linux-window-session-manager VS bismuth

I doubt I'll have any insights to solve the actual problem you're having, but I and others may have suggestions for waking it less painful to restart your workstation. For example, I have a script I run for to restore my windows for my day job. What are you running your containers on? Could starting all of those up be easily scripted? As for window restoration, I use lwsm. It's not perfect out of the box, I had to add an application definition or two, but now it's what allows me to launch my work windows in just a few moments

This might work for you https://github.com/johannesjo/linux-window-session-manager I have not tried it.

I implemented a workaround by installing the npm package linux-window-session-manager and then using crontab to launch it on boot. It doesn't auto-save the session on shutdown though. I have to do it manually.

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