Is it possible to swap window managers in session? Or do I have to logout and log back in?

[vanessa-luna]

Hi, I love using i3 when I'm getting dirty and productive. but I also have a touch screen monitor I use when I'm lounging and consuming media.

I was hoping to easily be able to swap between these two window managers so I can customize the experience depending on whether I have touch capabilities.

I had hoped I might be able to run a bash script to kill i3 and start Kwin and maybe fiddle with a couple other settings if needed. But I recognize I might have to create a totally different session where I logout of KDE+i3 and login to KDE+Kwin.

Can anyone point me in the right direction. I was a front end developer a decade ago with some linux experience trying to get back in it so I'm not a novice but need a little direction..

How might I go about making this work? Any input would be stellar. Thank you

[gabrielmip]

Hi, Vanessa, I don't know if you managed to get this working but as I lost a bit of hope when I saw the lack of answers here, I just wanted to register in the thread for future readers that window managers usually have a way to replace the current manager by running their executable with an argument like --replace. One has to figure the executable and the argument.

In our case, to use i3

kquitapp5 plasmashell
i3 --replace
kstart5 plasmashell

To use Plasma only (kwin_wayland for wayland)

kwin_x11 --replace

And pressing Alt+Shift+F12 twice to restart the compositor.