I’ve distro hopped quite a bit over the last few years. I’ve realized recently that I tend to gravitate toward KDE Plasma as a desktop environment, but I don’t take advantage of the customization as much as I could.
As I sit here looking through the KDE Plasma settings I’m curious to hear what are some favorite things to change in any DE. Please share what you like to do when you get a vanilla install. Do you have a favorite icon pack? Do you have a favorite theme? Any particular widgets that you would recommend?
I’m sure there is more out there than I can think of. Please share!
I don’t fiddle with my KDE much, but with every fresh install I always set the dock to auto-hide and fit-content.
“Indulge in nostalgia with useless 3D effects.” Is all I needed to read on that page ❤️
Taskbar on the left edge of the screen
E: also trackball instead of mouse.
For ages I’ve had my task bar on the side of my secondary monitor. When I first had to start using win 11 at work and I found out they had disabled the ability to move it I got so irrationally angry lol. It was the straw that broke the camels back and I went home and started down the linux rabbit hole fueled by sheer spite.
Kde made double click default, it used to be single click.
Put it back to single click. So much better.
Adjust focus stealing to your liking.
Adjust the color and width of the shadow to make active windows obvious in a dark theme.
Wobbly windows: but set higher than default.
I miss window shade. Hopefully it gets worked out and returns.
Capslock as control is life changing
Capslock as a layer key to turn hjkl into arrow keys. Easy to setup using Kanata!
I do that with left alt. Then I can use caps as control to move around 1 word
Capslock as control when held, esc when tapped. Best change I’ve ever made on a laptop for using vim keybinds
Capslock as control and emacs keybindings in gnome
What do you use for capslock? Or do you just use shift??
Wobbly windows!
I’m going to install wobbly windows as soon as I get home. So many people to keep suggesting it and it looks amazing lol
With KDE, you don’t even need to install anything. Just tick the box in settings.
Found the capslock user !
So, one thing that Windows 11 did that I think was half good was moving the taskbar stuff to the middle.
I hated it at first (have to use it at work, and still some at home for specific things), but then I used Start11 for a little bit to try to get rid of the shitty start menu changes and noticed an option to keep the icons in the middle but move the start button itself back to the left. And honestly… I think that’s perfect. Puts the programs that are open front and center while keeping the start button in a fixed location next to a corner border so it’s easy to move the mouse to it without hardly even looking.
Anyway, while I didn’t keep Start11 (I never do… Like the program but it’s always been buggy as hell going back at least as far as Start), I did make my Cinnamon, and later my KDE Plasma, taskbar look like that.
Also moved the sys tray next to the start button instead of next to the clock, and with a couple other monitors on the clock side (CPU and memory usage), the taskbar on my system is pretty balanced.
Maybe not as flashy or interesting as what you’re looking for, but it’s a layout I’ve really come to like
(ETA: the centralizing of the taskbar in Windows I think was bad only because it made the one part that should be in a fixed and easy to hit location, the start button, move around based on how many programs are open… I think if they’d gone with centralized programs and left side start button, it would have been much better received overall… But, this is just my opinion so do with that what you will)
On top of @psilotop@lemmy.world’s bit about monitors today being bigger, multi-monitor setups are also more common. I haven’t used a single monitor system as one of my main PCs (work or personal) in at least a decade. Being able to “slam” down and left to hit Start is a big part of why the corner was originally chosen, but if that’s just gonna get you to some random position on the bottom of an adjacent monitor, you’re back to requiring mouse precision, and the button may as well be moved more toward the center to get average travel distance down.
That’s fair enough, though sticky corners are a thing, and my multi monitor layout it would still work (big ultra wide main on bottom, three smaller above)
But I think there’s even value in it just staying in the same place. One big frustration I have with modern UI design is shit moving around, often trying to anticipate what you want, but I’m lost looking for it the last damned place it was. The start button moving a little left and right isn’t nearly as bad, but it’s along the same lines
I think I agree with you about the taskbar, but I would have to try it. I think because monitors are so much bigger than they were years ago, the center makes more sense most of the time. I’m definitely going to play around with moving the components to see where I really like them
I’m super boring and really like vanilla gnome but without fail I always install Blur My Shell. It’s so pretty and it doesn’t mess with the paradigm at all. On my laptop I also have found Bluetooth Battery Meter to be super helpful since I use more wireless devices with it.
I like to set up klipper actions to do automation on certain clipboard actions. I have them for sending certain URLs to special programs, converting credit card charge emails into a new item in a spreadsheet, doing 2 bandcamp things. I used to have some cool automation set up with starting and stopping activities, but they removed that functionality and now I have a worse one with the command output widget. I also love using window rules to customize my programs and where and how they appear.
The email to spreadsheet idea is fantastic! I have my credit card email me for every purchase so the format is uniform no matter where I buy…
Yeah it’s great. I click on the email, press ctrl-a to select all, ctrl-c to copy, win-r to run action on clipboard (there’s an option to do this one automatically). It then runs a script that parses that text to get the good bits and reformat it. I wrote it for Chase, not sure if it’s helpful if you want it.
Mouse Tiler is nice
blur
A must!!
The colour scheme. White screens are one of the things that trigger my migraines.
This in turn leads to my modifying several other visual aspects of the desktop, because a lot of widget set themes come with scrollbars that don’t work well with really dark colours. I also turn animations and automagic snapping and desktop navigation facilities off, because I find them annoying. Kindly behave like it’s 1999 and don’t do anything I don’t explicitly tell you to do, Mr. Desktop.
And then I embed a conky instance in the second desktop for general monitoring—CPU activity (composite and by thread), memory in use, disk space, network usage, temperatures, fan levels, and greediest processes all conveniently in a single view that doesn’t require me figuring out what I did with the window.
If you don’t use it already, be sure to check out Dark Reader. As someone who also suffers from screen induced migraines, this thing has been a game changer.
I chose a slightly different way of achieving what that extension does, and long ago set my browser not to allow websites to choose their own colours. That does partially break a few sites that don’t handle their images properly, but overall it’s workable and gives me white on a slightly different dark colour for each browser profile.
Interesting method, I didn’t even know that was possible. Would you mind sharing how you achieved that? I would be interested in comparing the two. Dark Reader does add some overhead which is noticeable on my older machines
It’s a normal browser setting left over from the early days of the Internet, when most pages did little or no theming (or did it badly). My primary browser is Pale Moon, which exposes the setting as a dropdown under Preferences > Content > General > Colors. Firefox also exposed the setting on its settings page the last time I checked, although it may be a checkbox there. It’s also a boolean in about:config,
browser.display.use_document_colors.Chrome-family browsers may not have such a setting, unfortunately. The only one I keep handy is Vivaldi, which doesn’t have it but does have a “Force a dark theme on all websites” checkbox (under Settings > Appearance > Website Appearance).
in m$win/kde-style-env: two row taskbar, titles always visible (like on win2k/kde3)
also sloppy focus and autoraise for mouse. extremely useful when you use many windows.
I don’t keep much in my taskbar at a time but I do remember using that back in Windows ME I think?
I totally forgot about mouse focus. I’m used to Windows for work but maybe I’ll change to sloppy. I’ll definitely give it a try
btw sloppy focus is also available on m$ windows. they call it x-mouse,you can enable manually thru registry or use a feature in some freeware called winaero tweaker
I’ve been using the CoW compositor lately and it has a neat, but possibly accidental, feature:
You get that “virtual desktop with additional screen space” feature, as was common on older X11 setups, with a little minimap that shows the real screens within the context of the virtual space. What’s unusual is that it’s possible to move the individual screens on a multi-monitor rig independently, rathrr than as a group.
Haven’t had a vanilla install since KDE 5 came out, but the biggest thing I use far from the default install is Karousel
I’m a regular auto tiler, but tried a few alternatives such as Karousel to see how it works out. Its not really for me, but it worked fine and did what it should in my experience. So another recommendation if anyone wants a Niri like experience with Karousel addon. Another curious one is Mouse Tiler, which is a completely different method of manual tiling.
