Try wobbly windows, like in Garuda Linux

Kind of a small thing, but I use an Ultrawide monitor with Sway, so I wrote a oneliner to swap to a higher or lower display scale depending on the workspace I’m on. I like to game in full rez while I’d write code or read with a HiDPI resolution that’s easier to squint at. Also adding hotkeys to change scaling on demand is nice

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.

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.

Mine.

My biggest customizations are all of the software I install and use to do things with the computer.

Setting Caps Lock as the Hyper modifier key.

Setting a keyboard layout that is comfortable for both typing programming symbols and the own language (I use UK international). Consistency is king here.

And configuring the compose key.

Otherwise, I don’t customize much, I think of it as a time sink.

KDE here.

Icons: Candy; Plasma Style Sweet; Window decs : sweet-dark; Autohide Icons-only task manager at the bottom (RIP Latte :( ), always on top panel for my secondary monitor, autohide top panel on the primary.

I actually use and like Activities, I have General, Game, Code, System, Work all with their own workflows and pinned apps etc.

I lean pretty heavily on mouse gestures using logid with a MxMaster 3. Switch activities, control music, switch apps etc.

I have the gesture button pop up Kando which can do ALL sorts of things, basically I can do 90+% of things super fast without touching the keyboard. Not that I dislike the keyboard, using it now, but sometimes I don’t want to bother.

Top centre of panel has a command output widget with cat CurrentShort.txt which pulls local temp/humidity from a couple of sensors via HomeAssistant. Hover has weather scraped from Aus BoM and a bunch of other informative stuff and if I click it it runs a script with

kdialog --geometry 1024x1024 --textbox /dev/stdin <<< $(cat CurrentInfo.txt)

which pops up a dialog with a weeks forecast among other things. I also use the command output widget for cpu/gpu temps and fan speeds to the left of the status bar, which is on the right.

The Wunderground widget is pretty cool too, find local weather stations and pop them in a panel.

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.

kde plasma

Mouse: increase pointer speed to 0.8

Sound: change volume increment to 2%

Sound: mute notification sounds

---

Colours:

Breeze Dark

Material Black Blueberry Icons

Oxygen Neon Cursors

KDE-Story-Blue-SDDM (login screen) with a different background

---

Screen Locking:

Never

---

Power Management:

When inactive: Do Nothing

Dim automatically: Never

Turn off screen: Never

---

Session:

Ask for confirmation: Deselect

On login: Start with an empty session

---

---

Panel:

Long date

Date beside time

Modify system tray settings to show what I want

---

---

Widgets:

On panel:

Thermal monitor (1 for cpu, 1 for gpu)

Memory Usage

Desktop Folder

Folder View (set to a folder where I keep docs and spreadsheets)

Wastebin

Shutdown or Switch

I always install Guake. It’s a drop-down terminal emulator and it can be heavily configured with hotkeys. I have it pop open/close with one key and I can split the terminal horizontally or vertically as many times as I want a couple other hotkeys.

It’s so ridiculously efficient (as a developer) that I can’t stand to not have it installed at this point.

Installing the Intel One Mono font, so much easier to read

In KDE my favorite is an extension to the window manager, for auto tiling: https://codeberg.org/anametologin/Krohnkite or install it from Settings > Window Management > KWin Scripts, then click “Get New” and search for “Krohnkite” by anametologin. Development is a bit slow at the moment, but it does the job well.

As you would expect, it does tile the windows automatically. I like that there are different layouts available, meaning different logic how a window should be placed and sized. I can switch between a layout when needed, and add exceptions to specific windows or applications to not tile them. So the usual stuff. It comes with some features not seen in other tiling window managers. In example I can convert any window into a “Dock”. A dock would then make the window be always on the top, bottom, right or left side of the window, similar to the KDE bar. And a window is tiled accordingly, so its always visible. Super cool.

Haven’t had a vanilla install since KDE 5 came out, but the biggest thing I use far from the default install is Karousel

Kitty mouse cursor