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This week in KDE: KDE-powered SteamDeck revealed

Santosh83 5y ago
Great. KDE has always flown strangely under the radar despite being every bit as capable, if not more, than its main alternative. It's like Firefox. Equally as powerful as Chrome, in some cases even better, but never the default anywhere. Any increased exposure can only benefit the project and the code base.
- lf-non 5y ago
  I don't intend to contest the capabilities or robustness of current generation of KDE, but it is not "strange" that KDE is not the default or equally popular if you take its history into account. A lot of people have faced quite a few frustrations with both bugs and performance regressions when updating to new KDE releases in past. And it doesn't help that really awesome apps like Konqueror got discontinued. And also given the history of myriad shenanigans around Qt's licensing, it is not surprising that the open source community gravitated towards a platform (Gnome) that was built and evolved in the open. It is interesting that you compare this with Firefox, because these parallels can be extended to FF too. A lot of us moved away from FF because chrome was a breath of fresh air in terms of performance when it arrived and has since had trailblazing support for modern web standards. Sure both FF & KDE may be in much much better state now, but it is worth acknowledging that for the wider population there is a lot of inertia when it comes to foundational technologies that are critical for their day-to-day work. If it works, and is getting better, there is usually little motivation to jump ship. Even less so, if you have already jumped across the same ships in past. Some competition is, of course, always good to have and I am very happy to see both platforms evolving.
  - rascul 5y ago
    > Konqueror got discontinued Do you have a reference for this? Konqueror appears to be alive and well from a quick search. I ask because I use Konqueror from time to time and I have not seen or heard anything about it being discontinued. Latest release was a week ago and the git repo appears active. https://invent.kde.org/network/konqueror/-/commits/master https://invent.kde.org/network/konqueror/-/commits/master
    - lf-non 5y ago
      Ok I was wrong about this. Dolphin replaced it as the default file manager but it continues to be developed.
- atatatat 5y ago
  > Equally as powerful as Chrome Processors get more powerful when you disable security mitigations, too!
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
I have switched my daily laptop to KDE neon since 5.12. Am I happy? Well 100%. I have been using Linux on and off since I think Ubuntu 8 or 10 days so a long time but this full time experience has been much better. I can do bash and am not scared of terminal. That is nice. I always read planet.KDE.org and its a fun place. KDE now with steamdeck means more people are going to get exposure to KDE which is always a good thing
- oefnak 5y ago
  Plasma doesn't support Wayland yet, so there's lots of issues when using external screens with a different DPI. That's why I'm moving to gnome, even though I like KDE better.
  - alexmcc81 5y ago
    > Plasma doesn't support Wayland yet Plasma does support Wayland and has for some time. Some distros are even considering defaulting to Wayland now. There have been substantial improvements to Wayland support in the last few months making it an acceptable daily driver, at least for me with 1 HDPI screen. Do you mean specific Wayland support for multiple screens? I have played with the KwinFT fork and found it be better for screen management.
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      > Some distros are even considering defaulting to Wayland now. Kubuntu 21.04 defaults to Wayland.
  - seba_dos1 5y ago
    Plasma has supported Wayland earlier than GNOME did (although GNOME's Wayland session has reached production quality earlier than Plasma did).
thevagrant 5y ago
I came back to using KDE over the past year after a long hiatus. KDE is great on opensuse tumbleweed. I used Gnome many times over the years but it feels way behind KDE. PopOS has done a reasonably well with Gnome but I wish more distros chose KDE as their primary DE to give Gnome more competition.
twobitshifter 5y ago
I’m excited to see the steam deck reviews, I’m wondering if the Steam deck is useful as a mobile computer / cyber deck.
- Darmody 5y ago
  It should be. It can run AAA games so it can be used as a "laptop".

Great. KDE has always flown strangely under the radar despite being every bit as capable, if not more, than its main alternative. It's like Firefox. Equally as powerful as Chrome, in some cases even better, but never the default anywhere. Any increased exposure can only benefit the project and the code base.

lf-non 5y ago
I don't intend to contest the capabilities or robustness of current generation of KDE, but it is not "strange" that KDE is not the default or equally popular if you take its history into account. A lot of people have faced quite a few frustrations with both bugs and performance regressions when updating to new KDE releases in past. And it doesn't help that really awesome apps like Konqueror got discontinued. And also given the history of myriad shenanigans around Qt's licensing, it is not surprising that the open source community gravitated towards a platform (Gnome) that was built and evolved in the open. It is interesting that you compare this with Firefox, because these parallels can be extended to FF too. A lot of us moved away from FF because chrome was a breath of fresh air in terms of performance when it arrived and has since had trailblazing support for modern web standards. Sure both FF & KDE may be in much much better state now, but it is worth acknowledging that for the wider population there is a lot of inertia when it comes to foundational technologies that are critical for their day-to-day work. If it works, and is getting better, there is usually little motivation to jump ship. Even less so, if you have already jumped across the same ships in past. Some competition is, of course, always good to have and I am very happy to see both platforms evolving.
- rascul 5y ago
  > Konqueror got discontinued Do you have a reference for this? Konqueror appears to be alive and well from a quick search. I ask because I use Konqueror from time to time and I have not seen or heard anything about it being discontinued. Latest release was a week ago and the git repo appears active. https://invent.kde.org/network/konqueror/-/commits/master https://invent.kde.org/network/konqueror/-/commits/master
  - lf-non 5y ago
    Ok I was wrong about this. Dolphin replaced it as the default file manager but it continues to be developed.
atatatat 5y ago
> Equally as powerful as Chrome Processors get more powerful when you disable security mitigations, too!

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

I have switched my daily laptop to KDE neon since 5.12. Am I happy? Well 100%. I have been using Linux on and off since I think Ubuntu 8 or 10 days so a long time but this full time experience has been much better. I can do bash and am not scared of terminal. That is nice. I always read planet.KDE.org and its a fun place. KDE now with steamdeck means more people are going to get exposure to KDE which is always a good thing

oefnak 5y ago
Plasma doesn't support Wayland yet, so there's lots of issues when using external screens with a different DPI. That's why I'm moving to gnome, even though I like KDE better.
- alexmcc81 5y ago
  > Plasma doesn't support Wayland yet Plasma does support Wayland and has for some time. Some distros are even considering defaulting to Wayland now. There have been substantial improvements to Wayland support in the last few months making it an acceptable daily driver, at least for me with 1 HDPI screen. Do you mean specific Wayland support for multiple screens? I have played with the KwinFT fork and found it be better for screen management.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > Some distros are even considering defaulting to Wayland now. Kubuntu 21.04 defaults to Wayland.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  Plasma has supported Wayland earlier than GNOME did (although GNOME's Wayland session has reached production quality earlier than Plasma did).

thevagrant 5y ago

I came back to using KDE over the past year after a long hiatus. KDE is great on opensuse tumbleweed. I used Gnome many times over the years but it feels way behind KDE. PopOS has done a reasonably well with Gnome but I wish more distros chose KDE as their primary DE to give Gnome more competition.

twobitshifter 5y ago

I’m excited to see the steam deck reviews, I’m wondering if the Steam deck is useful as a mobile computer / cyber deck.

Darmody 5y ago
It should be. It can run AAA games so it can be used as a "laptop".