KDE without the fluff

[AnthonyCFox]

I spent two years with the KxStudio install from the iso and discovered how great Dolphin, Kate and KDE's system settings are. What I didn't care for was the window management, and I thought the plasma desktop was silly.

Then I found the i3 window manager and that was very much to my liking, but when I logged into the i3 desktop some of KDE's functionality was less usable.

I've since learned that Kwin, KDE's window manager, can be replaced with another window manager and the plasma desktop disabled. Here's a howto for awesome window manager http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/KDE_and_awesome it worked for me with i3, and I'm sure it would work with any other WM.

Now I log into KDE, and get everything I like about it and with i3 as the window manager. Probably the only downside is that all KDE's desktop effects are contained within Kwin, so no desktop effects and no transparency for Konsole. I just use an edited version of my wallpaper as a background in Konsole and it looks practically the same as if it were transparent.