfm-qt is the only usable app (and I find it second best filemanager after dolphin).
Their packages are supposedly very outdated on Fedora, which I didnt verify. And using Ubuntu base is a nogo for irrational reasons.
On Fedora they still rely on tons of Qt5 just like Plasma, which I find unacceptable.
Also I never used a Desktop where compositor settings are simply unsupported. It may run, but you still need config files, and I wonder why use settings then.
I really dont need so switch, KDE is awesome. It is not a pain anymore since plasma 6, Fedora Kinoite is very well maintained, Flatpaks work well, it has the best app support of all, legacy support, theming, cursors.
Its literally just for the curiosity.
I have a spare SSD where I try COSMIC too. Its tiling is usable thanks to some random dude that joined Fedora and created a SIG 2 months or so after that and now packages all the apps (He added drag to tile support). Thanks btw.
But it looks pretty ugly, it mimics the useless GNOME top bar, the app menu is kinda bad, so you would need to write at least 2 applets and replace the preinstalled ones.
Not a dealbreaker, and it works really good.
