I've been using MX KDE for several months now, and I love it. The wealth of customization options is just amazing.
But I've never been happy with the task switching behavior when pressing Alt-Tab. The default is to switch to the next window immediately while presenting a large bar of preview windows on the left. If you hold down Alt while pressing Tab repeatedly, you're presented with successive windows. There's nothing wrong with this, but if you have a lot of windows open, it can make finding the one you want rather cumbersome.
What I really wanted was a list of window icons when pressing Alt-Tab. Holding down Alt and pressing Tab would scroll through the list. And since this is KDE, this can be done with minimal effort.
You can navigate to the Task Switcher settings in a couple of ways:
- Application Menu > Settings > System Settings > Workspace > Window Management > Task Switcher
- Application Menu > type Task in the search box.
[x] Show selected window
[x] Breeze
You can get very close to the behavior I want by unchecking Show selected winow and changing the effect to Breeze Dark or MX.
But the list is still taller than I like. And the white-on-black icons are just a tad off-putting. The other choices, Cover Switch and Flip Switch, are very cool but even further from my desired behavior.
There is a way to get more than the 5 effects listed in the Effects dropdown.
Launch the MX Package Installer and select the Stable Repo tab. Find and install the kwin-addons package.
Once installed, you'll have additional selections in the Effects dropdown: Informative, Thumbnails, Grid, Large Icons, Compact, Text Only, and Small Icons.
The Compact option is exactly what I wanted: a tight list of small, colorful icons with the window title.
If you want something different, the other options are also worth looking at. For example, Thumbnails provides what I think used to be the default MS Windows Alt-Tab behavior.
Once again, thanks to the MX devs for making KDE a supported alternative. It really is a joy to use.