ags VS bismuth

Lots of what the article talks about pertains to the difference between a 'full DE' and 'just a WM'. Gnome and KDE fall in the first category. They have a notification system, lockscreens, app launcher, etc by default. Hyprland doesn't. It puts windows on your screen and allows you to control their layout, everything beyond that, you can add yourself.

This article mentions dunst for notifications, Rofi for app launchers, Waybar for a status bar, swaylock for screen locking, ... I've been having a great time using just AGS [0]. AGS, at its core, is a framework to write all of those tools. It is based on the same technology that Gnome Shell uses, i.e. GJS. You can build up all of the widgets you want and need using Gtk and replace all of the tools I mentioned before. But be warned: AGS only provides you with the libraries you need, you'll still need to build the UI yourself. Unless you copy someone else's configuration of course ;)

[0] https://github.com/aylur/ags

The top bar and the dock https://github.com/Aylur/ags

What level are you interested in scripting? In KDE Plasma you can interact with the desktop UI via JS: https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/scripting/

And then for something more sophisticated there are extensions like https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth.

It does all feel a little disorganized/wild-west-y compared to say, a .vimrc with a list of plugins and bindings, which is something that makes a system like Nix (or a fully containerized DE of some kind) appealing

It had, but they are all dead until ported to the new kde 6.

https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/issues/471#issuecom...

This is what I used. I found no good replacement for it and that is what made me switch to hyprland.

one thing i would totally recommend for kde is bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth/

it's tiling for kde and it works REALLY well.

Take a look at a tiling window solution. I'm currently using bismuthwith gives similar arrangement to what you're looking for and helps massively with productivity when working on an ultrawide

As a good halfway house you could do worse than KDE with Bismuth (https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth), which is an add-in that will give you great tiling capability, fully controllable via the keyboard. Couple this with KDE native virtual desktops and you have a pretty decent tiling window manager.

Plasma 5.27 added in some native tiling support. There are also some kwin scripts available to add tiling to it.

https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth

Not-good stuff: This tiling is very incomplete. It doesn't allow you to snap everything to your tiles at once, it doesn't support different tiles per virtual screen/workspace and, perhaps more importantly, with that addition and Plasma 6 on the way, compatibility with Bismuth and similar addons is getting lost.

Since you are already using KDE, you can very easily try how much you like tiling: just install bismuth: https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth It's a plasma add-on that enables tiling in KDE. If you don't like tiling, just disable the plugin again and uninstall bismuth.

No, it doesn't have that. Here is the list of layouts.

No I was talking about Bismuth which was amazing and actively maintained but due to kwin updates it's not working and is apparently not going to be updated