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KDE Plasma Voted Best Desktop Environment in Linux Journal Readers Choice Awards
- Jonnax 9y agoKDE is excellent. Always seemed it got a lot of negativity from people that only perceived Linux as an operating system that should be run on a 5 year old laptop.
- kazen44 9y agomost criticism i seen nowadays is rooted in the KDE 4.X days. KDE 5 has been excellent and suprisingly lightweight aswell.
- simion314 9y agoI am still on KDE4, my setup works fine for me so I don't dare to change it, the problem was in the begining with KDE4.0 and the next few years, the transition from KDE3.5 was rough.
- SXX 9y agoI would agree, but Plasma still using up to 400-500MB RAM for me with no obvious reason since I use pretty much default panel with 6 saved app launcher icons. While it's not problem on 32GB machine it's the part of KDE with most memory usage of all KDE apps that I use.
- makomk 9y agoI'm pretty sure every KDE 5 version of Plasma has a memory leak somewhere, but it seems like tracking it down would probably be hell.
- SXX 9y agoMight be it's time to finally run it under Valgrind's massif and try to fix it myself.
- jcelerier 9y agoYou should look into using heaptrack instead, it's much much faster than valgrind and has a very efficient UI - the memory flamegraphs in particular are fantastic. It's built by folks at KDAB so works fine with KDE / Qt apps.
- yoran 9y agoJust out of curiosity, how does KDE compare to XFCE feature-wise? I am using XFCE for it being lightweight. However, I'd be willing to give KDE a shot if it has some nice features that can enhance my productivity while remaining lightweight.
- lallysingh 9y agoThe file manager, dolphin, is nice. Open up a shell in the window for that directory. Second best for manager I've ever used after Mac+default folder x
- znpy 9y ago> dolphin I really can't understand why people would want to use something as dumb as dolphin (created to be as dumb as nautilus) when you have the great and awesome Konqueror at your fingertips.
- seba_dos1 9y agoIt's the same kpart, just in a different UI shell. Dolphin has some overly simplistic defaults, but you should get the most (if not all) that you can get with Konqueror out of it.
- Sylos 9y agoKDE's search, called KRunner, is pretty nice, too. It searches applications and files, mails and calendar entries etc. (if you use the KDE Kontact suite), can calculate things and convert between units, allows you to jump to windows that you have open and many more things. It's also got autocompletion and acts intelligently to a limited degree (basically it remembers that when you typed in "Fi" last time, you wanted Firefox, not Filezilla, so it puts Firefox at the top). Of course, this does use up more CPU cycles than the pretty basic search in Xfce. You can turn off some of those search features, if you don't think you'll need them. And here's some random examples of the features that KDE has: I do some webdev, so I need a color picker every now and then. I have one of those in my panel. I also have a little button in my panel that I can click on, which pops open a list of the most recently modified files in my Downloads-folder, effectively acting as a direct access to my downloads. Lastly, you might want to play around with turning off compositing in KDE's settings. That does limit some features, but should speed things up quite a bit, too.
- nnq 9y agoThere's also the folks who end up having to use Ubuntu LTS (16.x) for various reasons, and if they ever try KDE on it will be doomed to inevitably hate it... Hope the story doesn't repeat with their next LTS version. (Maybe the KDE foundation should dedicate manpower/resources to the Kubuntu project before their LTS releases or something, as they'd massively increase their usage base this way...)
- 2ion 9y agoAbsolutely true. At work, we use 16.04 and Plasma in the version that shipped with it is very unbecoming. A stark contrast to what actually maintained, recent versions of the DE bring to the table.
- rwnspace 9y agoCurious, for what reasons am I supposed to hate it? What am I ignorant of? I use KDE neon which uses a mildly stripped-down Ubuntu 16.04. I surf, do some web development, attempt to learn Clojure, and make my desktop look very pretty. So far (couple months) I've had the "it just works!" level of experience. Edit: Actually, I suppose that is distinct from the LTS Ubuntu release /with/ KDE.
- Sylos 9y agoYeah, KDE Neon is very distinct from Kubuntu 16.04. Kubuntu 16.04 comes with a really outdated version of Qt and with KDE Plasma 5.5, which was essentially still a development version of the 5.x series. KDE Neon pretty much just exists to fix that hot mess.
- nnq 9y ago...then why TF don't people promote like even a little bit?! I didn't event know this KDE Neon existed. Really, WTF, it's not event on the page listing Ubuntu flavors https://www.ubuntu.com/download/flavours https://www.ubuntu.com/download/flavours and being a KDE project it's not even on the kde.org homepage. Do some people still live by "build it and they will come" nonsense? I mean, nobody expects dedicated marketing campaigns for an open source project, but at lest some links in the places where people could see. Event on the neon.kde.org page I see the crucial information that this is based on Ubuntu LTS burried in a big wall of text I wouldn't have ever bothered to read if I wasn't actively digging for details. I'll wait for a version based on Ubuntu 18 LTS when that comes, and definitely try it, but boy, it's like whoever works on this took great effort to keep it stealth or something...
- qwerty456127 9y agoI have hardly ever used a computer less than 5 years old. All the computers I've used (except the most ancient) had built-in graphics. Yet I have never seen a single sign of slowness from KDE ever. I totally don't understand people saying KDE is slow or resource-heavy.
- DiabloD3 9y agoI don't really see the point of this poll: Pantheon wasn't an option in it. Makes the rest look like jokes.
- gregopet 9y agoI see it's written mostly in Vala - I must confess I have a deep prejudice against Vala, mostly because it seems silly and complicated and just wrong to me to take a programming language and then compile it to C and then further compile it to machine code. We have that situation in Javascript land but at least there it was kind of unavoidable for a very long time. That said, I may take Pantheon for a spin - I've been a happy KDE user for many years but I never mind trying new things and perhaps learning something new. Everything I've tried so far made me return back to KDE but one must keep an open mind.
- pjmlp 9y ago> I see it's written mostly in Vala - I must confess I have a deep prejudice against Vala, mostly because it seems silly and complicated and just wrong to me to take a programming language and then compile it to C and then further compile it to machine code. You mean like Objective-C, C++, Eiffel, Scheme, Nim? Compiling to another native language is a shortcut to avoid implementing a complete compiler backend. With C being the best option as target language on UNIX systems, given its ubiquity.
- iforgotpassword 9y agoC++? Unless you're talking about the very first compiler ever or some toy project, you're wrong, and I'd actually guess the same is true for obj-c.
- pjmlp 9y agoOf course I am speaking about CFront. C++ first compiler that actually generated native code without going through C was written by Walter Bright sold by Zortech, which then sparked the race from all other compiler vendors. Objective-C started as a macro processor for C, hence the [ ] syntax and @ prefixes, to make it easier to find them. Nowadays the macro processor is gone, but at assembly level Objective-C code still gets translated into a bunch of objc_msgSend() and similar calls.
- goblins 9y agoI shall have to try KDE. I've been an xfce user for years but have been hearing good things about KDE.
- ahartmetz 9y agoProtip: Use krunner (Alt-Space) to launch applications once you know their names. It has autocompletion and many neat features such as web shortcuts: Type gg: or dd: <search terms> to open a tab in your configured default browser with Google or DuckDuckGo search. Not very discoverable but very convenient. You can also create your own web shortcuts in KDE system settings. krunner also supports opening Kate (the KDE editor, roughly similar to Sublime Text) sessions directly.
- abrowne 9y agoIt's also a calculator and unit converter!
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoI tried most of the popular desktops last year and KDE was the best in terms of dealing with high-dpi displays. Not perfect but better than most. It wasn't stable for me though and it generally felt sluggish so in the end I switched to Apple.
- iforgotpassword 9y agothat seems to be a common theme with kde and to a lesser degree gnome. they moved to 'features and innovation first' years ago and it shows. sure its nice that Linux is becoming more accessible for 'normal' people but for me both kde and gnome are getting in my way more and more while stability is suboptimal. i switched from kde to gnome around 2010 then xfce in 2012 and finally i3 in late 2013. for the rest of the apps i'm always looking for the leanest and least sophisticated solution that has enough features and suit my needs. these also tend to be pretty reliable. like you said, if i really needed all those fancy features and eyecandy I'd rather switch to apple or microsoft. I'm still taking a look at kde and gnome once a year or so, especially since kde5 looked really clean and nice, but it just isn't there yet..
- emilsedgh 9y agoI've always loved KDE and has been a contributor. So take my work with a grain of salt. But KDE is pretty light these days and it doesn't really get in the way. It's really polished. 2010 was the KDE 4.x times and it was indeed a bad time for the project. Things are quite different now.
- iforgotpassword 9y agoi agree that 5 is much better. ever since my kde fanboy coworker upgraded to 5, the amount of cursing about different things (mostly akonadi and kmail) was greatly reduced, but akonadi still seems to be a troubled child.
- simion314 9y agoYou can not use akonadi or kmail, I did not had a good experience with them either on older KDE so I do not used them, I use Thunderbird for mail and akonadi is off.
- digi_owl 9y agoOn a different note, KDE3 still existing in the form of the Trinity DE. http://www.trinitydesktop.org/ http://www.trinitydesktop.org/
- olavgg 9y agoSince Unity became the default in Ubuntu, I've been using KDE. Was very happy with the 4.x, but not so happy with the bump to 5.x. I've been using 5.x daily since the beginning. Mostly it works really well, though I still have to restart plasma or desktop effects daily. I'm not sure if it related to a bug with Nvidia. I also have an issue with framerate drops with Dota 2. But except from those minor issues, it works really really well, but I still feel that the latest 4.x was more stable than the current 5.x
- walkingolof 9y agoThen you be happy to know that Unity is no more on Ubuntu, it got canned when they ended their phone/tablet plans. The new default is Gnome, which has grown into a fantastic distraction free DE
- cygned 9y agoGNOME 2. Although I started with a lovely KDE with Open SUSE 10.1, GNOME (with Ubuntu) was my tool of choice. I mostly use headless Linux these days, but when I have a GUI at hand, I always miss the old GNOME. I heard there are some continuation project, haven’t looked into them yet, though.
- satbyy 9y agoThe name you're looking for is MATE desktop. I've been using it for many years because I never liked Gnome 3 (constant churn, breaking plugins, themes etc). I'm using it on Debian but there's also Ubuntu MATE and Fedora & Opensuse spins
- O_H_E 9y agoAlthough MATE does not technically use GTK2 now, but it is pretty good in sticking with the look and feel of a traditional customization desktop. I pretty much recommend Ubuntu MATE
- type0 9y agoUbuntu MATE is excellent, but more people should check out Solus MATE if they would like to have rolling release - it's a very underrated distro.
- nnq 9y agoLet's just hope the next Ubuntu LTS version doesn't pack up a "doomed to be buggy and perpetually outdated except security fixes" version of KDE :| ... Choosing to use Ubuntu 16 LTS, I gave up considering KDE as an option after trying hard to put up either with the official repo one or a newer unofficial one (both were buggy and unstable, and lacked essential features to me like Win+<number> task switching shortcut that is available in latest KDE, and especially combining this with drag-and-drop freely reorderable taskbar entries to actually enable my "standard" worflow that I can use fine in Windows 10, Unity, or Xfce+custom dock). Hope the Kubuntu guys take care not to shit the bed with the LTS release (because their non-LTS one were always fine, like in not just up to date as expected, but waay more stable too!)...
- vbsteven 9y agoYou should try the KDE Neon distro. It uses Ubuntu LTS as a base and adds the latest and greatest KDE release on top.
- kazen44 9y agoFedora also has an excellent KDE version in my opinion.
- type0 9y agoIt doesn't handle dependencies very, some software becomes installable because you can get package conflicts. Fedora KDE spin is better but doesn't run as good on laptops unless you tweak it, both are unsuitable for new Linux users. Is there a good KDE distro that can be recommended to Windows or Mac refugees?
- qwerty456127 9y agoI am extremely happy with Manjaro. The only problem is it doesn't include a WiFi driver to support 2013 MacBook Air, you will have to install it manually if you have this model.
- ploggingdev 9y ago
- blattimwind 9y agoI have been using KDE for ~eight years in one capacity or another and it almost continually improved with every update. Regressions were quite rare, even during the KDE4->5 move. I like that KDE applications are at least somewhat consistent in their UX and in the way they organize basics. For example, the way settings and shortcuts are handled is identical across all apps. Kparts makes embedded viewers consistent and good across apps. Support for GTK theming reduces the visual annoyance of the rare GTK app. KWin works very well, has a broad selection of useful shortcuts and has been the most stable compositor I've ever used (AMD/open source). On the other hand, KDEPIM/Akonadi seems like it is quite powerful, but for some reason I kinda didn't became comfortable with it. Not sure why, exactly. I used KMail and KOrganizer for quite a while, though. Decent tools, but some rough edges when it comes to first-time setup, e.g. the wizards could really use some polishing. There is a surprising number of useful and powerful utilities in KDE.
- Thev00d00 9y agoI love KDE and have used it for about the same amount of time and I agree with you that PIM really is the weak point. The other apps are generally excellent or good enough you don't notice them, which is exactly what I want from desktop.
- finchisko 9y ago>Regressions were quite rare, even during the KDE4->5 move. you must joking right. KDE5 beginnings were terrible.
- shock 9y agoKDE4 was also terribly bug ridden. I used to advocate for KDE heavily but after suffering through bugs in KWin and KMail/Akonadi that went unresolved for years I gave up and moved to Gnome. There was a KWin bug that filled the task bar with graphical artifacts over time so that you couldn't tell anymore which taskbar "button" was for which window. They kept blaming the video drivers until someone proved to them that they had a resource leak in KWin. The KMail/Akonadi bug that I still remember vividly as it was very annoying and long lived was one where you would get messages duplicated.
- Kenji 9y agoNot surprising at all.
- stewbrew 9y ago"Totally configurable, which is ESSENTIAL for new users who want their Linux desktop configured to emulate the exact rendering of Windows (XP or 7)" Funny argument after Windows 8. So KDE gets marketed as ressort for confused windows xp users? I enjoyed customizing my workspace for years. Now I use gnome shell, I relax and don't waste brain cycles on irrelevant stuff like which icons show up here or there. I don't use my desktop to do work or anything meaningful.
- subsection1h 9y agoIf you really enjoyed customizing your desktop environment for years, you would have graduated to a tiling window manager. And if you had been smart about it, you would have chosen one with a stable API. And if you had done so, you wouldn't need to "waste brain cycles" configuring your environment because it would be a solved problem. But since your example of desktop configuration is "icons show up here or there", I assume you never graduated to a real window manager.
- hanklazard 9y agoIs there one that you recommend?
- Sylos 9y agoMany people recommend i3wm to start out on, because it has good documentation. Personally, I'll run away screaming from reading any sort of manual on how to use software, rather than just dicking around with it, so I only really managed to get into tiling WMs with AwesomeWM, which is still relatively graphical.
- hanklazard 9y agoThanks! I'm going to check out AwesomeWM.
- simion314 9y agoConfiguring KDE and apps is more then GUI customization. The file manager has many options that anyone that does any work would be useful, like tabs, splitting the screen, icons/list/detailed view of files, opening a terminal inside the file manager,previews, FTP integrations and all of this is an option, including that you can configure the toolbars to show/hide buttons. Other example(maybe other DEs have this too) I can have tabs in the terminal app (konsole) and in the tabs that I am SSHed in I use different color scheme(with red on black) so I am aware and not run dangerous commands on a remote server. My point is that a KDE user is not one that chooses KDE over Gnome due to UI but is more about functionality.
- nkkollaw 9y agoKDE is great. One reason for the votes might however be that GNOME has been alienating both users and developers for a while now with idiotic ideas, and people are fed up with it.
- simion314 9y agoExactly, they managed to irritate the users and developers of the other DEs and WMs, the GTK changes made some important apps(like wireshark, Subsurface) and DEs(LXDE and Budgie) to switch to Qt
- oneplane 9y agoStrange to see this, maybe it's the target audience that makes this the result? At the office there are about 40 Linux desktop users, none of them use KDE. Most remote users I've worked with (~100) aren't using KDE either. This is of course somewhat anecdotal, but I suspect that the Linux Journal Readers are a specialised group. Most systems (out of a pool of about 200) I can query run: - Gnome 3 (about 80) - i3 (about 30) - Unity (about 25) - Mate (about 25) - Others (KDE included, about 40) And those are minimally managed systems, all they have to run is orchestration software and IPA, so they choose their own distro and DE and everything else.
- Zitrax 9y agoThis is my experience as well, I have used KDE for around 20 years but among colleges and friends it seems relatively rare.
- qwerty456127 9y agoGnome 3 is everywhere because it is the default in all the major distributions but this doesn't mean people like it. I personally think it actually is the weirdest DE ever and only popular for political reasons.
- adrusi 9y agoI found gnome 3 really appealing when I switched from OS X to Linux on the desktop.
- qwerty456127 9y agoIsn't Unity a way better and a way closer to OS X?
- adrusi 9y agoCertainly gnome felt more familiar than unity. What felt truly closest was elementaryOS's pantheon.
- k_bx 9y agoGNOME Shell on Ubuntu 17.10 is eating >1Gb RAM, I think it might be a good time to try KDE (unfortunately, it didn't work to just apt install kubuntu-desktop, so I'll have to do that via clean install sometime later).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- y4mi 9y agoYou should be able to choose the windowmanager at login once youve installed it like that. Its probably a menu in the top right corner of either your username 'tile' or the screen, depending on your login manager
- k_bx 9y agoThanks, I'm quite an experienced Linux user (>10 years). The problems I've had are way beyond this (bootloop, black screen, freezes, had to do a recover from a liveusb etc. etc.)
- seba_dos1 9y agoNot surprising at all, with GNOME 3 being what it is. Configuring, getting help, discussing and contributing to Plasma is a breeze. In contrast, GNOME camp feels like a bunch of very opinionated people that just know better how their users (and other DEs too, when it comes to interoperability) should behave.
- Fnoord 9y agoIf anything this survey shows how hopelessly fractured the GNOME desktop community is. Add GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE, and Unity and you get 41% (vs KDE's single 35%). I'd say that -unfortunately- the DE/WM world is irrelevant these days. We need decent UIs & OSes for the mobile world; Android and iOS need competition. The latter is proprietary, the former partly FOSS but data hungry.
- eximius 9y agoThis is surprising to me in that I don't know anyone who uses KDE. As someone who uses Cinnamon as my day to day at home and Awesome at work, what would entice me to switch?
- Multicomp 9y agoI started with Cinnamon, then switched to KDE. Mostly because it was more intuitive for me, 2% because I liked the new Konquii branding enough to try it that first time. Now when people want to try "that Linux thing" I hand them Debian KDE if they are a Windows user since it is closer to Windows start menu out of the box, at least for my purposes.
- wink 9y agoSame here, but maybe my sample size of "we'r all using tiling WMs" versus "I'm on Ubuntu and thus use Unity" is too small :P
- Sylos 9y agoReally trying hard to not sound biased here, but I have a feeling starting off with this, is not gonna help it: Compared to Cinnamon, KDE is pretty much better at everything. It's a thousand times more configurable, it's more feature-rich and the default applications are more powerful. The search in KDE, called KRunner, is also something that many people love. Where Cinnamon is better: - Not making your eyes bleed over when you look at the settings screen (because KDE really has a lot of settings). - Less incompatible options. In KDE, you sometimes dick around with one setting and it invalidates another setting. (Usually nothing important, though.) - Less features usually means less confusion for less technically inclined users. - Its keyboard shortcuts are quite similar to those of Windows. KDE deviates in places from that. - It uses probably like 100 MB less RAM and presumably a few less CPU cycles. (In the default configuration, that is.) - It's somewhat more stable. KDE has gotten a lot better at this over the last couple of releases, but it's still not yet quite as rock-solid and probably won't ever be. - Cinnamon is better at being Cinnamon. In KDE, with how configurable it is, you can rebuild most desktop environments in it and Cinnamon is very similar to the KDE default, too. But if all you want is exactly Cinnamon, then just using Cinnamon is cleaner. As for Awesome: + It's a lot lighter than KDE. + It works better independent from the distro. I don't think there's any distro where Awesome is not good. With KDE, I'd consider openSUSE, Manjaro and KDE Neon good. Fedora and Debian are not terrible. Ubuntu is often garbage. + There's some keyboard shortcut in Awesome to unminimize windows in reverse order of how you minimized them, which I was quite fond of. + It has tiling. There's some scripts that you can use in KDE to also make it tile its windows, but those are more limited than the tiling you have in Awesome. They are also somewhat laggy and sometimes just bug out. You can use bspwm or i3 inside of KDE, which is also somewhat hacky, but it does work well enough that I use KDE+bspwm as my daily setup. If you want a quick guide on that, let me know. Benefits of using KDE over Awesome: - KDE has lots of smaller and bigger features that Awesome doesn't have. I for example do some webdev, so I have a color picker widget in my panel. I could live without it, but I'd also just rather not. And again, the search of KDE is just really good. Awesome doesn't have anything like that. - Again, the KDE default applications are really good. Having those preinstalled rather than needing to hunt everything down yourself is worth something. And even if you don't end up using the desktop environment, lots of these applications are considered best-in-class by many people, so you could end up incorporating them into your Awesome workflow. - The KDE applications + the desktop environment also form a whole. They work well with one another, work similar to another and are thoroughly tested on that desktop environment. - KDE is a desktop environment, not just a window manager. So, it can handle volume, notifications, screen brightness, power management, connectivity etc.. With Awesome, you need your own custom solutions for many things. - Partially as a result of that, KDE is also more compatible with the outside world. Quickly hooking up a second monitor or a projector to Awesome is not necessarily something I'd feel confident about. And just in general more of these sort of edge cases are tested against and implemented in KDE, because the user base is much bigger.
- drewg123 9y agoI use KDE because the window manager is easily configurable to do what I want (even if it is weird). When I moved from running CTWM to a real desktop environment in ~2001, I submitted patches to both KDE and Gnome to add support for my oddball WM config (basically mapping move/resize/iconify to alt+mouse button press). KDE merged my patch. Gnome closed my bug request, saying that what I wanted to do were against the their design guidelines. So I've been using KDE for most of 2 decades..
- just_one_time_ 9y agoOn KDE now, love it!