KDE is great. It’s probably my favorite desktop environment, and I’ve been on a bit of a hopping spree lately. It’s mostly stable, and offers a ton of customizability baked into the system menus itself.
Still, by nature of its design, KDE does not support tiling at all, at least in its vanilla state. Yes, there are ways to manually tile windows together, but it’s a lot less intuitive than proper auto-tiling layouts.
Disappointed as I was, I decided to dig up some recommendations. Of these, I had used Bismuth previously. Unfortunately for me, Bismuth didn’t have any support for Plasma 6, which is the current version of KDE.
Things changed when I laid eyes on Krohnkite. This simple extension made tiling in KDE a lot more effortless, while retaining enough customizability.
I switched my Linux desktop environment from GNOME, and it’s so much better
One offers more control, the other is a bit more opinionated.
Installing Krohnkite was a bit of a challenge
Make sure to grab the most up-to-date fork
Krohnkite isn’t a particularly new concept. Tiling on KDE Plasma has always existed in some form or another, by the use of external scripts. Of these, the most popular one has to be Bismuth, but that does not have any Plasma 6 support, which made it pretty much a dead end.
Thankfully, the release of Plasma 6 was accompanied by multiple, compatible alternatives, with Polonium being one of the standout picks. Unfortunately for me, Polonium never really felt as polished as Bismuth, which meant that I had to go look for an alternative.
Eventually, I stumbled across Krohnkite and its original GitHub repo, but I was bamboozled yet again. Turns out, there was a more up-to-date fork available in Codeberg, and one that seemingly took care of most of my issues.
There is a version of the Krohnkite fork from the same developer on GitHub. Avoid this version, since it’s not updated anymore. Go to Codeberg instead.
Setting it all up
Surprisingly configurable
Getting back to the installation, it was as simple as downloading the file from the Releases tab. Or so I thought. Turns out, the Releases tab was a bit out of date when compared to the latest version.
This meant I had to manually compile the KWin script from its Git repository, and following the instructions listed on the Codeberg page to a T. I finally used go-task command to create a KWin script file.
With the script ready, all I had to do now was enter KDE settings. Navigating to Window Management and finally the KWin Scripts section, I could finally select, install and enable Krohnkite.
I was eager to experiment a little, but Krohnkite does have a very unfortunate drawback — important config changes require a full reboot. Spending some time here and there, I was finally able to get Krohnkite looking a whole lot better by adding in gaps, setting a spiral tiling approach and pushing the taskbar to the top.
All windows seemed to lack borders of any sort though, which made it look a bit off. Installing KDE-Rounded-Corners helped fix this by letting me add in a reasonable border around the sides of the window.
Krohnkite also has a built-in menu to blacklist certain applications from being automatically tiled, which I found to be very helpful. So far, it’s pretty much transformed my entire workflow, and I can’t recommend it enough.
A less transformative approach
KDE’s built-in manual tiler works
Of course, not everyone likes tiling. For those who just want a regular, floating desktop environment but also some of the functionality offered by a tiling WM, KDE’s built-in snap-to-tile tool should be good enough for most use cases.
It’s pretty similar to Windows, and lets you manually tile apps on a workspace. Hitting Win+T on the keyboard brings up the tiling menu, which has a ton of options baked in, such as being able to adjust the number of splits and window gaps.
It also supports floating tiles, and is quite intuitive. This utility is built into a default KDE Plasma 6 install, and is worth a look at.
KDE really isn’t designed for tiling
After having spent an awful lot of time exploring the various tiling options in KDE, I’ve come to a very unfortunate conclusion — they’re all severely limited in their functionality. At least when compared to a dedicated tiling window manager, but that’s to be expected.
KDE isn’t really designed for tiling, and no number of extensions will change that since you’re constantly fighting the default behavior. If you’re looking for something with basic tiling features, however, scripts like Krohnkite are a decent enough choice.
If you’re looking for something better, though, Pop Shell on GNOME or even COSMIC are good ways to go.
