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.
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.
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
Also available through KDE Settings > Window Management > KWin Scripts > [Get New…] . Installing it through this method should automatically update whenever its updated.
Yeah, and you don’t have to know which fork to choose. Only the compatible fork will show up in the search.
(I was going to recommend that, but had something in the back of head, that you needed a manual step to enable the configuration. But I just saw that this is described in the Plasma 5 version, not the Plasma 6 fork, so I guess, it’s not necessary anymore…)
Well, PopOS is a distribution, based on Ubuntu, shipping a desktop. That desktop was formerly a customized GNOME, now they have their completely own desktop environment.
The tiling might be similar between both but their GNOME extension is probably deprecated now.
Cosmic has dynamic tiling, while KDE has many manual tiling features which may be less efficient but require nearly no setup.
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.
I believe, that’s something which became impossible with Wayland?
But it wasn’t very good under X11 either. Even back then, it was much less clunky to use the various KWin scripts, which offer tiling. Well, and by now Plasma has built-in semi-automatic tiling, which those scripts basically just configure, so they do now feel quite smooth.
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.
