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Plasma is the best modern desktop environment for Linux and yet people barely talk about it. It is complete, mature and works out-of-the-box. For users it has

Plasma is the best modern desktop environment for Linux and yet people barely talk about it. It is complete, mature and works out-of-the-box. For users it has sane defaults but provides virtually endless customization and contrary to other desktop environments, user customization is encourage. For developers, it provides solid libraries to build upon, not like other libraries that are constantly changing and making developers' life harder. And yet, people don't care about it.

IronWolve 4y ago
I like kde, it was my main for a over a decade. I had lots of automation, then continual updates kept breaking my kde setup, as functionality was modified for things such as window setup, placement and size, to the teams correct way of functionality of settings should work. Bug fixes I guess. Took a many years of me interface hopping around, but I'm back at kde. I was using mate, but I'm back at kde on arch.
Beltalowda 4y ago
I haven't even looked at KDE in many years (I'm not a DE kind of user and just use dwm), but this was true back in the KDE 3 days as well, which I considered much nicer than the contemporary Gnome 2 as well. I never quite understood why Gnome got so much more attention compared to KDE.
- Wuzado 4y ago
  Bundling in major distros? (Say, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE(?)) GTK being open-source and quickly adopted by several popular projects? Being initially under the GNU Project? Probably a lot of factors adding together. KDE is pretty great, though.
- account42 4y ago
  Gnome is Red Hat and Red Hat has a lot of influence over Linux as a whole. Once a long time ago there was also the licensing concern with Qt.
  - akagusu 4y ago
    Unfortunately nobody remembers that Red Hat has so much influence over the Linux stack that they practically own it.
captainmuon 4y ago
I never got over the renaming to Plasma. KDE 3 was great at it's time, but KDE4 / Plasma felt like this bloated, buggy desktop shell seemingly based on QML (not sure, but it looked like it did) with the strange cashew in the corner. Plasma was too configurable, with too many ways to break your setup. I'm sure it got a lot better, and people have even described Plasma 5.x as light weight. The times I tried it later, I liked it, but for the time being the Linux desktop has lost me and I'm using Mac :-)
- atoav 4y ago
  I entered the game way after the renaming and it makes a lot of sense to me. KDE is the organization, plasma is that specific project (like Korganizer is the Calendar application).
  - account42 4y ago
    It makes a lot less sense once you realize that KDE once stood for K Desktop Environment. Trying to retcon this into the name for the organization is just wankery. Plasma is also already the name for the shell, no need to use it for the desktop environment as a whole.
- zokula 4y ago
dagw 4y ago
I distinctly remember the KDE 3->4 transition causing a massive revolt and lots of people abandoning KDE. I also remember personally switching from KDE3 to XFCE right around then (although I cannot quite remember exactly why, or what the specific complaints at the time where.). I wonder if we can still be seeing the echos of that backlash as most of the people who left KDE simply never came back. That being said, I did recently try KDE5 for the first time in ages about a year ago, and it is now (again) my favorite desktop environment.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  Yeah, it's unfortunate they abandoned the really good HCI paradigm in favor of glitzy, interesting problems to work on. KDE4 rollout was a absolute trainwreck.
- simcop2387 4y ago
  If it was like me, the KDE4 roll out was done way too haphazardly and wasn't usable for a bunch of releases (like 1.5-2 years? been a while) but a whole bunch of distros adopted it anyway, despite the KDE developers saying it wasn't ready yet. That ended up leaving a lot of people with a bad taste for it. the Plasma 5 releases were handled much better. I'm hoping that this latest release fixes the last few bugs with wayland that i kept running into (mostly multimonitor crashes, been tracking the bugs and they claim to have fixed all the ones i remember seeing last, but we'll see). I really want to ditch X11 because there's a noticeable performance increase and better power usage with wayland, by about 4-5 watts on my laptop, when it does run. It's also got better handling of scaling displays which is nice but not as critical for me.
  - snapplebobapple 4y ago
    This was what pushed me off kde back in the day and started a multiple year odyssey through all the lesser desktops before ending up on lxde for a while. When lxde started to get left behind as they tried to port to lxqt with limited resources I took kde 5 for a whirl and it was like meeting back up with an old friend and I haven't bothered with anything else since except a brief foray into qtile (I see why people like tiling desktops but I also really think they are not good for anyone with a diverse and ever changing usage/workflow sitaution vs just autobooting kde with a few windows set to autostart in fixed locations).
db65edfc7996 4y ago
Linux barely works as it is. I no longer have any interest in debugging my desktop technical problems. Which means my best option is to use the most popular environment so when I do encounter an issue, there is likely to be someone who has already encountered the same issue and reported a solution. Until Ubuntu switches to KDE, I am stuck in the Gnome-lets-remove-desktop-icons-because world.
- TheChaplain 4y ago
  Ubuntu already have a KDE flavour; https://kubuntu.org/ https://kubuntu.org/ Myself I'm running XUbuntu (XFCE) as my daily driver, works excellently and I have no issues doing what I need to do.
- runjake 4y ago
  Here you go[1]. Official[2] Ubuntu with KDE. 1. https://kubuntu.org/ https://kubuntu.org/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuntu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuntu Edit: OK, "officially blessed".
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    I wouldn't call it official, it's a side project run by the community. 'Official' would be something created and supported by Canonical. It's a moot point though since you get the exact same thing by installing Ubuntu without a gui and then doing 'apt install plasma-desktop'.
kps 4y ago
As a heavy terminal/editor user, I use KDE because it's not too difficult to stop its programs stealing the Control key. It could, and should, be much easier (global) but at least it's possible.
- klibertp 4y ago
  Remap Control_L to Hyper_L in xmodmap, then map Hyper to Control in the terminal emulator. Just an idea, personally I've been working with window managers (most recently Awesome) and not desktop environments exactly due to the keyboard shortcuts that are hard or sometimes impossible to unbind...
MisterTea 4y ago
I always felt kde was both cluttered and bloated. From memory the initial plasma debut was met with a lot of complaints about stability which tarnished its reputation (though it did improve.)
- teekert 4y ago
  You should give it another chance.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    I was a heavy KDE user until 4 came out. After a massive amount of issues with it (Plasma crashes every few minutes on multiple devices with different hardware), I abandoned KDE and tried it from time to time after seeing comments like yours (roughly once a year or so). I don't know how well it works these days (no desire to spend any more time on trying it out), but IME it worked about as badly as the first 4.x releases until at least whatever version was the latest at the beginning of 2021. It's the same story every time — I install it, login into my desktop, start doing stuff, and get crashes at least once an hour (on wildly different hardware, on many releases ten years in a row). Nepomuk crashes, Plasma crashes, kio daemon (or whatever it was called) crashes, this thing and that. I found happiness in xfce4 (that beauty hasn't crashed even once in about 8 years of using it heavily), and then sway (same story, currently at two years).
    - chupasaurus 4y ago
      > on wildly different hardware, on many releases ten years in a row Is the problem. Plasma has been my daily driver since 4.4, on Debian testing, on systems which I know beforehand wouldn't have any random issues (Debian-specific also).
      - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
        Eh, maybe. I don't care either way anymore. If it works for you — great, I haven't been so lucky. Everything else has been running smoothly (even gnome), and as a fanatical Linux user I'm usually very careful in my choice of hardware (no nvidia/broadcom/etc).
kitsunesoba 4y ago
Its sheer customizability makes customizing it into a real task, though. Every time I start sifting through its settings my eyes begin to glaze over. It’s gotten better over the years but still has a long way to go. Something that would help a lot is if KDE came prepackaged with a handful of different full configurations that could be easily flipped between to serve as starting points.
- lproven 4y ago
  This. And in the thousand options to twiddle, there aren't the options I want. I'd like a panel that when vertical did not scale the controls on it, just kept them the same size but rearranged them. I want a 4- or 5-column vertical panel with nothing growing or shrinking in size. I'd like the Xfce option to constrain the Start button to a single line of text+label. I'd like the Xfce option to set the size and font of the clock. I rather liked wm2. I would like the option of window title bars on the left or right edge, or even the bottom. Why not? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Wm2.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Wm2.png I liked BeOS' title bars as tabs, not whole width. Can I have those, please? Then if I stack windows on top of one another, I would like to move the tabs so they don't overlap. Or better still, have them automatically rearrange themselves. I hate the trend of having no menu bar, just a hamburger menu. Can I disable that globally, please? I want a menu bar in every app, enforced by the desktop. Currently some apps have it, some don't. I do not want desktop gadgets or widgets or plasmoids or whatever they are called. Not at all, not ever. A tick box to disable them globally might be useful? Maybe integrate with Conky for a desktop status monitor. I used to have a machine with 3 screens arranged in a line, with the bottom edges level. (Don't have space in the home office, sadly.) If I can't have a working vertical taskbar, can I have one taskbar across the bottom of 2 or 3 screens, please? KDE 3 could do that no problem.
jcelerier 4y ago
> Plasma is the best modern desktop environment for Linux and yet people barely talk about it. It's the DE of the Steam Deck, for which was apparently 1.5 million units were already sold in May. That's certainly one of the most significant events for the Linux desktop.
- akagusu 4y ago
  Although it makes its way to Steam Deck, the Linux community favors Gnome and other DEs. If you search for videos and blog posts, Plasma is usually a second class citizen.
  - pxc 4y ago
    GNOME has more of a particular vision for the desktop, and I think Plasma unfortunately gets sold as 'more or less like Windows!' because the defaults put the taskbar on the bottom and there's a button resembling the Windows Start Menu.
- IE6 4y ago
  This is completely tangential and a purely anecdotal observation but I find it interesting that big movements in the "year of the linux desktop" usually come in some very specific use case like ChromeOS or SteamOS.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    I'm glad you said it, I think it's really important, especially for those of us who really like Linux. It's easy to split hairs over "true Linux" or whatnot, but I think it's far more valuable to celebrate wins like ChromeOS and SteamOS in the hopes of encouraging more of this. I think that's what gets us closer to the general ideas and ideals of "Linux" and or "Free Software" broadly. It won't be "Year of the Linux Desktop," it will be "Years of many Linux Desktops."
    - jraph 4y ago
      ChromeOS is hard to celebrate though. While it is essentially free software and based on free software, it puts computing of its users in Google's cloud. That's a big loss of control and a huge privacy concern. Free software is important to me because it is supposed to enable users to take back control of their computing.
deleted 4y ago
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jeroenhd 4y ago
> And yet, people don't care about it. It works as you expect and you don't ever need to tweak it unless you're really into it, which makes it... boring. Boring is good. You don't want your desktop manager to distract you, it's there to help you! As for library support, I looked into it but the only real options seem to be to write code in C++ (not a fan) or to use some high level abstraction (Python). I like GTK for projects like gtk-rust. The relevant types and macros seem much better supported than any Qt binding I've seen so far, and the Qt ones often come with unsafe code blocks out of necessity. My Rust GUI code will (sadly) be GTK based because of its decent support without too many hacks. That's quite sad, because GTK applications look very GNOME-like, even when running on Windows or macOS. An unfortunate result of their unwillingness to consider other options in the CSD/SSD fight. Stupid stuff like the inability for applications to look native in any desktop environment is why I don't think we'll reach the year of the Linux desktop any time soon. The Linux desktop can't even run applications in a consistent style. Any way, I hope KDE will in time grow more language diverse. I'd like to switch my code to a less opinionated code base.
- pxc 4y ago
  > The Linux desktop can't even run applications in a consistent style. Now that I'm actually using Windows again on a regular basis, it really baffles me that people say this. Like, turn dark mode on and have fun getting blinded when random parts of the builtin Settings app are actually links to Control Panel, which just doesn't support dark mode at all and uses totally different widgets. Or try to fight a headache when some Java app has really blurry font rendering for some reason, even though the toolkit looks semi-native for Windows apps from 10 years ago. And have fun with all the Electron apps that completely ignore the native look and feel. There is no OS where all apps have visual consistency. Idk why people pretend this is uniquely a freedesktop problem.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    It's far from uniquely a freedesktop problem. There's one platform I know of whose applications, with the exception of Electron junk, mostly follows system design guidelines and that's macOS. It's far from perfect, but it's the best out there at the moment. Windows used to have about the same level of consistency in the Vista and 7 age. I think Microsoft has ruined their design uniformity the day Windows 8 came out. Windows 8.1, then 10, then 10 again, and now 11, all added their own little inconsistencies to a system that hadn't been fully ported to the new UI yet. However, in my opinion the inconsistencies are rarely ever by design, except for Electron/Tauri/etc. applications because web developers consider themselves above concepts like "consistency" and "using system standards". The move from native to specialised, slightly outdated browsers has been a regression in usability in many aspects and the proposed solutions seem to be to switch to a dedicated, up to date browser rather than to look for consistency. I usually run most Electron apps in my browser instead because the "native" part of the application never seems to add anything, really, though sometimes developers don't port features to the web version. Qt can copy the native look and feel quite easily but GNOME chooses not to expose a usable native look and feel unless you port the entire thing over to GTK+. In return, GTK+ doesn't even try to come close to a native look and feel. If Qt and Wine applications don't look entirely native, that's because of technical challenges or a lack of free time to invest in platform behaviour. In these opinionated desktop environments and SDKs, the problem is actually a conscious choice: "our system looks better than your so suck it" rather than "we don't have time to make our UI look perfect on your system". When developers choose frameworks that don't look consistent that's either because of cost effectiveness, lack of knowledge of native languages, or sometimes simple laziness. Those reasons can be annoying but they're understandable. The real problem lies with the platforms themselves for not exposing easy methods to gain consistency. That's why I blame Electron more than Spotify or Slack, and why I have such a dislike of Java's GUI libraries, GTK+, and GNOME.
Macha 4y ago
It's nice and were I to use a standard desktop environment I'd be all over it, but I'm too attached to tiling WMs and bismuth doesn't quite cut it compared to i3/sway. As a non default environment for most distros, I think this is the problem they face. Once you get into the people going into the customisation sphere, everyone has their own little dealbreakers like moving a window left repeatedly with keyboard hotkeys not wrapping into the next monitor, or the amount of spacing on titlebars or the way the dark theme handles the settings app
- lproven 4y ago
  Pop_OS successfully bolted tiling onto GNOME. Why not make that an option in KDE?
  - Macha 4y ago
    Bismuth does that, which is why I called it out in the post. It doesn't work as well as i3 or sway.
    - lproven 4y ago
      Ah, OK, fair enough. Sorry. That was not clear to me, but then again, I do not routinely use KDE. I liked KDE 1.x but for me each successive version adds bloat I don't want. No, I daresay it doesn't work as well as a dedicated tiling WM, but I don't use tiling WMs. :-) I have used xNix environments with just a window manager in the past, and while it works, I am not someone who lives in a terminal. In fact I almost never use them, just for occasional admin stuff, like a morning update run. Apart from that, I barely touch them. So for me, I like the comforts of a desktop, and I don't want to give that up. But I do like tiled windows sometimes, so something that gives me a bit of both is of potential interest, while a pure-play tiling WM isn't.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
For me it's so much better than gnome. Much more intuitive, much more configurable (which I really care about). I generally like Qt apps much more than GTK equivalents too so that works out well. I only have a few GTK apps in my workflow.
robonerd 4y ago
Mature? I don't know about that. Each time I upgrade I'm faced with new inexplicable bugs. This time on 5.25.0, I'm hit by: Brightness controls are broken, both from the keyboard keys and plasma applet thing. echoing into /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness still works fine at least... https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454161 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454161 I can't drag windows between different virtual desktops from the desktop grid. Trying to drag one window drags all on that desktop and swaps them with the target desktop. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455268 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455268 Not introduced with this update but still broken: Every time I unplug and replug in my USB mouse, my inverse scroll direction preference isn't respected. I have to go into the mouse config GUI, uncheck it, apply, recheck it, and apply. Every time I plug in my mouse. Never in my 30 years of using computers have I see such basic functionality broken this badly. How how HOW does KDE not get a mouse configuration GUI to work correctly? Such basic functionality getting broken has seriously shaken my confidence in KDE as a whole. I just don't understand how something so basic and conceptually simple could break, let alone remain broken for so long. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435113 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435113 Other issues I've experienced in the past few months that have now seemingly resolved: Symlinks to files on my network share wouldn't thumbnail in the Folder View applet, but would in Dolphin. Power management (plugged in, unplugged, battery low, etc) notifications stopped working. > And yet, people don't care about it. I care, trust me. I really want to like KDE. But when each update inexplicably breaks basic functionality, how can I recommend this to any of my friends or family? I think they'd hate me for the recommendation.

IronWolve 4y ago

I like kde, it was my main for a over a decade. I had lots of automation, then continual updates kept breaking my kde setup, as functionality was modified for things such as window setup, placement and size, to the teams correct way of functionality of settings should work. Bug fixes I guess. Took a many years of me interface hopping around, but I'm back at kde. I was using mate, but I'm back at kde on arch.

Beltalowda 4y ago

I haven't even looked at KDE in many years (I'm not a DE kind of user and just use dwm), but this was true back in the KDE 3 days as well, which I considered much nicer than the contemporary Gnome 2 as well. I never quite understood why Gnome got so much more attention compared to KDE.

Wuzado 4y ago
Bundling in major distros? (Say, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE(?)) GTK being open-source and quickly adopted by several popular projects? Being initially under the GNU Project? Probably a lot of factors adding together. KDE is pretty great, though.
account42 4y ago
Gnome is Red Hat and Red Hat has a lot of influence over Linux as a whole. Once a long time ago there was also the licensing concern with Qt.
- akagusu 4y ago
  Unfortunately nobody remembers that Red Hat has so much influence over the Linux stack that they practically own it.

captainmuon 4y ago

I never got over the renaming to Plasma. KDE 3 was great at it's time, but KDE4 / Plasma felt like this bloated, buggy desktop shell seemingly based on QML (not sure, but it looked like it did) with the strange cashew in the corner. Plasma was too configurable, with too many ways to break your setup. I'm sure it got a lot better, and people have even described Plasma 5.x as light weight. The times I tried it later, I liked it, but for the time being the Linux desktop has lost me and I'm using Mac :-)

atoav 4y ago
I entered the game way after the renaming and it makes a lot of sense to me. KDE is the organization, plasma is that specific project (like Korganizer is the Calendar application).
- account42 4y ago
  It makes a lot less sense once you realize that KDE once stood for K Desktop Environment. Trying to retcon this into the name for the organization is just wankery. Plasma is also already the name for the shell, no need to use it for the desktop environment as a whole.
zokula 4y ago

dagw 4y ago

I distinctly remember the KDE 3->4 transition causing a massive revolt and lots of people abandoning KDE. I also remember personally switching from KDE3 to XFCE right around then (although I cannot quite remember exactly why, or what the specific complaints at the time where.). I wonder if we can still be seeing the echos of that backlash as most of the people who left KDE simply never came back. That being said, I did recently try KDE5 for the first time in ages about a year ago, and it is now (again) my favorite desktop environment.

calvinmorrison 4y ago
Yeah, it's unfortunate they abandoned the really good HCI paradigm in favor of glitzy, interesting problems to work on. KDE4 rollout was a absolute trainwreck.
simcop2387 4y ago
If it was like me, the KDE4 roll out was done way too haphazardly and wasn't usable for a bunch of releases (like 1.5-2 years? been a while) but a whole bunch of distros adopted it anyway, despite the KDE developers saying it wasn't ready yet. That ended up leaving a lot of people with a bad taste for it. the Plasma 5 releases were handled much better. I'm hoping that this latest release fixes the last few bugs with wayland that i kept running into (mostly multimonitor crashes, been tracking the bugs and they claim to have fixed all the ones i remember seeing last, but we'll see). I really want to ditch X11 because there's a noticeable performance increase and better power usage with wayland, by about 4-5 watts on my laptop, when it does run. It's also got better handling of scaling displays which is nice but not as critical for me.
- snapplebobapple 4y ago
  This was what pushed me off kde back in the day and started a multiple year odyssey through all the lesser desktops before ending up on lxde for a while. When lxde started to get left behind as they tried to port to lxqt with limited resources I took kde 5 for a whirl and it was like meeting back up with an old friend and I haven't bothered with anything else since except a brief foray into qtile (I see why people like tiling desktops but I also really think they are not good for anyone with a diverse and ever changing usage/workflow sitaution vs just autobooting kde with a few windows set to autostart in fixed locations).

db65edfc7996 4y ago

Linux barely works as it is. I no longer have any interest in debugging my desktop technical problems. Which means my best option is to use the most popular environment so when I do encounter an issue, there is likely to be someone who has already encountered the same issue and reported a solution. Until Ubuntu switches to KDE, I am stuck in the Gnome-lets-remove-desktop-icons-because world.

TheChaplain 4y ago
Ubuntu already have a KDE flavour; https://kubuntu.org/ https://kubuntu.org/ Myself I'm running XUbuntu (XFCE) as my daily driver, works excellently and I have no issues doing what I need to do.
runjake 4y ago
Here you go[1]. Official[2] Ubuntu with KDE. 1. https://kubuntu.org/ https://kubuntu.org/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuntu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuntu Edit: OK, "officially blessed".
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  I wouldn't call it official, it's a side project run by the community. 'Official' would be something created and supported by Canonical. It's a moot point though since you get the exact same thing by installing Ubuntu without a gui and then doing 'apt install plasma-desktop'.

kps 4y ago

As a heavy terminal/editor user, I use KDE because it's not too difficult to stop its programs stealing the Control key. It could, and should, be much easier (global) but at least it's possible.

klibertp 4y ago
Remap Control_L to Hyper_L in xmodmap, then map Hyper to Control in the terminal emulator. Just an idea, personally I've been working with window managers (most recently Awesome) and not desktop environments exactly due to the keyboard shortcuts that are hard or sometimes impossible to unbind...

MisterTea 4y ago

I always felt kde was both cluttered and bloated. From memory the initial plasma debut was met with a lot of complaints about stability which tarnished its reputation (though it did improve.)

teekert 4y ago
You should give it another chance.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  I was a heavy KDE user until 4 came out. After a massive amount of issues with it (Plasma crashes every few minutes on multiple devices with different hardware), I abandoned KDE and tried it from time to time after seeing comments like yours (roughly once a year or so). I don't know how well it works these days (no desire to spend any more time on trying it out), but IME it worked about as badly as the first 4.x releases until at least whatever version was the latest at the beginning of 2021. It's the same story every time — I install it, login into my desktop, start doing stuff, and get crashes at least once an hour (on wildly different hardware, on many releases ten years in a row). Nepomuk crashes, Plasma crashes, kio daemon (or whatever it was called) crashes, this thing and that. I found happiness in xfce4 (that beauty hasn't crashed even once in about 8 years of using it heavily), and then sway (same story, currently at two years).
  - chupasaurus 4y ago
    > on wildly different hardware, on many releases ten years in a row Is the problem. Plasma has been my daily driver since 4.4, on Debian testing, on systems which I know beforehand wouldn't have any random issues (Debian-specific also).
    - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
      Eh, maybe. I don't care either way anymore. If it works for you — great, I haven't been so lucky. Everything else has been running smoothly (even gnome), and as a fanatical Linux user I'm usually very careful in my choice of hardware (no nvidia/broadcom/etc).

kitsunesoba 4y ago

Its sheer customizability makes customizing it into a real task, though. Every time I start sifting through its settings my eyes begin to glaze over. It’s gotten better over the years but still has a long way to go. Something that would help a lot is if KDE came prepackaged with a handful of different full configurations that could be easily flipped between to serve as starting points.

lproven 4y ago
This. And in the thousand options to twiddle, there aren't the options I want. I'd like a panel that when vertical did not scale the controls on it, just kept them the same size but rearranged them. I want a 4- or 5-column vertical panel with nothing growing or shrinking in size. I'd like the Xfce option to constrain the Start button to a single line of text+label. I'd like the Xfce option to set the size and font of the clock. I rather liked wm2. I would like the option of window title bars on the left or right edge, or even the bottom. Why not? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Wm2.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Wm2.png I liked BeOS' title bars as tabs, not whole width. Can I have those, please? Then if I stack windows on top of one another, I would like to move the tabs so they don't overlap. Or better still, have them automatically rearrange themselves. I hate the trend of having no menu bar, just a hamburger menu. Can I disable that globally, please? I want a menu bar in every app, enforced by the desktop. Currently some apps have it, some don't. I do not want desktop gadgets or widgets or plasmoids or whatever they are called. Not at all, not ever. A tick box to disable them globally might be useful? Maybe integrate with Conky for a desktop status monitor. I used to have a machine with 3 screens arranged in a line, with the bottom edges level. (Don't have space in the home office, sadly.) If I can't have a working vertical taskbar, can I have one taskbar across the bottom of 2 or 3 screens, please? KDE 3 could do that no problem.

jcelerier 4y ago

> Plasma is the best modern desktop environment for Linux and yet people barely talk about it. It's the DE of the Steam Deck, for which was apparently 1.5 million units were already sold in May. That's certainly one of the most significant events for the Linux desktop.

akagusu 4y ago
Although it makes its way to Steam Deck, the Linux community favors Gnome and other DEs. If you search for videos and blog posts, Plasma is usually a second class citizen.
- pxc 4y ago
  GNOME has more of a particular vision for the desktop, and I think Plasma unfortunately gets sold as 'more or less like Windows!' because the defaults put the taskbar on the bottom and there's a button resembling the Windows Start Menu.
IE6 4y ago
This is completely tangential and a purely anecdotal observation but I find it interesting that big movements in the "year of the linux desktop" usually come in some very specific use case like ChromeOS or SteamOS.
- jrm4 4y ago
  I'm glad you said it, I think it's really important, especially for those of us who really like Linux. It's easy to split hairs over "true Linux" or whatnot, but I think it's far more valuable to celebrate wins like ChromeOS and SteamOS in the hopes of encouraging more of this. I think that's what gets us closer to the general ideas and ideals of "Linux" and or "Free Software" broadly. It won't be "Year of the Linux Desktop," it will be "Years of many Linux Desktops."
  - jraph 4y ago
    ChromeOS is hard to celebrate though. While it is essentially free software and based on free software, it puts computing of its users in Google's cloud. That's a big loss of control and a huge privacy concern. Free software is important to me because it is supposed to enable users to take back control of their computing.

deleted 4y ago

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jeroenhd 4y ago

> And yet, people don't care about it. It works as you expect and you don't ever need to tweak it unless you're really into it, which makes it... boring. Boring is good. You don't want your desktop manager to distract you, it's there to help you! As for library support, I looked into it but the only real options seem to be to write code in C++ (not a fan) or to use some high level abstraction (Python). I like GTK for projects like gtk-rust. The relevant types and macros seem much better supported than any Qt binding I've seen so far, and the Qt ones often come with unsafe code blocks out of necessity. My Rust GUI code will (sadly) be GTK based because of its decent support without too many hacks. That's quite sad, because GTK applications look very GNOME-like, even when running on Windows or macOS. An unfortunate result of their unwillingness to consider other options in the CSD/SSD fight. Stupid stuff like the inability for applications to look native in any desktop environment is why I don't think we'll reach the year of the Linux desktop any time soon. The Linux desktop can't even run applications in a consistent style. Any way, I hope KDE will in time grow more language diverse. I'd like to switch my code to a less opinionated code base.

pxc 4y ago
> The Linux desktop can't even run applications in a consistent style. Now that I'm actually using Windows again on a regular basis, it really baffles me that people say this. Like, turn dark mode on and have fun getting blinded when random parts of the builtin Settings app are actually links to Control Panel, which just doesn't support dark mode at all and uses totally different widgets. Or try to fight a headache when some Java app has really blurry font rendering for some reason, even though the toolkit looks semi-native for Windows apps from 10 years ago. And have fun with all the Electron apps that completely ignore the native look and feel. There is no OS where all apps have visual consistency. Idk why people pretend this is uniquely a freedesktop problem.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  It's far from uniquely a freedesktop problem. There's one platform I know of whose applications, with the exception of Electron junk, mostly follows system design guidelines and that's macOS. It's far from perfect, but it's the best out there at the moment. Windows used to have about the same level of consistency in the Vista and 7 age. I think Microsoft has ruined their design uniformity the day Windows 8 came out. Windows 8.1, then 10, then 10 again, and now 11, all added their own little inconsistencies to a system that hadn't been fully ported to the new UI yet. However, in my opinion the inconsistencies are rarely ever by design, except for Electron/Tauri/etc. applications because web developers consider themselves above concepts like "consistency" and "using system standards". The move from native to specialised, slightly outdated browsers has been a regression in usability in many aspects and the proposed solutions seem to be to switch to a dedicated, up to date browser rather than to look for consistency. I usually run most Electron apps in my browser instead because the "native" part of the application never seems to add anything, really, though sometimes developers don't port features to the web version. Qt can copy the native look and feel quite easily but GNOME chooses not to expose a usable native look and feel unless you port the entire thing over to GTK+. In return, GTK+ doesn't even try to come close to a native look and feel. If Qt and Wine applications don't look entirely native, that's because of technical challenges or a lack of free time to invest in platform behaviour. In these opinionated desktop environments and SDKs, the problem is actually a conscious choice: "our system looks better than your so suck it" rather than "we don't have time to make our UI look perfect on your system". When developers choose frameworks that don't look consistent that's either because of cost effectiveness, lack of knowledge of native languages, or sometimes simple laziness. Those reasons can be annoying but they're understandable. The real problem lies with the platforms themselves for not exposing easy methods to gain consistency. That's why I blame Electron more than Spotify or Slack, and why I have such a dislike of Java's GUI libraries, GTK+, and GNOME.

Macha 4y ago

It's nice and were I to use a standard desktop environment I'd be all over it, but I'm too attached to tiling WMs and bismuth doesn't quite cut it compared to i3/sway. As a non default environment for most distros, I think this is the problem they face. Once you get into the people going into the customisation sphere, everyone has their own little dealbreakers like moving a window left repeatedly with keyboard hotkeys not wrapping into the next monitor, or the amount of spacing on titlebars or the way the dark theme handles the settings app

lproven 4y ago
Pop_OS successfully bolted tiling onto GNOME. Why not make that an option in KDE?
- Macha 4y ago
  Bismuth does that, which is why I called it out in the post. It doesn't work as well as i3 or sway.
  - lproven 4y ago
    Ah, OK, fair enough. Sorry. That was not clear to me, but then again, I do not routinely use KDE. I liked KDE 1.x but for me each successive version adds bloat I don't want. No, I daresay it doesn't work as well as a dedicated tiling WM, but I don't use tiling WMs. :-) I have used xNix environments with just a window manager in the past, and while it works, I am not someone who lives in a terminal. In fact I almost never use them, just for occasional admin stuff, like a morning update run. Apart from that, I barely touch them. So for me, I like the comforts of a desktop, and I don't want to give that up. But I do like tiled windows sometimes, so something that gives me a bit of both is of potential interest, while a pure-play tiling WM isn't.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

For me it's so much better than gnome. Much more intuitive, much more configurable (which I really care about). I generally like Qt apps much more than GTK equivalents too so that works out well. I only have a few GTK apps in my workflow.

robonerd 4y ago

Mature? I don't know about that. Each time I upgrade I'm faced with new inexplicable bugs. This time on 5.25.0, I'm hit by: Brightness controls are broken, both from the keyboard keys and plasma applet thing. echoing into /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness still works fine at least... https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454161 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454161 I can't drag windows between different virtual desktops from the desktop grid. Trying to drag one window drags all on that desktop and swaps them with the target desktop. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455268 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455268 Not introduced with this update but still broken: Every time I unplug and replug in my USB mouse, my inverse scroll direction preference isn't respected. I have to go into the mouse config GUI, uncheck it, apply, recheck it, and apply. Every time I plug in my mouse. Never in my 30 years of using computers have I see such basic functionality broken this badly. How how HOW does KDE not get a mouse configuration GUI to work correctly? Such basic functionality getting broken has seriously shaken my confidence in KDE as a whole. I just don't understand how something so basic and conceptually simple could break, let alone remain broken for so long. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435113 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435113 Other issues I've experienced in the past few months that have now seemingly resolved: Symlinks to files on my network share wouldn't thumbnail in the Folder View applet, but would in Dolphin. Power management (plugged in, unplugged, battery low, etc) notifications stopped working. > And yet, people don't care about it. I care, trust me. I really want to like KDE. But when each update inexplicably breaks basic functionality, how can I recommend this to any of my friends or family? I think they'd hate me for the recommendation.