spin2win VS PaperWM

Have you heard of Phoenix [1]? It seems relatively unknown but I actually found it to work better than Yabai in some ways. The gist is that it basically simulates a tiling wm and virtual desktops by internally tracking state. It's also highly hackable/extensible being written in JS. Spin2Win [2] is a config that's worked well for me.

[1] https://github.com/kasper/phoenix

[2] https://github.com/nik3daz/spin2win

That said, it seems there are no perfect solutions. At work where I can't really be futzing around with window management config I basically just use Raycast + hotkeys and try to keep everything inside maximized application windows. This means using Arc browser (tabbed), iTerm (tabbed), VS Code (with native tabs), etc mapped to cmd+1, cmd+2, cmd+3...Not much "tiling" going on but at least everything is pretty keyboard friendly.

Actually, if you're interested at all, I just, after literally months of reading about this, found a pretty sick solution.

Have you ever heard of Phoenix? https://github.com/kasper/phoenix/. Despite googling around for this exact topic, with 3.8k stars I had never heard of it. Apparently someone has created slim, JS scriptable interface that is basically tailor made toward creating your own tiling WM. I just installed it and loaded one of the examples: https://github.com/nik3daz/spin2win. And what it does is basically ignores the built-in spaces and creates truly virtual desktops by just hiding and resizing windows. And it works pretty well. The response time between switching "desktops" is basically instant.

But with auto-tiling you need to place windows according to a pre-set configuration, it needs to fit whatever layout you want to go for and it needs to be able to resize the window without breaking the content. This works pretty well for libadwaita apps, but a lot of webapps seem to assume a certain minimum window size. Another issue is how to handle modal dialogues, where paperwm for example sets an override to ensure they're not attached to the main window. Should the settings window then be treated as a separate window and tiled, or should it be left floating above all others?

I like Gnome's simplicity, agree with most of its deviations from the tired old Windowsy desktop status quo, and am very happy to depend on all its great integration work. I can't quite live with the simplistic window management, but extensions cover that (as they do much else). With Fedora + Gnome + PaperWM, I'm quite at peace with the current linux desktop situation.

Still I'm looking forward for something like PaperWM to be possible in KDE - or even to write it by myself

I have noticed in one of your comments in this thread that you are looking for novel ideas of the UI look. As others commenters stated, you might be interested in tiling window managers like i3 [0] or sway [1]. They are truly a gem for productivity and sometimes for an eye [2].

However, I love the concept of scrollable window manager like PaperWM [3] is. When I had a smaller screen (24" 16:9) I was complaining a lot on unused space on my screen. With PaperWM I was finally happy with its dimensions, because I could have huge IDE on the left and small part of terminal displayed on the right. That way I knew if something was printed to terminal, while my editor took 80% of the screen.

[0]: https://i3wm.org/

[1]: https://swaywm.org/

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/

[3]: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM

If you want something really different, give PaperWM a shot.

You may want to try PaperWM (GNOME extension) https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM