Thinking of switching to a window manager (WM)

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1

I am currently on plasma wayland and I wanted to try i3 or sway, I have never before tried a tiling window manager before, what are the pros and cons of it?
and how would I go about installing or changing? I don’t want to lose the setup I have currently with the apps installed in the root, etc… (home is a separate partition).

2

A tiling window manager is an acquired taste :slight_smile: I never really got used to it. I - kind’a - like the floating window paradigm, but one has to try.

You are right, i3 and sway are the most known tiling window managers.

  • i3 is using x11
  • sway is using wayland

sway is a drop-in replacement for i3.

There is no issues running either of them side-by-side with Plasma.

The only place where things can get weird is if you run Gnome or Xfce side-by-side with Plasma, the reason being they are fundamentally different.

Have fun :slight_smile:

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3

hi

Hyprland is also a good idea (dynamic tiling) ..

view videos and one arch install

before, create a new user

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4

Why not try Krohnkite KDE plugin before moving to a different WM? You’ll get the idea of a tiling WM without moving from plasma.

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8

@papajoke
I’ve heard of it before but never gave the chance of looking into it, I’ll definitely give it a look now, Thank you

@bananamangodog
sounds interesting I’ll give it a look, thank you

@linux-aarhus
thanks for your response and information, I have tried to get i3 installed previously but by no luck, something wasn’t working on having them side-by-side with plasma, is there any thing extra that I need to do?
what I installed i believe was the i3-wm package from the extra repo.
sway sounds like the way to go since we’re already using wayland.

Mod edit: Consecutive posts merged. Please edit your previous post(s) instead to add further information.

9

I went same way in 2024, I moved from Plasma to Hyprland

I didn’t any special preparations - just installed hyprland package and several other to do thing around it, configured it to use my themings from KDE and that’s it. No new users, no voodo and it works alongside KDE on same user.

Pros:

  • you configure everything - you can have things that in other DE would be hard to achieve
  • fast changes - that’s true especially in Hyprland - new features appear very fast compared to other WM (or even DE)
  • you are more aware what programs you run
  • it’s tiling so windows do not cover each other - that’s what most appeal to me in WM
  • keyboard is all you need (though you can use mouse if you want)
  • you will understand why DE are masterpiece and why you’ll never return to any DE :stuck_out_tongue:

Cons:

  • you configure everything - if you don’t have time or passion for experimens it will be pain (though if you do it properly you do it only once)
  • changes - from time to time you meet breaking changes - not true to all WM, but Hyprland is more actively developed than others and from time to time you meet breaking changes - eg. on v0.55 released yesterday you need rewrite all configs to lua (and that also mean all old config tutorials will be trash :face_with_tongue:)

Maybe later I will write some very simple tutorial how to install and configure Hyprland alongside KDE. I just need little time and inspiration :wink:

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10

imo this one is the best,most polished with plenty of options for configuration and made with love and care.

you can play with it in a VM without committing.

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11

You should mark your last backup before messing to make it easier to wind back.

Also, you could try a VM or dualboot for a better test drive without compromising your system.

12

if you fancy X11 stacking WM with no configuration fuss, iceWM highly recommended

13

I also know nearly nothing about i3-wm and sway. (But I used to run a dozen or so of window managers at once.)

And this sounds fairly easy to run along side another DE.

Did you disable plasmalogin before you launched?

Did you launch via the tty or a login manager? (with sddm, or lightdm works too)

If the former, what is your .xinitrc?

That’s before we’ve done any configurating of sway itself…

The first point the Arch wiki goes into, is that you pick one of either:

  • systemd-logind and polkit
  • seatd

Manjaro does come with both of the first method, and it makes sense to use it. But I imagine the configuration may be more complex here.

Which is configured by default? What did it error?

14

Unnecessary. :wink: Plasma has built-in tiling. You can create the tiling layout by pressing MetaT, and then you can configure your other shortcuts for moving your application windows into the desired tiles.

i3-wm runs on X11, but Plasma now defaults to Wayland, and X11 support will be dropped from Plasma completely when Plasma 6.8 is released. Therefore, if you really do want a tiling-only window manager — and just as for @linux-aarhus, it’s not my thing either — then you are better off with hyprland.