 So I am well known as a guy who likes tiling window managers a lot I prefer tiling window managers more than desktop environments by a wide margin now I have spent a lot of time in desktop environments and I probably will do so in the future But I prefer tiling window managers and it's not even a close thing. I like them for many different reasons In fact, I just recently did a video not too long ago explaining why I like tiling window managers I'll link to it, you know up above here somewhere. It is a well-known fact at this point So when I heard that plasma was building in tiling I was very interested because one of the things that plasma was really lacking was good tiling now They've had scripts for a very long time, but they've been very Hacking now you could get them to work fairly well But they required quite a bit of effort in order to actually, you know get set up and working properly So having it built in by the people who develop plasma seems like a big deal It seems like they would at least attempt to do a good job So what I want to do today is take a look at the 5.27 plasma tiling now I've noted the version number there because that's the version where tiling came into play if you have anything older than that You're not gonna get tiling you'll have to use a script So that's what we're gonna do today, but before I jump into this if you could be so kind leave a like on the Video I'd really appreciate it. It really does help the channel. So that's all the begging for likes I plan on doing Let's go ahead and move on into the actual content. So let me show you My Desktop here. This is plasma on fedora So if I do actually do a neofetch here, you can see that I am in fact on fedora and it is a Very well set up plasma desktop as you can see now What you're seeing in front of you is the traditional tiling that plasma has had for a very long time So if you use super and the arrow keys you can tile your windows Just like so it's just a matter of putting the window where you wanted to go That's the traditional plasma tiling that has been there for a very long time. You can set up key bindings in order to control it It's very useful. It's not unique to plasma XFC does this as well. I think even Genome has the option to do it as well So it's it's a very good and functional way of doing tiling that does not go so far as To claim it's a tiling window manager, right? It's not even meant to be or meant to emulate that type of behavior It's just meant to tile your windows side-by-side or on top of each other or whatever once 5.27 was released We got actual tiling. So Here's the thing Whoever did this I'm pretty sure has never actually used a tiling window manager before so in order to Tile something using the new plasma tiling So the way you do it by default is you press the shift key on your keyboard And then you use your mouse to drag the window and as you can see this selector area pops up It's kind of hard to see with grubbox, but here along the side There's like a shaded version and if you drag your window there It will tile it there if you grab it and shift it over to the other side It will that it will Tile it over there now the one thing that I like about tiling window managers the most is that it's keyboard centric This is not keyboard centric as far as I'm aware now if you hit Super and T it's going to bring up the layout editor. That's what this thing looks like the default layout is actually this one here Which is it has the master in this in the center and then the stacks along the side now There are a couple things about this layout editor thing first of all you can edit the layout So if I wanted to make the master bigger or the center bigger I can do that by dragging and I can even add spawn regions if I want to by hitting split horizontally or split vertically But it doesn't always work. So this time it worked just fine If I added it in a section where it's kind of too small if I wanted to split this horizontally You can see it's not really meant to do that if I split it vertically it works again So you kind of have to know when it will work when it won't work But the problem here is is that you can't save this loud. Let's say that this was your favorite layout This is the layout that you wanted. There's no way to save it, right? You can only load the three pre-configured layouts the side-by-side the one with the big spawn in the middle And then this one here, which looks like this. That's all you can do You can edit them here, but that's not saved at all and again, it's mouse centric It's not keyboard centric, which is one of the best ways of interacting with a tiling window manager Or at least it is the best way I don't think it's debatable that the reason why you'd use a tiling window manager is to use it with your keyboard With the tiling in plasma such as it is now at least by default It seems to be all mouse focus you have to primarily use your mouse to do things Now the reason why I've said it is Primarily mouse focused is because if you go into the shortcuts area of the system settings and you search for tiling Nothing comes up and even if you scroll through the K-Win Section here, which is where you'd expect the tiling stuff to go. There's nothing here for tiling other than the Super and arrow keys, which is you know default, right? That's what these parts these parts here are Those have been there for many many years. There's nothing else here for the new tiling that they've implemented So it's completely mouse focused So that's the reason why I said it feels like whoever Decided to do this has never used a tiling window manager before because that's not how you Interact with a tiling window manager. Can you interact with a tiling window manager with your mouse? Yes, you can of course you can but it's not the primary means of doing so the primary means of doing so in every tiling window manager is With your keyboard. That's the way you do it. So that's my biggest overall complaint is that they've kind of missed the point, right? They've yes, they have tiling here, but it's no better than the tiling that they really already had In fact, it's actually worse because there's no key bindings to do any of the tiling stuff So if I wanted to talk, let me go into a different layout here Make sure that I'm in a one of the more complex layouts either this one here or this one Let's do this and let's say I wanted to tile Let's get rid of some of these windows here for just a minute Let's so to do this I do shift and then drag and it'll drag that over here shift and then drag here Then we'll open up a browser and shift oops shift and drag over here And that's how you would Tile the things that you wanted to tile There's no way of moving those windows with the keyboard You have to use both the keyboard and the mouse in order to do it. That is a complete and utter mess I mean, it's just that's not good. Okay, even Even if you were to want to want to build a tiling window manager that is solely mouse focused You wouldn't want to have a combination of mouse and keyboard. That's just bad design. It's not well done It's not well thought out I would say that they really desperately need to go use a tiling window manager and Actually live in it for a little while to see how this could be done. Well, or here's your thought Let's just copy Bismuth Bismuth was a script that allowed Plasma to have built-in tiling. It was very complex had a ton of key bindings associated with it Was it completely stable? No, but I'm assuming that the KDE devs could put some effort behind that and make it better But they didn't do that. They decided to start from scratch do it their own way and in the process They did this which is not good. Now, let's talk a little bit about more of the features So if you hit super T in order to go back into this thing here, there really aren't that many features So you can add a floating tile, which is a place where you can add like a Spawn point within a space that's floating. You can actually split that floating spawn point Horizontally or vertically as well if you wanted to I don't think it would work all that well things Oh, there's technically two spots here, but you know, you can't edit them That's really weird. That's really not how you want floating things to work But sure and as you can see if you see these buttons up here I'm not sure what those are those came when I hit one of these buttons over here So that's kind of broken as well Then you had the load layout which I've already shown you do you have these are the three layouts that you have And then the other thing that you can do is mess around with the padding So if I do decrease the padding what happens out here is that there's actually less gap And again, that doesn't work as well as you'd want it to because if you have certain applications that can't be made any smaller So like settings here can't be made any smaller in this one direction Than it is right now. So that breaks the tiling, right? It's not meant to be tiled at all So that's another area that's broken But the the gaps they call padding which is fine, right? You can add the padding But again, I'd like a key binding to do that that'd be cool I'd like a keyboard binding for all of it to be honest with you Now maybe it's possible that there is tiling key bindings here somewhere else And I just don't know where those are or they're they're located in some weird Place or maybe you have to add them manually not sure I have searched through this a little bit But you know the shortcuts are in such a disarray I would say that it's kind of hard to find things and it's possible that they do exist and I'm just not finding them So that's one thing. So yeah, that is plasma tiling I'm gonna actually change that padding back up to where I had it and see if that makes it look a little bit better Yeah, that at least added it made it look like tiling again So that is plasma tiling. So if I so the thing about tiling in a tiling window manager is when you spawn a brand new Window, you know where it's going to go, right? so in say q-tile or or BSPWM or DWM or whatever you hit super enter And you're going to get a brand new window. It's going to be your terminal, right? And when that spawns it's going to be where it's supposed to go So it's either gonna be at the top of the stack or the bottom of the stack depending on how the window manager has set it up Right, it's always going to spawn all new windows are going to spawn in the same place And this one does too, but it spawns them all in the middle and none of these things are actually tiled They're just in the center for some reason, right? That if I wanted to tile them I'd actually have to tile them on top of one of my other windows because the Layout that I have chosen only has three spawn points, right? There's no adding onto spawn points unless you go into these Layout editor and split this say vertically like so and then I could take this Console here and actually do this and have it tiled like that But I have to go edit the layout and then put the window where I want it instead of having it automatically spawn in a new Spawn point, right? It doesn't create spawn points automatically It just keeps adding editors or it keeps adding adding clients I should say on top of each other in the center And then if you want to move those anywhere you have to move them on top of things you already have or go into The layout editor and actually add a spawn point so you can spot then drag the client To the new spawn point that you created that is just I can't even begin to tell you how you know I don't like to say bad things about developers because develop the open source developers do wonderful work And they do it mostly for free now the Katie developers You know that they're a mixture of volunteers and people who get paid I don't I don't care about all any of that, you know support them and plasma overall is a wonderful thing But whoever came up with this they didn't do a good job. Okay? This is bad. Okay, and it's not even it's not even as if it's buggy Which is my primary complaint about plasma as it usually is right usually my my complaints against plasma Or is that is buggy, right? It's I call it buggy if they should you know Stop coming up with features and you know fix the bugs that they already have You know, that's my usual complaint against plasma this time. They've done something and it's just bad Okay, now I will put the usual for proviso on this that maybe I'm doing something completely wrong but as I see it right here, this is not a good experience and There's no reason why anyone would want to use this now It's possible that I'm looking at this from the wrong perspective, right? So I'm a tiling window manager guy I'm very used to using tiling window managers in a certain way, which I think is the default way I don't think I use tiling window managers in a weird way So I think if you you're coming from a tiling window manager and you see this You're gonna be just like me like what is going on? Why is it like this? But it's possible that if you are a plasma user Someone who's always used plasma or maybe you're coming from genome to plasma and you see this Maybe it makes perfect sense to you, right? Maybe you like the combination of mouse and keyboard to manage your tiling Maybe that's perfectly fine for you And maybe my bias towards tiling window managers as I expect them to be is coloring my Perspective towards the tiling such as it is that's totally possible. I don't think so But it's possible now. See the thing is is that this has been done well or at least fairly well So there are two plugins for granone. There's a material shell and there's pop shell I can't remember which one came first one of them is based off from the other It doesn't really matter and I have my problems with pop shell and material shell. They're they're not perfect But they've done a fairly good job Of emulating what a tiling window manager is supposed to do and they've done it in a gnomish way, right? They've managed to keep the workflow of gnom in such a way that it fits very well into a tiling window manager Kind of setup. So that has been done before well inside of a traditional desktop environment The plasma version is a swing and a miss. It's just not good. So That is it for this video. I don't like to be completely negative About anything that developers do but sometimes developers you just you whiffed, right? And this is one of those cases where it's just not good So that is it for this video if you have thoughts on the whole tiling aspect of plasma Or perhaps I've missed something leave those comments in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you You can follow me on masses on our odyssey those links will be in the video description If you haven't already drop a like on this video, I'd really appreciate it It really does help the channel You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast links for libera pay and youtube will be in the video description as well Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon youtube You guys are all absolutely amazing without you the channels were not anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. You guys are awesome. Just Thank you so very much for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time