Window Manager Shill Switches To KDE Plasma 6

I said I would do it and here we are I am now officially a desper environment user I am running K plasma 6 specifically 6.0.1 if you need more proof on a plasma here you go here is the cube which I still don't understand why people actually like if you want to use the cube make sure you have a package called KD addons installed now for context I am typically not a desktop environment user I'm typically not a floating or stacking Window Manager user my entire experience on Linux has been on tiling window managers whether that be I3 sway awesome WM bspwm hyperland maybe there is something else in there as well but I have been using exclusively tailing now you're probably wondering what did I actually install because I didn't change dros to do this I'm still using Arch Linux and on Arch Linux there are a couple of different ways you can actually install plasma you can install the whole plasma group and get a ton of different plasma packages you can install plasma meta which basically is the strict guidelines for how KD probably should be installed and you also have the option of just installing plasma desktop I installed the third option I just installed plasma desktop and install additional things as I actually need them and I kind of wish more people installed plasma the way that I did especially if you have no interest in the rest of the KD applications because plasma has a bunch of weird silent errors and things that just don't make any sense a great example of this is in the system settings display and monitor this is how you configure your monitor layout this is an extra package and it's not an extra package on Arch it is an extra package as per the KD packaging guidelines why why is Monitor configuration an additional module but drawing tablet and game controller configuration are part of the plasma desktop another fun one is with the cube so the cube comes from KD add-ons and to make the cube work you need to make sure you have a dependency called qt6 quick 3D if you don't have that dependency the cube just doesn't do anything there's no error there's no popup nothing tells you why it's not working it just doesn't work now art should be forcing you to install q6 quick 3D if you install KD add-ons but if it's missing the desktop doesn't tell you what's broken it just does nothing one I'm still trying to work out the problem of is if I click containing folder on a wallpaper it right now crashes my system settings so clearly something is missing there and it's doing something but again is not telling me what is missing plasma has a notification game it has a pop-up system and even if you can't tell the user exactly what package they need to install because you would need to add different cases for every single Dro telling the user nothing is always a bug having a silent error is never a good thing thing finding all this out is kind of a side benefit of installing like I did the reason why I did this initially at least is I just didn't care about most of the KD applications I was going to use the applications that I want to use anyway the only part I actually cared about was specifically how the desktop itself actually worked on that note the biggest change for me is getting used to not having tailing again I'm going to say it and I know that some people don't agree with me floating windows absolutely suck there is a time and a place for them but floating by default is not a good experience because what ends up happening is you end up having a bunch of these different Windows all placed around the place and you're like oh well I want to find oh this window oh yeah okay I want to get to this window okay well I got to move this around and move move this around like there's no reason to have to worry about where your windows are placed but it's a floating system I knew I was going into a floating system I can't blame it for being a floating system and plasma does do things to make the floating experience somewhat more tolerable most tiling window managers their floating windows are very basic here we actually have window snapping now I feel like by default the window snapping is a little bit too Le vent so if we go into the window management and then movement section you can change the amount of distance you actually want the snapping to happen I've got it to 25 to snap to the edge and then 10 pixels for snapping into other windows for me that feels comfortable by default it's 10 and 10 and I always end up missing the side here where my second monitor actually starts on that note you can also push the windows into the side to expand them into full screen like this if you push it to this side we can either get a quarter go down further take up half the screen same on the other side now this works great if you have a single monitor I don't so getting it to actually snap in the right location here can be a bit of a challenge I know in a future version they are working on having a fake monitor Edge so it will be a lot easier to drag it into this spot here and actually have it snap onto the correct screen right now though it just doesn't work that well and of course we can't talk about plasma window management without talking about Plasma's native tiling and that is the last time I'm going to call it tiling because is not tiling stop calling it tiling it's a bad Port of Windows fancy zones that doesn't mean it's useless it is a very good Baseline it's just not tiling so if we press Super T which should be enabled by default it's going to bring up this layout now sometimes I've had issues with it actually opening and the entire system locks up but when it does work this is what you get so let's go back down to a single tile here what we can do is choose how we want it to be split let's say I want to have a horizontal split it's going to automatically make this we can go and drag this wherever we want so we want this to be small over here or way over here we could do that or anywhere in between I could then go and split either of these sections as well let's make a vertical split and let's add a floating tile in here as well this one we can drag around wherever we want and also resize as much as we want as well we can also go and change the padding between each of the sections and padding is always nice to have if I now click escape the layout is going to be saved now if I drag a window while holding down the shift key it is going to let me snap into any of those zones I made before let's put it into this one right here make another window put it over here and another window and put it down here this does make things a little bit more convenient but this is only a start to what I would want from tiling now as you can see here I've gone and removed the floating window okay there we go we had the complete lock up of my desktop we'll try that again great that I captured that on video here you go what I would want from an actual tiling system just as a Baseline and I will do a follow-up video on this is if I remove this window here this window then expands into this whole section here and if I remove this window not that window the other window if I remove this window this window expands all the way into this section here that would instantly make it way way more useful if plasma actually wants to have something they call tiling look at the way that tiling window managers work look at the way the new cosmic desktop works what you have right now is not tiling on top of window management I also don't like the way that virtual desktops are handled I have modified my capture because Window Manager users will not believe the way this works what you're seeing right now is all three of my monitors being captured at the same time my two vertical monitors and my main horizontal monitor if I swap to workspace 2 any Window Manager user out there will say oh the monitor you are currently on that is the one that is going to go to workspace 2 no what happens is every single monitor goes to workspace 2 without additional plugins that is the only way that plasma works this is a KD bug report that has been open since 2,05 per screen virtual desktops this is another one I'm going to do a full video on because there is so much bad explanation from the KD developers about why they didn't want to support this it is going to be changing but it should have never been like this in the first place I like having it there as an option if people are used to it keep it there as an option but per monitor workspaces should be supported my other issue with virtual desktops is what exists by default if we go into the system settings and virtual desktops this lets you actually make them by default there aren't any of these there is just one so if you were like me and went to the shortcuts to go and reset up the shortcuts because you knew that whatever they had by default is something you wouldn't like if you then try to switch to a different desktop you would be like huh why can't I switch to desktops turns out the reason you couldn't do it is because they didn't exist yet and there wasn't any indication that there weren't any virtual desktops now when you do make one this thing is going to be added into your panel it shows you what desktop you are currently on but I didn't even know this existed because I didn't have any virtual desktops yet so this didn't exist in the first place so I was just left confused side note if anyone knows of a widget that is far less space absorbing than this something that maybe just lists out the current desktop name let me know in the comment section down below that would be very convenient now there is kind of a hackwork around to make virtual desktops behave in a kind of sensible way if you right click on any window you can go to desktops okay that's a ct6 bug by the way uh go to desktops click on all desktops and then when I swap to a different workspace the window is going to follow you but that also means the extra workspaces on your additional monitors now become unusable because they're being taken up by windows that are following you around the place I just want to have per screen virtual workspaces please please get that resolved as soon as possible now I unintentionally showed it before but a bunch of the desktop effects end up leading to my desktop stuttering the titling editor sometimes doesn't open like in that case if we try it again okay it opened that time and when I close it my mouse stutters for a moment if I go into the overview my mouse stuttered when I opened it my mouse stutters when I close it if I go into the cube find when I open it and then stutters when I close it the micro stutters AR aren't as big of a deal the locking up of my entire desktop and the effect just not running in the first place that made me want to quit plasma the second it happened now for anyone who's like ah Nvidia problems no I am using an AMD 6750 XT maybe it's Wheeling compositor problems I don't know all I know is it annoying now this one I only noticed during the recording I'm making use of a feature called Legacy X11 app support so what this lets me do is pass hot Keys globally into an application running through X11 so my OBS window isn't actually running under whand it's running under X whand so I can do things like pressing F3 it goes over there F2 goes over there F5 does this so on and so forth if I press Super T and then I quit out of that and I now press F5 my hot keys don't work anymore they don't work until I give the window Focus again and now we're good now I know the video is sounding very negative and makes sound like I hate plasma I don't hate it I just think it's very very rough around the edges here's something that actually is good you might notice I have a clock right here I also have a clock on my third monitor as well the way I'm doing this is with the edit mode so what edit mode lets you do is basically add in these things called panels so this bar down here is called a panel or we can add in widgets directly so I want to add in something like an analog clock we can just put this wherever I want it to be put if I want to add something like a application dashboard okay that one is that working I don't know why that's not working is this one of these uh silent errors that breaks I'm going to assume that's a silent error okay let's uh get rid of that one if I had something like a calendar here we go now it says the DAT and all that and I can just put this literally anywhere that I want it to be I can put it on another screen I can bring it back here I okay it's weird when I drag it between screens apparently lags a bit I can make it massive if I want to I can do whatever I want this has tons and tons of customization also if you resize it I think it might change the year you're in why did that happen I was conf I I saw that in the recording if anyone knows why that year changed I definitely definitely want to know there also if you watch someone like n loves Linux you probably know a lot about the floating panel so this panel down here if we somehow get it to bring up the thing I don't know why it's not appearing actually um let's go back in there manage desktop and panels uh there's supposed to be a little popup window that appears here but sometimes it just doesn't appear I'll cut back to when I can get it open yes so I couldn't get the window to appear it just it's not showing up if you do see a dialogue here it'll have the option to switch between floating and not floating I like my bars just being on the bottom of my screen edit mode when it works is really cool but like a lot of things in plasma 6 is still kind of Rough Around the Edges before I move on here is the camera widget a widget which is kind of broken which is firstly hallucinating a second camera which doesn't exist I don't have something called the cam link 4K cam link 4K I just have one camera plugged in also what does suspended mean the camera you are seeing is currently in use so is that supposed to mean it's in use or it's not in use I genuinely don't know I want to try to make this video more positive but it's really really hard one more thing about edit mode if I open up the ad widgets dialogue and then click exit edit mode like this the dialogue actually stays open and from here I can actually still add things but because I'm not in edit mode I can't drag it so I can add these things they just get placed in the default location but like they're just stuck here to go and move them we need to go back into edit mode and now we can do stuff with them okay positive desktop portals one of the issues I had with hyperland is the portal was a little bit flaky for video capture I occasionally had some crashes I had a fairly consistent crash every time I tried to show my desktop after I was showing another capture over the top of it for a reasonable amount of time it would just crash out my entire desktop none of that perfect I close OBS I reopen it remembers what I was capturing before literally not a single problem with portals now let's talk about system settings I'm not going to talk about everything here but I do want to talk about a couple of highlights one of them is the way that shortcuts are handled I changed my mind a bit on this because I actually like the way it's done now if we go to something that has a default shortcut let's say spectacle and then capture rectangular region so you can set as many custom shortcuts as you want you just click cck on add custom shortcut press whatever you want but also that doesn't override the default shortcut so if you want to have multiple shortcuts that all do the exact same thing you can very easily do that but also if you don't like your custom shortcut it is very easy to restore the default you just delete your custom read the original and boom you're done now now my shortcuts aren't going to look anything like yours I do still have a lot of the defaults but a lot of the defaults are things that I wasn't using so I just haven't changed them the ones I am using I've basically poured it over the existing hot keys I had on various window managers into plasma and for the most part I found things that fit on most window managers there is a way to instantly jump your cursor onto another screen it's useful if you're in a full screen game and you want to go and check a browser or something like that I haven't worked out a way to do that yet if anyone knows how let me know down below now desktop effects are where all of your animations live one of them that I think is really useful for videos is if I press super and then plus we have a zoom feature so if we go over here there you go that is how you enable it now you might notice that these are radio buttons here and they do act like radio buttons but they're radio buttons in a list of check boxes they there is a heading that is not here that I don't know why they didn't add but um yeah go and add that side note if you are going to use zoom make sure you change it from the default which is proportional which is genuinely disorientating so proportional is going to follow your mouse around and I would change it to something like push so with push what that is going to do is when you push the edge of your screen now it is going to move this gives you a lot more control over where you're actually placed one effect that I would like to see that I know is in the works is colored window borders because the way the window focus is shown in plasma is not good so it is shown with a window Shadow which I can barely see what I like to see and we do have this really nice configurable accent color is change the focused window to have a border that is your accent color I know some people don't like colored borders you just have it as a desktop effect let me toggle it and we'll be good if you would like to configure that accent color go to the color section under the global theme and you can either pick one of the default colors or use the Color Picker here personally I use the Color Picker pick this red right here if you want to use the same one I have one thing to note about themes is make sure you don't have qt5 CT or qt6 CT installed because if you don't know anything about KD theming like I didn't they will completely break your Global theme just uninstall the package and let KDE do the theming itself now all of this is assuming your system settings is working I have had multiple occasions where it just completely locks up and is not responding we saw that crash earlier with the uh open containing folder so assuming it's good setting your settings is just fine now I hope it doesn't sound like I'm being too harsh here I think overall plasma 6 is a fairly good release and really good relative to the history of the project but it is still fairly rough around the edges at least with 6.0.1 and there's a good reason why they're getting 200 bug reports a day because yes obviously a lot more people are now testing the project but also there are still a lot of bugs that need to be ironed out by the time dros like kabutu start shipping it though we should be on 6.1 and by then I would expect a lot of these early issues to be IND out any big release is going to be rough and for the most part is not as rough as it could be so let me know are you running plasma 6 have you run into any of the issues I've mentioned today whether that be the issues with tiling not being tiling whether it be any of the stutter issues or edit mode completely breaking I would love to know let me know your thoughts down below and if you have some bugs you want to report please don't report them to me if you want to tell me about them please do that but there are proper places to report the bugs as well so let me know your thoughts down below and if you like the video go like the video and if you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here here check out patreon scrib baray Linked In the description down below that's going to be it for me and we are definitely not done here I've still got a bunch of plma videos to [Music] [Music] make something like [Music] this

Channel: Brodie Robertson

Views: 31,012

Keywords: brodie robertson, brodie robertson linux, brodie robertson arch linux, the linux experiment, nicco loves linux, kde, kde plasma 6, plasma 6, open source, foss, best linux desktop, best linux desktop 2024, kde plasma 6 review, plasma 6 review, is kde plasma good, is plasma 6 good, kde plasma tutorial, how to install kde plasma, how to install linux, linux tutorial, arch linux, tiling window manager, window manager, chris titus tech, distrotube

Id: RMJ3QWp7gVU

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2024