OpenSuSE Tumbleweed was acting squirrelly, so I downloaded an ISO and installed the latest OS from scratch. That was a huge mistake. Now, sometimes my machine spontaneously reboots, and other times windows get blocked for keyboard input.
On the good side, getting back to a working production system was never easier: delete the HDMI sound card and sound works again, add the external repos and codecs, and YouTube works again, add tesseract-ocr and The GIMP, and I can do my web work again. Install my Epson printer, and I can print a document for an upcoming event I’m a volunteer for.
On the bad side, that brand-spanking-new install came with Wayland and KDE 6, which is so new that it doesn’t have automatic window tiling. I hate it.
Whining about a problem isn’t the same as proposing a fix, so here’s what I wish I could fix:
When a new window opens (and it is not a dialog box), re-tile everything on that screen so that everything that showed before, still shows, but the new thing too, takes half the screen. I use “focus follows mouse”, so it is infuriating that as I move my mouse toward the newly opened window, the window underneath activates focus and hides the new screen behind it because the window underneath is full screen. I wouldn’t mind so bad if my old keystrokes worked, and I could shove the full-screen to half-screen: but that doesn’t work either. The previous behavior, which is what I want, is that the previous full-screen window would automatically resize to the other half of the screen when a new window opens.
This weekend I went to the Southern California Linux Expo, and had thought someone might be able to guide me to a solution. Nope, the KDE guy was anti-helpful, pointing me to a non- KDE solution. Checking it out, it is not what I want. I just want the old KWin tiling script to work.
Self-will got me a brand-new OS installation that frustrates me. Yay. I should have just lived with the squirrelly behavior until I heard the “all-clear” signal from the OpenSuSE forums.