- I am very unlikely to switch away from KDE Plasma 6
- I would anyways like to try Sway or the like
- I dont use virtual desktops and find just navigating through a bottom taskbar makes more sense for me
- I have many apps fullscreen, and would never tile more than once vertically, as I am on a Laptop
- I want: NightLight, tray icons, a good app menu, many KDE Apps (Dolphin, Kate, Ark, Gwenview, Spectacle Edit feature at least)
Are Wayland WMs ready for this use case? What would you recommend to fill these exact requirements?
Yeah, LXQt is certainly a matter of taste. They introduced Qt6 support with the recent 2.0 release, which might not yet be on Fedora. You can also set its theme and icons to look like Plasma, although it’s still not as consistent.
But yeah, if you don’t care for LXQt’s applications, you might rather like to try a minimal window manager, where the configuration is done via config file and the panel etc. is mostly DIY.
Although, it certainly still does not sound to me like you’d prefer it over KDE…
Haha no not really.
I look forward to pure Rust COSMIC, which works pretty well. But they need to do so much ground work, and their UX (overview, app menu, …) is in parts pretty ugly.
I wonder what the best alternative to KWin is. Wayfire? Labwc?
Well, I haven’t tried any of them. Apparently, LabWC is built to work similarly to Openbox, which I used before switching to KDE Plasma.
Openbox could do most things that Kwin could, although it had some big omissions, like no way to tile a window by dragging it to the screen edge (you could set up a keyboard shortcut to resize and move a window, though).
According to the LXQt link above, it also doesn’t have desktop effects, if you want/need those.
But yeah, I know nothing about Wayfire…
And that was back when both used XOrg to do the heavy lifting.
Wayfire is used in a lot of minimal desktops. Raspberry PiOS uses it for their new Wayland desktop.