Hacker News Reader

Kwin used to have tiling support builtin. That was removed from core.

There are multiple different Kwin script that add the tiling functionality now. Like this [0] and this [1]

Regarding being lightweight, KDE is very very light these days. In terms of memory usage it rivals XFCE. Not quite sure about power usage, but since Plasma Mobile is being developed and it shares a lot of code with Desktop, I assume it shouldn't be too bad.

[0] https://github.com/lingtjien/Grid-Tiling-Kwin

[1] https://github.com/kwin-scripts/kwin-tiling

I was also wondering why they would have me watch someone's dirty keyboard, sunrise and other apparently meaningless motifs.

The scene with the keyboard with crumbs and hairs tells me that they do not respect their own product enough. A good example on how the effort of hundreds of people that contributed to this awesome release is being ... not appreciated.

It has been my observation that tech people tend to place less emphasis on aesthetics or, god forbid, marketing or sales. This functional fixation is unfortunate - many people do engage in emotions, enjoy looking at pleasant things, tend to appreciate harmony and subconsciously associate themselves with things that bear the same values as they believe themselves to possess.

I don't think a lot of people will find a way to associate with this presentation.

A former KDE user, looking to come back.

I'm not a big fan of "large" DEs, but I take KDE for a spin every other release or so.

The tiling features are all scripts now, they're not part of the base Kwin code anymore. They work pretty well in my experience. (That being said, if you haven't used Kwin in a while, it's worth noting that it also lost window tabbing along the way, so tiling is far less useful than it could be).

In terms of resource use, Plasma 5 is a lot more lightweight and snappier than we've come to expect from KDE in the post-4.0 era :). You can tell it's QML all the way down because the latency is nowhere near as good as in the 3.x days, but it's not too bad, and in terms of resource consumption (RAM, CPU, whatever), it's better than it's ever been in the last 10 years. And it's very good overall.

In terms of power consumption, I can't say I've noticed a difference between KDE and the more lightweight setup that I use. I haven't ran numbers though -- so all I can say is that, if there's a difference, it's small enough that I haven't noticed it. Probably because the biggest power drains account for so much of the power drain that KDE & friends don't account for much anymore :)

> Maybe something is wrong with me, but it irks me that there are 40 seconds of meaningless video before they show stuff in that video. I ended up skipping the video and skimming through the poorly formatted article.

I am a dedicated follower of Plasma and to be honest counting features this is a lame relase.

BUT it's also a LTS release. Some will upgrade specifically for that somehow quality statement. You do not want a ton of new features without time for stabilisation in such a release?

It's true this release doesn't bring is as many features as the last ones. However, the jump between LTS versions wil be impressive. Everything is more polished, more functional, and more intuitive.

I'll upgrade as soon as I can, so I can check out the quick audio device switching. Audio routing in Plasma is featureful but not intuitive.

> But I can imagine that if I had sent it to a bunch of other people who have no interest in KDE they would have closed the page again.

The OMGUbuntu site did a decent write-up:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/kde-plasma-5-18-lts-feat...

Anyway, updating KDE Neon as I'm typing this. Looking forward to new bits of polish :)

The only out of the box tiling feature I'm aware of is the Windows-like hotkeys (meta+arrows) for snapping windows to half or a quarter of the screen.

There are kwin extensions for more extensive tiling support such as: https://github.com/kwin-scripts/kwin-tiling

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-wadsworth-constant

Doesn't seem to work anymore on youtube though