I was keeping myself on Plasma 5.x until recently. I got so accustomed to the Bismuth window tiling script for KWin that I couldn’t imagine myself updating to Plasma 6.x where Bismuth doesn’t work.

Unfortunately (?), one of the recent Debian updates broke Bismuth in Plasma 5.x as well, so I had nothing keeping me on the old version anymore. I’m now (again) running the development version of (most) KDE software.

Since the update, I managed to make the Qtile tiling window manager work with Plasma to some extent. But the integration between Qtile and Plasma I hacked was less than ideal, and I kept switching between KWin which worked perfectly, as KWin does, but without tiling, and my Frankenstein Qtile which didn’t work that well, but it had tiling.

Maybe I’ll write about it if I get back to hacking Qtile, but that might not happen any time soon because…

Krohnkite

Then I saw the news that the predecessor of Bismuth – the Krohnkite script has been ported to KWin 6 – see the announcement on reddit, github to get and review the code, and kde store for the package you can install.

Huge kudos to all who are involved in the rebirth, the script works as well as it did with KWin 5.

Window decoration

The only thing missing was the simple ‘just a line around the window’ window decoration that Bismuth had.

Now we have that as well, I’ve ported the original Bismuth window decoration to KWin 6 (nothing huge, just a few tiny changes to make it compile). The code, and the installation instructions are available on github.