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Revisiting KDE

332 points by rc00 4y ago

HN_is_for_gemes 4y ago
[dead]
RedShift1 4y ago
I miss the KDE 3.5 days. It was a super customizable and polished DE. It's a real shame all that work was thrown away, every time I try KDE now I'm still disappointed, it doesn't take much to get the first crashes and bugs...
- jimbosis 4y ago
  You may already be aware of the Trinity Desktop Environment, and if not: "The TDE project began as a continuation of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) version 3.... Trinity is an independent fork..." (from the "About" page) https://www.trinitydesktop.org/index.php https://www.trinitydesktop.org/index.php https://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php https://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  I’ve been running KDE 4 and 5 on a variety of different hardware since the day KDE 4 reached v4.0. Granted the first few releases of 4 were a little bumpy (as had been thoroughly discussed on the internet at the time) but it’s been super stable for me ever since. Is it possible your issues are down to your preferred distro packing KDE badly? The few times I’ve tried Kubuntu (for example) KDE has felt laggy. On Slackware, OpenSuse and Arch it flys though. This was true in the 3.x days too. I’d also be interest to know what WM / DE is your usual daily driver and comparison here. Does it do compositing? If not, I wonder if the issue is graphics hardware and running KDE with software rendering would work better (though if you’re going to do that then you’re probably better off with an older DE or WM). As an aside, I’ve been running KDE since the 1.0 and I my personal opinion KDE is the best now it has ever been.
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    Not GP, but I was also KDE3 user who ran away after the KDE4 (in my eyes) fiasco. I never went back because customizing and learning to use a desktop environment is an investment on my side, and if the DE doesn't respect that and doesn't understand why I use it, I will not waste my time with it. But hearing the praise in this thread, maybe I should give KDE another chance? I went to Gnome for a while but never felt at home there, too many weird (to me) ux decisions. I finally settled on Xfce and it works great. Nothing fancy, it just does its job.
    - hnlmorg 4y ago
      Interesting that you mentioned GNOME because it was only a couple of years later that GNOME 3 was released and that was a far more significant change to the UX than KDE 3 to 4. Around that time there seemed to be a lot of changes to the FOSS DE landscape. I’ve not used XFCE in 10 or 15 years but I always had a good experience when I did need it. In fact I preferred that over GNOME too. Completely just my personal preference, though the leaner footprint was a big incentive. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. All this stuff basically boils down to personal preferences at the end of the day, but it’s often interesting hearing what peoples preferences are.
      - bornfreddy 4y ago
        I wasn't using Gnome before that so the changes didn't affect me much... :) Iirc I switched to xfce very quickly too. I agree, every person has a different set of preferences and priorities. For me it just has to work reliably and not get in my way, and design is less important. But I still try to make my desktops look good.
      - LarryMullins 4y ago
        GNOME 3 and KDE 4 both committing usability seppuku at around the same time was really odd. Both these disasters were immediately preceded by the release of the first iPhone. I think maybe iOS broke the devs, made the KDE and GNOME devs feel inadequate so they started flailing around and hurt themselves in an attempt to reinvent things and prove to themselves that they could reinvent like Apple can.
- thom 4y ago
  Logging in the morning, opening a website, a word doc and a spreadsheet in tabs in Konqueror, editing stuff over SSH in Kate. It genuinely felt like KDE was trying something new back then, creating a more object oriented desktop. I don’t know how much of that survives but it was exciting at the time.
- oweiler 4y ago
  For me KDE 3.5 was the epitome of Linux on the Desktop, KDE 4 felt like a huge step backwards when introduced (may not be true anymore).
  - jraph 4y ago
    Agree, and KDE 5 is KDE 3.5, modern for me. Latest version of KDE 4 were already pretty good.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  XFCE is very customizable. There's a project called Trinity, which is essentially KDE 3. https://www.trinitydesktop.org https://www.trinitydesktop.org
- dmead 4y ago
  I agree. It seems kde 4 was the reason it was really dropped from most of the major distros.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  Try https://trinitydesktop.org/ https://trinitydesktop.org/ then?
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  KDE 5 is much better than KDE 4 was, but I agree that KDE still hasn't reacquired the heights they had in the 3.5 days. Things are still less configurable than they used to be. And Plasma is still buggy for me, whenever I try to use Plasma I end up having to manually restart plasma-shell several times a month because it crashes and KDE doesn't manage to start it again, leaving me with no task bar until I restart it manually... Kwin is generally great though, and many of the KDE applications are top-tier.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Kool article, but it was far shorter than I expected. Would have loved to hear the author's POV on touchpad and gestures. Still, the author gets points from me for using Opensuse Tumbleweed, a highly underrated distro.
- 63 4y ago
  I used to use OpenSuse Tumbleweed but ended up switching to Manjaro for the AUR. Currently in the process of moving to Arch after all the problems I've had with poorly documented Manjaro updates that break half my system.
  - nazgulsenpai 4y ago
    Isn't breakage a risk using AUR on any arch-based distro?
    - 63 4y ago
      The specific issues I had weren't related to the aur, they were oversights from Manjaro. I'm okay with things breaking when it's my fault.
    - deadbunny 4y ago
      Using the AUR on Manjaro is a risk because they hold packages in the Manjaro repos back compared to Arch. So `libfoobar` might be at 1.2 in the arch repos and required by an AUR package but it's only 1.1 in the Manjaro repo which will lead to broken packages. If you're going to use the AUR, use Arch basically.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  Tumbleweed is a great distro, and seems to be getting more popular recently.
gjsman-1000 4y ago
I am personally very perplexed with KDE. Many Linux users hate GNOME. Sure, it’s not that customizable, and looks like it was made for the smartphone generation. But… I cannot deny that it is very, very polished visually and is much more familiar to people who aren’t as good at computers. If I was building Linux computers for poor people at a charity shop, I would use GNOME. KDE… it is just so customizable, almost to a fault. System Settings can be mentally overwhelming - and why does every app have to start with the letter K? Also, whereas GNOME is content with generic names like “Web” and “PDF Viewer,” I’m just supposed to know Okular is my PDF viewer?
- unsafecast 4y ago
  If I have two PDF viewers, should both be called "PDF viewer"? Gnome seems to love hiding the actual names (the gnome document viewer is actually called evince).
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    View it this way. If I’m a new user to Linux, KDE tends to come with far more apps than GNOME, with names that are often so opaque every app is a mystery. And not in a good way. “Oh… I thought Konquerer might be a video game, involving Conkers.”
    - rhn_mk1 4y ago
      You nailed it: GNOME targets new users. KDE doesn't. The advantage of having unique names is that you can actually talk about them, and that includes finding documentation and solving problems via a search engine. Try finding anythng useful when your query is based on a generic name, e.g. "document viewer crashes".
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
        > GNOME targets new users. Which is of course the correct strategy in the exploding-growth market of not only Linux Desktop, but desktop computing in general. ...wait a second...
Derbasti 4y ago
I love KDE. Its file manager in particular is a thing of beauty, unique in its ability to display large directories without slowing down and uniquely flexible and powerful. The desktop in general gets out of my way, with a good window switcher, launcher, and window manager. Nothing groundbreaking here, but everything mostly works as intended (looking at you, Win+Arrow on Gnome). Some of the default apps are great, like the PDF viewer Okular with its fantastic annotation tools. The only thing I don't really care for is the default look, which is a bit dated. A refresh would be nice. To be fair, it is relatively easy to customize the colors, which helps. Still, that steel-gray-with-neon is a bit boring.
- popol12 4y ago
  Dolphin is the best. I love how it integrates a terminal that follows you through folders. Best of both worlds: GUI and CLI together
  - sph 4y ago
    Why not add an email client panel as well? Windowing should be a window manager concern. There is no reason for Dolphin to embed a terminal instead of your window manager to just keep a borderless Konsole next to it, like you might see on any tiled WM. It's pure bloat caused by inflexible software. Personally I would love to see tabs, panes and all that crap disappear from any application. It shouldn't be their concerns to manage windows. My dream desktop would even have Emacs windows be separate frames managed by the window manager, not by Emacs itself.
    - massysett 4y ago
      ? Aren’t Emacs frames (the C-x 5 2 variety) managed by the window manager already?
      - sph 4y ago
        Yes, but Emacs tends to use windows (what one would call panes elsewhere) for everything, not frames, so it replicates badly something your desktop is already doing.
turbobooster 4y ago
Not a fan of the confusing QT license
- jcelerier 4y ago
  what's confusing with this? https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtmodules.html https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtmodules.html everything before the "Add-ons available under Commercial Licenses, or GNU General Public License v3" separator is available under LGPLv3, and that covers very likely 100% of what is used in KDE
  - LtWorf 4y ago
    over 20 years ago qt was not free software. People on the internet keep parroting this information that they've read in a comment… and so on. The original comment was true and was decades ago.
- rascul 4y ago
  There is a KDE Free Qt Foundation to help make sure Qt stays free for KDE users. > The Foundation has license agreements with The Qt Company, Digia and Nokia. The agreements ensure that the Qt will continue to be available as Free Software. Should The Qt Company discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the required licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreements stay valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy. https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/
heywhatupboys 4y ago
oh how I love KDE and how I wish I could actually use it. But all the time, every year, I return to MacOS.
- vlod 4y ago
  Any specific reason? Personally I used to be a die hard mac user, but then I realized most of the time I just use vscode, firefox and terminal, which could be done on any platform (I chose linux and never looked back).
  - heywhatupboys 4y ago
    that is what I wish I knew. If I knew, I could help "solve" it. but somehow it is just so hard.
- ankurdhama 4y ago
  Yeah MacOS, where you can't even use Tab key to move focus on different UI controls.
29athrowaway 4y ago
My favorite KDE versions were KDE 1 and KDE 2. KDE 3 was fine. KDE 4 was not a worthy successor to KDE 3 and it was a massive setback with regards to customization. After that I stopped using KDE. KDE 3 was polished, KDE 4 looked like developer art. https://kde.org/announcements/4/4.0/desktop.png https://kde.org/announcements/4/4.0/desktop.png
- Thev00d00 4y ago
  You should try a modern KDE 5 it's polished and it's as good as the end of V3 era.
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    Sure, but I don't feel like finding Qt replacements for the software I use.
college_physics 4y ago
KDE has a well articulated vision about how open source personal computing should look like. E.g., I like their growing collection of android apps [0] (KDE Connect in particular). Hopefully they can attract more resources to speed up executing on that vision. [0] https://apps.kde.org/platforms/android/ https://apps.kde.org/platforms/android/
- chungy 4y ago
  KDE Connect is indeed amazing, definitely a "killer feature" (albeit one not exclusive to the KDE desktop -- I run GNOME and still integrate with my phone via KDE Connect). It makes so much sense, I don't know why Google or anyone else hasn't attempted anything like it too.
  - sodality2 4y ago
    KDE Connect also runs on iOS (I find it the easiest way to send large files to my iPhone then open with VLC for example). Also, Windows! A bit ironic that a KDE Connect user probably exists that uses it on their iPhone and Windows computer together.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > I don't know why Google or anyone else hasn't attempted anything like it too. Google does have an integration feature, for Chrome OS and Android. I suspect they just aren't invested in other platforms.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Windows has something similar for Android: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-devices https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev...
izoow 4y ago
KDE is the desktop environment that finally made me stay on Linux full-time and I seriously feel like its developers don't get enough praise. Especially over the last years I feel like they've ironed out a ton of bugs and weird quirks and made KDE truly a joy to use. I'm surprised to see how much Kate can do, and even more so that the author deemed it good enough to use in place of neovim. Maybe I should give it a chance someday.
- hajile 4y ago
  Kate has the best VI command emulator out there bar none and got a lot more usable for a lot of stuff when it added LSP support. Kate is the core editor of KDevelop IDE too. https://www.kdevelop.org/ https://www.kdevelop.org/
  - account42 4y ago
    The editor component is also used in KWrite if you want a more minimal editor. I don't really use Kate itself but really like both KWrite and KDevelop.
  - bergheim 4y ago
    Really? Bar none? Better than evil?
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      Hard to imagine that's possible, since evil is already better than vim.
      - nequo 4y ago
        What makes Evil better than Vim in your experience?
        LarryMullins 4y ago
        Better configuration language. For instance (define-key evil-normal-state-map " " "@q") vs noremap <Space> @q I know it's subjective and some people will say the later is better because it's shorter, but I greatly prefer the first. It's very descriptive, I can tell exactly what it does just by reading it. The vim version... "no remap"? I know it means "Normal Recursive Map", but that's not the way it reads unless you already know what it does. Vim just has a bewildering array of such things, noremap, nnoremap, vnnoremap, znormap, xnoremap, snoremap, onoremap, tnoremap... one of those is fake and you probably can't tell which. Basically, vim has an old-school unix culture of naming things, while emacs has a lisp culture of naming things. Considering both these editors now come with powerful completion features that make it easy to type long symbol names, I think the lisp approach is the correct one. I tried to like vimscript. Tried for nearly 15 years. When I finally took the plunge and switched to evil mode it was like a breath of fresh air, and I was left wondering why I hadn't switched years earlier.
suby 4y ago
Regarding the blurry icons in alt tab, I think this is a general problem on Linux and not KDE specific. I had the same issue with certain icons in Cinnamon, and the following steps fixed it for me: Find the desktop file, for Cinnamon they're stored in /usr/share/applications For the blurry icon, append to the end of the file (obviously replacing Audacity with the app name) StartupWMClass=Audacity
criddell 4y ago
Is there any possibility that KDE and Gnome will ever merge?
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Extremely unlikely. They’re built on entirely different UI stacks so in a “merge” the codebase for one half or the other is going to have to be binned, and besides that they have very different and largely incompatible approaches in terms of UI/UX design.
- pluijzer 4y ago
  I see this as very unlikely as kde and gnome have very different design philosophies. Also KDE used Qt and Gnome GTK, merging the code bases would be problematic.
- NoahKAndrews 4y ago
  Why would they? They have no shared code (as far as I know), and significantly different philosophies.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    I also would never want this. They are completely different products that appeal to different people. It's like asking if MacOS and Windows will ever merge. No, they won't, and they shouldn't (antitrust aside).
    - criddell 4y ago
      They do appeal to different people, but I think the fat part of the curve is made up of people like me - they don’t care. Both work just fine. I can launch applications and manage my machine from it.
  - criddell 4y ago
    To defrag the Linux demographic. If the two camps worked together on a future WM using all the things they’ve learned, maybe something great would come about. Having a single desktop for developers to target if they want to reach Linux users would be nice as well. It seems like if trends continue, Electron will be pretty much the only way new software gets on Linux and as a platform, Electron sucks compared to KDE or Gnome.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
As much as I want to like KDE and agree with some of its principles (such as its all-too-uncommon lack of fear of proper menubars) I have a hard time using it long term because even after years of effort going into polishing it, it still has that distinct “designed by programmers” feel to it with awkward UI layout and whitespace distribution and quirky idiosyncrasies smattered throughout. I get why it has ardent fans but I don’t think it’s for everybody.
- cpach 4y ago
  Are there any FOSS desktop environments that executes better in those areas?
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Just about anything GTK-based. GNOME takes minimalism too far but is undeniably polished, but Cinnamon and XFCE get much closer to a balance between good UI/UX and configurability.
  - mrbadger 4y ago
    Cinnamon works for me. KDE was buggy, unreliable and annoying when I tried it--admittedly some time ago. And the fetish for naming everything with an initial letter K: kindergarten stuff. Too much effort on making every last thing customisable and not enough on making it work?
- eliaspro 4y ago
  On the calendar front, Kalendar [1] has picked up KOrganizer's tab and is doing a great job at it: [1] https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/ https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/
- kombine 4y ago
  I'm not a design expert, but KDE looks absolutely fine to me. Maybe because I'm a programmer and it was designed by people like me for me.
- javier2 4y ago
  Same for me. And I am even a programmer. I have settled on Gnome for the past ~five years.
Thev00d00 4y ago
KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era. Exposed options make computing discovery possible. Sometimes having a drop-down to pick your compositing mode opens a lot of possibilities to learn more about your system. This is not what i.e. GNOME are going for nowadays, everyone wants to reinvent the locked down iPhone "experience".
- drooopy 4y ago
  "KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era." I was trying to find the right words to describe why I prefer KDE over other DE's but this captures my feelings perfectly.
  - pxc 4y ago
    I find this quite strange. I was a kid (and heavy computer user) when Windows 9x was current. I'd been a user of MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x, and Windows XP before I got into Linux and KDE, back in the KDE 3.4 days. I love KDE, but I have no positive feelings about Windows 9x, and I don't really think KDE reminds me of it at all. In fact, some of the developments and workflows that excited me back in the day were divergences away from Windows 9x, like the replacement of the old Kicker menu with Lancelot. The KDE application that eventually won my heart as a teenager was Amarok, which simply had no equivalent in any other ecosystem. To me, what is great about KDE is best described with reference to KDE itself, not some other desktop experience.
    - FeepingCreature 4y ago
      Amarok is a distant descendant of WinAmp, which was indeed developed for Windows 95. :) WinAmp -> X11Amp -> XMMS -> Amarok ... -> Clementine -> Strawberry, if you want a current player that looks like Amarok 1.4.
      - seba_dos1 4y ago
        Describing Amarok as a descendant from XMMS feels like describing Firefox as a descendant from Lynx.
nisa 4y ago
I really like KDE but one thing that saddens me is the state of the office stuff - like KMail, KOrganizer, Desktop Search etc.pp - there was an ambitious project called Nepomuk for Semantic Desktop and that failed 10 years ago? And the Backend launches a full MySQL at the moment - I hope someday all of this will be streamlined get's an UI update and a fast database i.e. https://github.com/cozodb/cozo https://github.com/cozodb/cozo and the features will come back. Also KMail needs some usability improvements... If this stuff would work and not crash adding calendars/todo-lists in the ui would hopefully work and the original ideas and research concepts could be implemented in a fast an good way. Well, one can dream :)
- dale_glass 4y ago
  Unfortunately it's the last 5% of polish -- coming up with cool tech is interesting, tracking down that one weird bug in Akonadi that makes mail break randomly after 3 months of working fine is much less enticing.
- bmn__ 4y ago
  > And the Backend launches a full MySQL at the moment You are allowed to run SQLite instead, install package `akonadi-server-sqlite` and edit `~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc`. Unfortunately, `akonadiconsole` does not offer this customisation in the GUI for some reason.
  - nisa 4y ago
    thanks - I didn't know about this. I actually like and enjoy this it's just that it's missing polish but this is not the fault of the devs who do hard work for an difficult and almost impossible problem without lot's of ressources and even then it's still difficult to get right.
- kdomanski 4y ago
  > there was an ambitious project called Nepomuk for Semantic Desktop and that failed 10 years ago? Oh, they didn’t fail per se. They just ran out of the 11.5 million EUR grant money.
drooopy 4y ago
Whatever happened to the 1.x revival project or whatever it was called? I am very fond of the aesthetics of the 1.x and 2.x series as it reminds me of classic Windows and MacOS. Is there a way to replicate the look and feel of 1.x and 2.x on modern KDE?
haskellandchill 4y ago
was anyone else thinking kernel density estimation?
c0l0 4y ago
I was a very happy KDE user during the 3.3 to 3.5 days. I tried sticking with the desktop after the 4.0 release (there were SO MANY changes and grand new ideas under the hood!), but lost patience soon after the 4.2 release - it just wasn't ready for day-to-day use; all the rough edges made me bleed every day. So I made the plunge to Xfce, and didn't look back for more than a decade. Until some three months ago, when I had to set up a new, additional machine at home, and I decided to try the new (really: current :)) Plasma Desktop on Arch Linux for funsies. By now, all may Xfce machines, except the one at work, have been migrated to KDE. Now even my wife uses it on her personal desktop - she's especially fond of Okular, KDE Connect, and digiKam.
- PontifexMinimus 4y ago
  > I was a very happy KDE user during the 3.3 to 3.5 days [...] So I made the plunge to Xfce, and didn't look back for more than a decade. My experience too. I liked KDE 3.5 so of course the devs had to fuck it up by chasing whatever is the user interface fashion of the day. So I went with xfce which doesn't change much. Maybe I will try out KDE again sometime.
  - ablob 4y ago
    May I ask what the biggest changes/ deal breakers were? It is difficult to understand the whys without knowing about the usage-pattern was broken. I'm genuinely curious.
    - oriolid 4y ago
      IIRC KDE4 wasn't as much breaking existing usage patterns but pushing intrusive things like desktop widgets and generally trying to lock me into tightly integrated system. I remember it was really easy to create a desktop note by accident and somehow really difficult to delete one. KDE3.5, or Xfce for that matter, felt more like something that is good for launching apps, managing desktop and some generic utilities. The clumsy UI design didn't also help.
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
0xZy4d 4y ago
[flagged]
agumonkey 4y ago
I went away from KDE because of this constant fluctuation phase, plasma felt never finished, always new ideas but never clicking (unlike eos). Maybe it's time to also revisit. I agree that Kate, kdev etc are great.
willnonya 4y ago
I get much of the praise and dislike for KDE. What I've never understood is the success of gnome. KDE isn't perfect but gnome is a textbook example of broken workflows and poor UI design. How it became the default for many distros never made sense to me.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  GNOME became "the default" in large part due to the licensing uncertainty that has historically clouded Qt and by extension KDE. After that, it's been inertia.
  - lpcvoid 4y ago
    For me it was very good out of the box Wayland support which made me use GNOME for a long time.
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      Wayland wasn't relevant until very recently, and hasn't existed even in concept for much longer than that. The Qt licensing matter I'm talking about was back in the 90s.
      - chungy 4y ago
        GNOME's been pretty damn usable with Wayland since around 2015 or so. Enough time that I can distinctly remember three Debian stable releases that run it by default.
- chungy 4y ago
  GNOME takes a hard-nose approach to application and technology design, making each application they ship feel like part of a greater whole. Rather than feeling like applications made by developers each with their own ideas of how to design an application (which is very much what KDE looks and feels like), GNOME pushes every one of its components into a unified look and feel and it really makes it feel like everything was made by the same people (despite the actual development story). It permeates everything from user interface design to what libraries the applications use (eg: GNOME applications use SQLite for database needs. And that's it. You don't get some using SQLite, others using PostgreSQL, others using MySQL; that's the situation KDE found/finds itself in.) On top of all that, IBM and Novell have put some serious development money behind making GNOME check all the accessibility boxes and the remote administration boxes. It's the only environment outside of Windows that can match the accessibility and administrative control Windows offers.
bergheim 4y ago
I LOVED KDE 3.5. Holy smokes that was a good experience for me growing up. 4 made me switch, and years later, I tried KDE 5 (last year). And eh, I really tried for two weeks. That was super annoying, and coming back to i3 just felt like finally getting air. It was slow, things didn't work, and weird. I totally understand that people would use gnome or kde and call it a day, because it is much easier to get going with. But if you think you should invest time into your interface I would say try other things as well. Still lots of other good things from the kde project though!
- E39M5S62 4y ago
  My experience mirrors yours. I started using KDE back in the 1.x days, and continued up through 3.5. I switched to OS X for a few years, then when I came back to Linux I discovered how wonderful i3 was to use. I've been on Sway now for a few years, but they're functionally equivalent with each other. I try KDE each time a major new release hits, but I just can't give up my Sway workflow. Maybe KDE+ Bismuth would do it.
- woolion 4y ago
  It seems that virtual desktops have fallen out of fashion, but I still use them and found that they made tiling entirely unnecessary to me. Each program is on its own desktop (Firefox, thunderbird, ...) and the terminal is everywhere through Guake (or Yakuake). Most 'comparative' views are already managed by specialized programs, but if you really need to 'tile' two windows, using meta+left or meta+right to take half the screen is very fast. Compared to tiling with i3, it's a workflow that requires almost no configuration or learning.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    I don't think it's fair to say that multiple virtual desktops have fallen out of fashion, given that even Windows has added them a few years ago.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Tried it recently to kick the tires on fedora and wayland as well. Pretty good and better than before but still so goddamn cluttered. Wish most stuff was plugins that I could remove. All I want is a desktop as good as Win 2k with a modern terminal. Cinnamon seems to be the closest to that today, finally gave up on mate as it has been rotting from beneath.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > Cinnamon seems to be the closest to that today, finally gave up on mate as it has been rotting from beneath. I've had the opposite experience. Cinnamon was always buggy and crashing, while Mate never crashed. Of course, I switched to Plasma about 2 years ago, so I am willing to concede that Mate has had an awful two years while Cinnamon has been bugfixed until the bug reports stopped :-)
  - bigger_cheese 4y ago
    I've been using Cinnamon for years now on Fedora. No issues with crashes on my end. I like it as far as I'm concerned it is a solid piece of software, it works and it does what I want I don't need to touch anything to have it working the way I prefer. It may not be the fanciest or have all the bells a whistles but it is what I like. When I first started using Linux in the early 2000's as a university student KDE was the environment that managed to get me to switch over from Windows. I appreciated just how configurable it was. I would spent hours tweaking my desktop getting everything setup just how I liked it to look. It felt like there was a configuration setting in KDE for just about everything. I remember spending an afternoon procrastinating as a student picking the perfect font for the system clock. All of that seemed to come at a cost I remember it gradually felt more and more bloated and things became less responsive over time I reached a point where I cared less and less about being able to customize things and more about just having a useable system. I kind of grudgingly used Gnome (in the Gnome 2.6 days) I was never really enamored with it but it "worked". Gnome 3 lost me as a user completely I just did not mesh with the new paradigm they were going for. I tried out KDE again but this was around the time they were having stability issues and there was some new file indexing system they were using I'm not sure if it was just badly implemented by my distro but it was incredibly resource intensive it would freeze the system for 2 to 3 seconds at a time whenever it kicked it. So I moved on tried out a few other environments like XFCE for a while before settling on Cinnamon. On a semi-related note does anyone know what happened to Enlightenment? I remember that was the much hyped up desktop environment back in the old Slashdot days I never really hear about it these days.
eointierney 4y ago
Apart from an early dalliance with Enlightenment 16 due to scavenging 486 computer components from skips in Cork (I fondly remember the donation of a P90 from my friend Barry) KDE has provided me with an almost ideal desktop environment of unparalled configurability and utility. It is fast, light, and as beautiful as you wish it to be. And then there are the applications
noisy_boy 4y ago
> Whereas on KDE applets typically quickly allow me to to perform the required action without having to dive into the full settings. Indeed, but I had to actually remove applets which I wanted to use because once I added a few (Command Output applet to be precise), CPU usage started to jump by 2-5% on every addition and fans started to run full tilt. Running shell scripts that don't do anything CPU intensive once every 5 or 10 seconds shouldn't result in that. Completely agree with the points regarding Task Switcher - when I use Breeze, I get this huge list of icons on the left which frankly looks terrible. There should atleast be an option to switch to smaller icons in the task switcher (I don't see any "Small Icons" option, only the names of the themes). None of these are deal-breakers though; I think KDE is the best "mainstream" DE experience on Linux.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  There is a "Small Icons" option, it's just below "Large Icons".
  - noisy_boy 4y ago
    I don't see either Large or Small Icons (KDE 5.25.5): https://imgur.com/a/3qV1z0h https://imgur.com/a/3qV1z0h
    - tmtvl 4y ago
      In OpenSUSE Tumbleweed the additional task switchers are provided by the package plasma5-addons. Depending on which distro you're on it may have another name, like kdeplasma-addons in Arch. Look for a package which provides /usr/share/kwin/tabbox/small_icons/contents/ui/main.qml.
      - noisy_boy 4y ago
        I couldn't find the package for Ubuntu (I'm using Pop!_OS which is based on Ubuntu) - trying to install kdeplasma-addons returns error "Unable to locate package kdeplasma-addons". Anyhow, I searched for alternative switchers and found one called "MediumDefault" which works pretty well - medium size icons in the middle of the screen which is pretty much a "sane" setup.
tmtvl 4y ago
Looking back I'm not sure the Oxygen theme has aged particularly well Well, I am currently using the Oxygen theme (with a GTK 3 version called Oxygen SCSS) and I like it a lot better than the default Breeze theme. Buttons that look like buttons, a nice glow effect when highlighting things, and some of the icons* I find absolutely gorgeous (the Log Out, Restart, and Shut Down icons, for instance, have this nice glassy look). * https://iconarchive.com/show/oxygen-icons-by-oxygen-icons.org.html https://iconarchive.com/show/oxygen-icons-by-oxygen-icons.or...
- __float 4y ago
  "Nice glossy look" is very Vista-era: it's has fallen out of fashion since then.
  - tmtvl 4y ago
    Who cares about fashion? If something looks good, it looks good, even if it's not fashionable. It's like saying the style of a nice Gothic cathedral has fallen out of fashion, it still looks better than a concrete and glass box.
    - paul_funyun 4y ago
      Correct about fashion, but wrong about the icons. Glassy icons are like concrete boxes, not cathedrals. They never looked good and were just the fashion for a while, like shag carpets or powdered wigs.
      - tmtvl 4y ago
        Oh come now, as long as you don't overdo it cut glass looks neat. Millions of crows and magpies can't be wrong.
linuxhansl 4y ago
KDE is great. I've been using the Fedora KDE spin for years now. Just works. Everything just seems to make sense, and I have not experiences the crashes or wake-up failures the author describes. Probably Fedora pre-vets which packages and version work well together.
- hackerbrother 4y ago
  Seconding KDE + Fedora! Great twice annual upgrade cycle, SELinux by default, popular enough for e.g. a first-party Google Chrome package, and close to bleeding edge kernel! KDE feels like Windows 10 (meant in a good way).
  - kombine 4y ago
    I've been meaning to switch to Fedora because of more up to date packages after 10+ years on Ubuntu. It does work for me though, and by now I reached a point of where everything works, so I'm afraid to change things too much.
tommica 4y ago
I went with KDE from gnome shell, and it just works so nicely - would have stayed with gnome-shell, but it had some weird glitches in regards of screen freezing, while mouse moves, but with KDE life is so much smoother. If year of the linux happens, KDE will play a big part in that.
nikanj 4y ago
I wonder what desktop Linux would look like today if Qt licensing issues in the 1990s didn’t stop KDE from getting widespread support from Debian.
moistly 4y ago
I jumped to macOS 20-odd years ago, mostly out of frustration with the build quality of Windows laptops and the endless PITA experience of Windows itself. Figured the resale value of Apple laptops made it a minimal risk. Bought a Lenovo laptop the other year and installed Ubuntu. Thoroughly meh experience there, really disappointed. But then I found KDE, and it’s my main dev environment now. If Lenovo could come out with a laptop with the build quality of Mac, running a KDE environment integrated with their new Lenovo phone, I think they’d stand a very good chance of going head-to-head with Apple.
- vouaobrasil 4y ago
  It makes sense but I think there are other factors preventing Linux going head to head with Apple, even with the same quality build. There are apps. I was a long-time Linux user also (and still use it technically), but my main computer is also Apple now. There are the apps, and even with KDE MacOS is still more consistent-looking than Linux sadly.
IshKebab 4y ago
> I think this is partially my fault for using Flatpak applications and expecting the desktop integration be 100% seamless. Ha yes, definitely your fault for expecting Linux desktop stuff to work seamlessly!
Daunk 4y ago
KDE is what kept me away from Linux for a long time. I think everything they make "looks bad" (layout, design, graphics etc.) and I feel like they're just pushing out half-finished features. It's really a desktop about quantity over quality. Cinnamon is what finally "clicked" for me. I wish KDE the best of luck, but I just cannot stand it.
indymike 4y ago
I've been on KDE since coming back home to Linux a few years ago. A few thoughts: * KDE feels like we just kept on iterating on the same UI since the early 90s. The functionality is very deep, but also intuitive. A lot of the depth comes from things like KIO, kparts and dbus, where we see a lot of functionality being reused from one app to the next. This means if you learn how Konsole works, when you fire up a terminal in other KDE apps, it works the same way. * Customization is really a good thing. Everyone isn't learning to use a computer for the first time. Computers have been personal for almost 50 years now. * Would really love kmail and the whole korganizer get a refresh. It's really good when it works, but needs some crashy-ness and jank removed. (BTW Akregator, the KDE-PIM RSS feed reader is still EXCELLENT)
- catfishx 4y ago
  > Would really love kmail and the whole korganizer get a refresh Korganizer is being rewritten as Kalendar: https://apps.kde.org/en-gb/kalendar/ https://apps.kde.org/en-gb/kalendar/
anotherevan 4y ago
Have been a long time KDE user from the 3.x days through to 2019 when a long standing itch to try a tiling window manager moved me to Awesomewm. I still use Dolphin, Konsole and a few other bits though. I also seem to remember using the Suse distro in those early times as it was the only one I could find that treated KDE as a first-class citizen and not a bolt-on. (Think I was Redhat before that. This is before the Opensuse and Fedora days.)
WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
My wish for KDE is that they move some of their quirks used, for example, to launch GTK3/GTK4 applications so they start in the right size, or XWayland itself, somewhere scriptable. Right now, if something doesn’t quite work, you need to fix it in C++ and recompile the whole plasma-desktop, which is not very tinker-friendly. Otherwise KDE has quite a renaissance for the last few years, I hope it continues.
- foresto 4y ago
  What is the "right" size? Do Window Rules do what you need? That's what I used to make a certain app's window size/position persist between runs. Title bar menu: More Actions: Configure Special {Application,Window} Settings: Add Properties
  - WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
    The right size as in "the right DPI". There was this bug with GTK4 apps that they launched at 4x when everything else was 2x (and the usual quirks for GTK3 apps didn't work), and all those XSettings + environment variable stuff Plasma sets were all in the C++ parts of the code.
    - foresto 4y ago
      If this is the bug, it looks like it's fixed in the upcoming 5.27 release. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442901 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442901
Kenji 4y ago
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crispinb 4y ago
It really is time for the HN mods to review the guidelines. Nearly every comment here has been made almost verbatim thousands of times, in dozens of different forums, repeated for years on end. The same thing happens when there's any mention of an electron app, or Windows, or software having the temerity to not reveal its source. These issues turn so many HN commenters into echolalics. This guideline should be extended to cover this kind of repetitive and pointless content: > Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. Assuming that the guideline writers really mean the justification stated here: more than 50% of the comments in this kind of thread are so often canonical examples of 'too common to be interesting', so the guideline should apply to this kind of standard trigger issue.
Octabrain 4y ago
KDE 3.X was the first Linux desktop I ever used. It was back in the old days, when I installed a SUSE Linux that came in a magazine that my mother bought me after me finding it unexpectedly in a groceries shop while shopping with her. I felt pure and simple fascination. I was a teenager that only knew Windows. I spent hours playing around with it and its familiar and attractive aspect helped me a lot on making easier to dig into the GNU/Linux idiosyncrasies. Later, I moved to Ubuntu and Gnome 2.X, then Debian, then Slackware, then Arch then whatever was the trend at the time. All great experiences, and despite nowadays I use Gnome (in Fedora) exclusively (and enjoy it quite a lot) I will always have KDE in my heart. The only shame is the fact that no mainstream distro (from the subset I prefer to use for technical reasons: RHEL based) use it as a first class citizen. I would be open to give it a try if that wasn't the case.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  You wrote: "no mainstream distro". What is wrong with Debian and its variants? Assuming that you are vanilla x86-64, GNOME, KDE, and many other windowing systems are first class citizens on Debian.
  - kombine 4y ago
    Well, in Ubuntu and Fedora all DEs are equal but GNOME is more equal than the rest. I just wish they switched to KDE because it is so much better.
  - Octabrain 4y ago
    I wrote "no mainstream distro *(from the subset I prefer to use for technical reasons: RHEL based)*. So no, Debian doesn't apply.
- Maakuth 4y ago
  I use KDE on Fedora in my daily driver. I have not experienced issues that would suggest of KDE being lower than first class. In Fedora it's installed with dnf groupinstall -y "KDE Plasma Workspaces"
0000000000100 4y ago
My experience with KDE has been great, until you start using proprietary drivers / hardware. I got an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 (solid laptop aside from the spotty keyboard) and it was an absolute nightmare getting the keyboard lighting and the laptop GPU to work reliably with KDE Neon. I ended up just nuking it and restarting with Gnome. Gnome turned out to be a lot more restrictive, but the initial setup load was significantly less than KDE. The graphics card / keyboard LEDs just worked straight out of the box. The new widgets in KDE were pretty cool and very fluid. The desktop state didn't save for me though and any time I rebooted/logged out, everything disappeared from my desktop...
- pragmatic8 4y ago
  Wait what? KDE & Gnome are only desktop environments and have no bearing on gpu / kb rgb drivers.
  - octotoad 4y ago
    Yeah, “KDE Neon” is the key here. The problem is in the distro, not the DE.
  - ben-schaaf 4y ago
    Keyboard RGB no, but the DE certainly needs to support the GPU in some way, especially when it comes to wayland.
    - tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa 4y ago
      Sure, in the same way that most DE's will give you a GUI for adjusting monitor layout, but it actually working has nothing to do with the DE itself and everything to do with the underlying distro/OS.
ruph123 4y ago
I know it is a very unpopular opinion on HN but I don't get KDE. Sure, all applications are super feature-packed, which is mostly a good thing (Konsole, Dolphin, Okular are chef's kiss) but also has its downsides: e.g. that, last time I checked, you cannot have a simple dedicated calendar app like gnome-calendar (or macOS Calendar) but must open the outlook-heavy KOrganizer which comes with mail, contacts, etc. Not really what I want when I just quickly want to check my calendar. But this is just a small annoyance. What really bothered me though was the UI. All these lines! Everything has an outline. Every UI element has a heavily highlighted outline. It feels super dated and cluttered. But the last time I daily-drove it, I thought "Hey I embrace the KDE life style. I am finally on the right side of the Linux Desktop according to HN and Reddit. Whenever people sh*t on Gnome, one of the big arguments is that you cannot customize it. So I just customize it, make it mine, lets go!" Well surprisingly the other themes were almost all equally bad or caused inconsistencies. So I went further down the rabbit hole and installed Kvantum. I found a theme that I liked and happily used it for some time. Until I noticed that the theme altered the functionality of KMail. Namely, when tabbing away from KMail, it would select another Email. Super annoying when you want to keep an Email open in the background as a reference while e.g. doing something in your browser. I raised the issue with the Kvantum dev who redirected me to an issue with KDE. I don't remember all the details but it is an issue in KDE and for them it is a wontfix. So, for me I basically had a similar experience to others here with Gnome. I try to make it work for me until I hit a wall where the maintainers tell me that my use case is not supported by the desktop. So I went back to Gnome. And you know what. I like Gnome. It works for me. It looks nice and is functional. However I don't want or need to convert other happy KDE'ers which is also not the point of my little comment. I don't want to dunk on KDE. It does a lot of cool things, but I just cannot stand the UI. Isn't it great to have choice?
- jcelerier 4y ago
  > e.g. that, last time I checked, you cannot have a simple dedicated calendar app like gnome-calendar (or macOS Calendar) but must open the outlook-heavy KOrganizer which comes with mail, contacts, etc. Not really what I want when I just quickly want to check my calendar. But this is just a small annoyance. Kalendar doesn't cut it? https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/ https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/
foobarbecue 4y ago
Coincidentally, I was cleaning out my garage last week, and I booted up an old ASUS eeebox running Kubuntu 12.10. The desktop looked just like the picture in this blog post. I love that style. I had to copy some things off and I was struck by how lovely the interface was to use. It was still quick, and to my eyes really pretty. Made me a little sad to shred that disk and give the machine away (but the general junk reduction is a real relief). Kubuntu (or, better, KDE on Debian) has always been my OS of choice for desktop use.
lemper 4y ago
kde is my go to choice whenever i set up a linux desktop. it just works, for some values of work. furthermore, it works on my machine.
fareesh 4y ago
KDE is great. The customizability really makes it shine above Gnome. I use AwesomeWM and some KDE apps like Dolphin.
aitchnyu 4y ago
Tangential, each time I used Kubuntu, stuff broke left and right. Did they improve over the last few years?
aquir 4y ago
I really wanted to change to Linux but a simple thing (what is mentioned in this article that it works flawlessly) of using my laptop on a second screen with the lid closed was not working automatically at all. Probably it is caused by the fact that I have a laptop with a discrete GPU. Tried different distros with KDE, but no luck. Btw, the same things was not working with other window managers either (tried Gnome(s) and xfce) Shouldn't be this way, having switchable graphics is not exactly a new tech. I give it a try next year.
feldrim 4y ago
I'm not a KDE usr, but in KDE's defense, when you typed "mo" it seems like it assumed "monitor" would be the search phrase instead of "mouse". In that case, both are valid use cases and to me, it's not that weird. However, I'd prefer something which weighs application names over some other metadata.
WhyNotHugo 4y ago
It's a huge shame that KDE applications won't really work outside of KDE. I get that most KDE developers use KDE themselves, so non-KDE desktops aren't their main focus. But it still seems a shame that so much effort is put into all these tools, but they barely run outside KDE. For example, if one isn't using KDE, there's no configured KDE icon theme, and most applications will default to simply rendering blank icons. So buttons that have just icons are completely blank. I also just downloaded `plasma-sdk` to try out `cuttlefish`, an application that's designed to preview the icons from the KDE breeze icon theme. But it's totally broken. The menus render some entries with the text having the same colour as the background. The icons are a mix of KDE icons, GTK icons and some black and white ones (so it's not even usable for its main purpose). Scrolling with the mouse wheel has a weird lag (no touchpad, just a mouse). Clicking on the scrollbar doesn't work, nor does dragging the little "thing" inside the scrollbar. I don't know how many of these issues are related to me using swaywm, and how many or something else, but there's so many I don't even know where to start. If just one thing is broken, and try to figure it out and report upstream. But if almost nothing works, the same attitude doesn't really work.
- tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa 4y ago
  That sounds like an issue with your install, I've never experienced any of those issues and I would be surprised if it's a common issue considering the freedesktop.org stuff. https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ The whole interoperability between desktop frameworks isn't always _perfect_, but it's worked fairly well for probably 10+ years for me (been using linux since the 90's).
jtode 4y ago
Switched to Arch recently, also after years of lazily using Ubuntu (though it was what they used at work as well, so it just made sense to use it on my desktop), and I also am giving KDE another go, and I can confirm a similarly usable experience these days. I absolutely do remember KDE being extremely buggy ten years ago but they seem to have made a ton of progress.

332 points by rc00 4y ago

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I miss the KDE 3.5 days. It was a super customizable and polished DE. It's a real shame all that work was thrown away, every time I try KDE now I'm still disappointed, it doesn't take much to get the first crashes and bugs...

jimbosis 4y ago
You may already be aware of the Trinity Desktop Environment, and if not: "The TDE project began as a continuation of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) version 3.... Trinity is an independent fork..." (from the "About" page) https://www.trinitydesktop.org/index.php https://www.trinitydesktop.org/index.php https://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php https://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php
hnlmorg 4y ago
I’ve been running KDE 4 and 5 on a variety of different hardware since the day KDE 4 reached v4.0. Granted the first few releases of 4 were a little bumpy (as had been thoroughly discussed on the internet at the time) but it’s been super stable for me ever since. Is it possible your issues are down to your preferred distro packing KDE badly? The few times I’ve tried Kubuntu (for example) KDE has felt laggy. On Slackware, OpenSuse and Arch it flys though. This was true in the 3.x days too. I’d also be interest to know what WM / DE is your usual daily driver and comparison here. Does it do compositing? If not, I wonder if the issue is graphics hardware and running KDE with software rendering would work better (though if you’re going to do that then you’re probably better off with an older DE or WM). As an aside, I’ve been running KDE since the 1.0 and I my personal opinion KDE is the best now it has ever been.
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  Not GP, but I was also KDE3 user who ran away after the KDE4 (in my eyes) fiasco. I never went back because customizing and learning to use a desktop environment is an investment on my side, and if the DE doesn't respect that and doesn't understand why I use it, I will not waste my time with it. But hearing the praise in this thread, maybe I should give KDE another chance? I went to Gnome for a while but never felt at home there, too many weird (to me) ux decisions. I finally settled on Xfce and it works great. Nothing fancy, it just does its job.
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    Interesting that you mentioned GNOME because it was only a couple of years later that GNOME 3 was released and that was a far more significant change to the UX than KDE 3 to 4. Around that time there seemed to be a lot of changes to the FOSS DE landscape. I’ve not used XFCE in 10 or 15 years but I always had a good experience when I did need it. In fact I preferred that over GNOME too. Completely just my personal preference, though the leaner footprint was a big incentive. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. All this stuff basically boils down to personal preferences at the end of the day, but it’s often interesting hearing what peoples preferences are.
    - bornfreddy 4y ago
      I wasn't using Gnome before that so the changes didn't affect me much... :) Iirc I switched to xfce very quickly too. I agree, every person has a different set of preferences and priorities. For me it just has to work reliably and not get in my way, and design is less important. But I still try to make my desktops look good.
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      GNOME 3 and KDE 4 both committing usability seppuku at around the same time was really odd. Both these disasters were immediately preceded by the release of the first iPhone. I think maybe iOS broke the devs, made the KDE and GNOME devs feel inadequate so they started flailing around and hurt themselves in an attempt to reinvent things and prove to themselves that they could reinvent like Apple can.
thom 4y ago
Logging in the morning, opening a website, a word doc and a spreadsheet in tabs in Konqueror, editing stuff over SSH in Kate. It genuinely felt like KDE was trying something new back then, creating a more object oriented desktop. I don’t know how much of that survives but it was exciting at the time.
oweiler 4y ago
For me KDE 3.5 was the epitome of Linux on the Desktop, KDE 4 felt like a huge step backwards when introduced (may not be true anymore).
- jraph 4y ago
  Agree, and KDE 5 is KDE 3.5, modern for me. Latest version of KDE 4 were already pretty good.
29athrowaway 4y ago
XFCE is very customizable. There's a project called Trinity, which is essentially KDE 3. https://www.trinitydesktop.org https://www.trinitydesktop.org
dmead 4y ago
I agree. It seems kde 4 was the reason it was really dropped from most of the major distros.
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
Try https://trinitydesktop.org/ https://trinitydesktop.org/ then?
LarryMullins 4y ago
KDE 5 is much better than KDE 4 was, but I agree that KDE still hasn't reacquired the heights they had in the 3.5 days. Things are still less configurable than they used to be. And Plasma is still buggy for me, whenever I try to use Plasma I end up having to manually restart plasma-shell several times a month because it crashes and KDE doesn't manage to start it again, leaving me with no task bar until I restart it manually... Kwin is generally great though, and many of the KDE applications are top-tier.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

Kool article, but it was far shorter than I expected. Would have loved to hear the author's POV on touchpad and gestures. Still, the author gets points from me for using Opensuse Tumbleweed, a highly underrated distro.

63 4y ago
I used to use OpenSuse Tumbleweed but ended up switching to Manjaro for the AUR. Currently in the process of moving to Arch after all the problems I've had with poorly documented Manjaro updates that break half my system.
- nazgulsenpai 4y ago
  Isn't breakage a risk using AUR on any arch-based distro?
  - 63 4y ago
    The specific issues I had weren't related to the aur, they were oversights from Manjaro. I'm okay with things breaking when it's my fault.
  - deadbunny 4y ago
    Using the AUR on Manjaro is a risk because they hold packages in the Manjaro repos back compared to Arch. So `libfoobar` might be at 1.2 in the arch repos and required by an AUR package but it's only 1.1 in the Manjaro repo which will lead to broken packages. If you're going to use the AUR, use Arch basically.
LarryMullins 4y ago
Tumbleweed is a great distro, and seems to be getting more popular recently.

gjsman-1000 4y ago

I am personally very perplexed with KDE. Many Linux users hate GNOME. Sure, it’s not that customizable, and looks like it was made for the smartphone generation. But… I cannot deny that it is very, very polished visually and is much more familiar to people who aren’t as good at computers. If I was building Linux computers for poor people at a charity shop, I would use GNOME. KDE… it is just so customizable, almost to a fault. System Settings can be mentally overwhelming - and why does every app have to start with the letter K? Also, whereas GNOME is content with generic names like “Web” and “PDF Viewer,” I’m just supposed to know Okular is my PDF viewer?

unsafecast 4y ago
If I have two PDF viewers, should both be called "PDF viewer"? Gnome seems to love hiding the actual names (the gnome document viewer is actually called evince).
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  View it this way. If I’m a new user to Linux, KDE tends to come with far more apps than GNOME, with names that are often so opaque every app is a mystery. And not in a good way. “Oh… I thought Konquerer might be a video game, involving Conkers.”
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    You nailed it: GNOME targets new users. KDE doesn't. The advantage of having unique names is that you can actually talk about them, and that includes finding documentation and solving problems via a search engine. Try finding anythng useful when your query is based on a generic name, e.g. "document viewer crashes".
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      > GNOME targets new users. Which is of course the correct strategy in the exploding-growth market of not only Linux Desktop, but desktop computing in general. ...wait a second...

Derbasti 4y ago

I love KDE. Its file manager in particular is a thing of beauty, unique in its ability to display large directories without slowing down and uniquely flexible and powerful. The desktop in general gets out of my way, with a good window switcher, launcher, and window manager. Nothing groundbreaking here, but everything mostly works as intended (looking at you, Win+Arrow on Gnome). Some of the default apps are great, like the PDF viewer Okular with its fantastic annotation tools. The only thing I don't really care for is the default look, which is a bit dated. A refresh would be nice. To be fair, it is relatively easy to customize the colors, which helps. Still, that steel-gray-with-neon is a bit boring.

popol12 4y ago
Dolphin is the best. I love how it integrates a terminal that follows you through folders. Best of both worlds: GUI and CLI together
- sph 4y ago
  Why not add an email client panel as well? Windowing should be a window manager concern. There is no reason for Dolphin to embed a terminal instead of your window manager to just keep a borderless Konsole next to it, like you might see on any tiled WM. It's pure bloat caused by inflexible software. Personally I would love to see tabs, panes and all that crap disappear from any application. It shouldn't be their concerns to manage windows. My dream desktop would even have Emacs windows be separate frames managed by the window manager, not by Emacs itself.
  - massysett 4y ago
    ? Aren’t Emacs frames (the C-x 5 2 variety) managed by the window manager already?
    - sph 4y ago
      Yes, but Emacs tends to use windows (what one would call panes elsewhere) for everything, not frames, so it replicates badly something your desktop is already doing.

turbobooster 4y ago

Not a fan of the confusing QT license

jcelerier 4y ago
what's confusing with this? https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtmodules.html https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtmodules.html everything before the "Add-ons available under Commercial Licenses, or GNU General Public License v3" separator is available under LGPLv3, and that covers very likely 100% of what is used in KDE
- LtWorf 4y ago
  over 20 years ago qt was not free software. People on the internet keep parroting this information that they've read in a comment… and so on. The original comment was true and was decades ago.
rascul 4y ago
There is a KDE Free Qt Foundation to help make sure Qt stays free for KDE users. > The Foundation has license agreements with The Qt Company, Digia and Nokia. The agreements ensure that the Qt will continue to be available as Free Software. Should The Qt Company discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the required licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreements stay valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy. https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/

heywhatupboys 4y ago

oh how I love KDE and how I wish I could actually use it. But all the time, every year, I return to MacOS.

vlod 4y ago
Any specific reason? Personally I used to be a die hard mac user, but then I realized most of the time I just use vscode, firefox and terminal, which could be done on any platform (I chose linux and never looked back).
- heywhatupboys 4y ago
  that is what I wish I knew. If I knew, I could help "solve" it. but somehow it is just so hard.
ankurdhama 4y ago
Yeah MacOS, where you can't even use Tab key to move focus on different UI controls.

29athrowaway 4y ago

My favorite KDE versions were KDE 1 and KDE 2. KDE 3 was fine. KDE 4 was not a worthy successor to KDE 3 and it was a massive setback with regards to customization. After that I stopped using KDE. KDE 3 was polished, KDE 4 looked like developer art. https://kde.org/announcements/4/4.0/desktop.png https://kde.org/announcements/4/4.0/desktop.png

Thev00d00 4y ago
You should try a modern KDE 5 it's polished and it's as good as the end of V3 era.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Sure, but I don't feel like finding Qt replacements for the software I use.

college_physics 4y ago

KDE has a well articulated vision about how open source personal computing should look like. E.g., I like their growing collection of android apps [0] (KDE Connect in particular). Hopefully they can attract more resources to speed up executing on that vision. [0] https://apps.kde.org/platforms/android/ https://apps.kde.org/platforms/android/

chungy 4y ago
KDE Connect is indeed amazing, definitely a "killer feature" (albeit one not exclusive to the KDE desktop -- I run GNOME and still integrate with my phone via KDE Connect). It makes so much sense, I don't know why Google or anyone else hasn't attempted anything like it too.
- sodality2 4y ago
  KDE Connect also runs on iOS (I find it the easiest way to send large files to my iPhone then open with VLC for example). Also, Windows! A bit ironic that a KDE Connect user probably exists that uses it on their iPhone and Windows computer together.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > I don't know why Google or anyone else hasn't attempted anything like it too. Google does have an integration feature, for Chrome OS and Android. I suspect they just aren't invested in other platforms.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Windows has something similar for Android: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-devices https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev...

izoow 4y ago

KDE is the desktop environment that finally made me stay on Linux full-time and I seriously feel like its developers don't get enough praise. Especially over the last years I feel like they've ironed out a ton of bugs and weird quirks and made KDE truly a joy to use. I'm surprised to see how much Kate can do, and even more so that the author deemed it good enough to use in place of neovim. Maybe I should give it a chance someday.

hajile 4y ago
Kate has the best VI command emulator out there bar none and got a lot more usable for a lot of stuff when it added LSP support. Kate is the core editor of KDevelop IDE too. https://www.kdevelop.org/ https://www.kdevelop.org/
- account42 4y ago
  The editor component is also used in KWrite if you want a more minimal editor. I don't really use Kate itself but really like both KWrite and KDevelop.
- bergheim 4y ago
  Really? Bar none? Better than evil?
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    Hard to imagine that's possible, since evil is already better than vim.
    - nequo 4y ago
      What makes Evil better than Vim in your experience?
      - LarryMullins 4y ago
        Better configuration language. For instance (define-key evil-normal-state-map " " "@q") vs noremap <Space> @q I know it's subjective and some people will say the later is better because it's shorter, but I greatly prefer the first. It's very descriptive, I can tell exactly what it does just by reading it. The vim version... "no remap"? I know it means "Normal Recursive Map", but that's not the way it reads unless you already know what it does. Vim just has a bewildering array of such things, noremap, nnoremap, vnnoremap, znormap, xnoremap, snoremap, onoremap, tnoremap... one of those is fake and you probably can't tell which. Basically, vim has an old-school unix culture of naming things, while emacs has a lisp culture of naming things. Considering both these editors now come with powerful completion features that make it easy to type long symbol names, I think the lisp approach is the correct one. I tried to like vimscript. Tried for nearly 15 years. When I finally took the plunge and switched to evil mode it was like a breath of fresh air, and I was left wondering why I hadn't switched years earlier.

suby 4y ago

Regarding the blurry icons in alt tab, I think this is a general problem on Linux and not KDE specific. I had the same issue with certain icons in Cinnamon, and the following steps fixed it for me: Find the desktop file, for Cinnamon they're stored in /usr/share/applications For the blurry icon, append to the end of the file (obviously replacing Audacity with the app name) StartupWMClass=Audacity

criddell 4y ago

Is there any possibility that KDE and Gnome will ever merge?

kitsunesoba 4y ago
Extremely unlikely. They’re built on entirely different UI stacks so in a “merge” the codebase for one half or the other is going to have to be binned, and besides that they have very different and largely incompatible approaches in terms of UI/UX design.
pluijzer 4y ago
I see this as very unlikely as kde and gnome have very different design philosophies. Also KDE used Qt and Gnome GTK, merging the code bases would be problematic.
NoahKAndrews 4y ago
Why would they? They have no shared code (as far as I know), and significantly different philosophies.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  I also would never want this. They are completely different products that appeal to different people. It's like asking if MacOS and Windows will ever merge. No, they won't, and they shouldn't (antitrust aside).
  - criddell 4y ago
    They do appeal to different people, but I think the fat part of the curve is made up of people like me - they don’t care. Both work just fine. I can launch applications and manage my machine from it.
- criddell 4y ago
  To defrag the Linux demographic. If the two camps worked together on a future WM using all the things they’ve learned, maybe something great would come about. Having a single desktop for developers to target if they want to reach Linux users would be nice as well. It seems like if trends continue, Electron will be pretty much the only way new software gets on Linux and as a platform, Electron sucks compared to KDE or Gnome.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

As much as I want to like KDE and agree with some of its principles (such as its all-too-uncommon lack of fear of proper menubars) I have a hard time using it long term because even after years of effort going into polishing it, it still has that distinct “designed by programmers” feel to it with awkward UI layout and whitespace distribution and quirky idiosyncrasies smattered throughout. I get why it has ardent fans but I don’t think it’s for everybody.

cpach 4y ago
Are there any FOSS desktop environments that executes better in those areas?
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Just about anything GTK-based. GNOME takes minimalism too far but is undeniably polished, but Cinnamon and XFCE get much closer to a balance between good UI/UX and configurability.
- mrbadger 4y ago
  Cinnamon works for me. KDE was buggy, unreliable and annoying when I tried it--admittedly some time ago. And the fetish for naming everything with an initial letter K: kindergarten stuff. Too much effort on making every last thing customisable and not enough on making it work?
eliaspro 4y ago
On the calendar front, Kalendar [1] has picked up KOrganizer's tab and is doing a great job at it: [1] https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/ https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/
kombine 4y ago
I'm not a design expert, but KDE looks absolutely fine to me. Maybe because I'm a programmer and it was designed by people like me for me.
javier2 4y ago
Same for me. And I am even a programmer. I have settled on Gnome for the past ~five years.

Thev00d00 4y ago

KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era. Exposed options make computing discovery possible. Sometimes having a drop-down to pick your compositing mode opens a lot of possibilities to learn more about your system. This is not what i.e. GNOME are going for nowadays, everyone wants to reinvent the locked down iPhone "experience".

drooopy 4y ago
"KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era." I was trying to find the right words to describe why I prefer KDE over other DE's but this captures my feelings perfectly.
- pxc 4y ago
  I find this quite strange. I was a kid (and heavy computer user) when Windows 9x was current. I'd been a user of MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x, and Windows XP before I got into Linux and KDE, back in the KDE 3.4 days. I love KDE, but I have no positive feelings about Windows 9x, and I don't really think KDE reminds me of it at all. In fact, some of the developments and workflows that excited me back in the day were divergences away from Windows 9x, like the replacement of the old Kicker menu with Lancelot. The KDE application that eventually won my heart as a teenager was Amarok, which simply had no equivalent in any other ecosystem. To me, what is great about KDE is best described with reference to KDE itself, not some other desktop experience.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    Amarok is a distant descendant of WinAmp, which was indeed developed for Windows 95. :) WinAmp -> X11Amp -> XMMS -> Amarok ... -> Clementine -> Strawberry, if you want a current player that looks like Amarok 1.4.
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      Describing Amarok as a descendant from XMMS feels like describing Firefox as a descendant from Lynx.

nisa 4y ago

I really like KDE but one thing that saddens me is the state of the office stuff - like KMail, KOrganizer, Desktop Search etc.pp - there was an ambitious project called Nepomuk for Semantic Desktop and that failed 10 years ago? And the Backend launches a full MySQL at the moment - I hope someday all of this will be streamlined get's an UI update and a fast database i.e. https://github.com/cozodb/cozo https://github.com/cozodb/cozo and the features will come back. Also KMail needs some usability improvements... If this stuff would work and not crash adding calendars/todo-lists in the ui would hopefully work and the original ideas and research concepts could be implemented in a fast an good way. Well, one can dream :)

dale_glass 4y ago
Unfortunately it's the last 5% of polish -- coming up with cool tech is interesting, tracking down that one weird bug in Akonadi that makes mail break randomly after 3 months of working fine is much less enticing.
bmn__ 4y ago
> And the Backend launches a full MySQL at the moment You are allowed to run SQLite instead, install package `akonadi-server-sqlite` and edit `~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc`. Unfortunately, `akonadiconsole` does not offer this customisation in the GUI for some reason.
- nisa 4y ago
  thanks - I didn't know about this. I actually like and enjoy this it's just that it's missing polish but this is not the fault of the devs who do hard work for an difficult and almost impossible problem without lot's of ressources and even then it's still difficult to get right.
kdomanski 4y ago
> there was an ambitious project called Nepomuk for Semantic Desktop and that failed 10 years ago? Oh, they didn’t fail per se. They just ran out of the 11.5 million EUR grant money.

drooopy 4y ago

Whatever happened to the 1.x revival project or whatever it was called? I am very fond of the aesthetics of the 1.x and 2.x series as it reminds me of classic Windows and MacOS. Is there a way to replicate the look and feel of 1.x and 2.x on modern KDE?

haskellandchill 4y ago

was anyone else thinking kernel density estimation?

c0l0 4y ago

I was a very happy KDE user during the 3.3 to 3.5 days. I tried sticking with the desktop after the 4.0 release (there were SO MANY changes and grand new ideas under the hood!), but lost patience soon after the 4.2 release - it just wasn't ready for day-to-day use; all the rough edges made me bleed every day. So I made the plunge to Xfce, and didn't look back for more than a decade. Until some three months ago, when I had to set up a new, additional machine at home, and I decided to try the new (really: current :)) Plasma Desktop on Arch Linux for funsies. By now, all may Xfce machines, except the one at work, have been migrated to KDE. Now even my wife uses it on her personal desktop - she's especially fond of Okular, KDE Connect, and digiKam.

PontifexMinimus 4y ago
> I was a very happy KDE user during the 3.3 to 3.5 days [...] So I made the plunge to Xfce, and didn't look back for more than a decade. My experience too. I liked KDE 3.5 so of course the devs had to fuck it up by chasing whatever is the user interface fashion of the day. So I went with xfce which doesn't change much. Maybe I will try out KDE again sometime.
- ablob 4y ago
  May I ask what the biggest changes/ deal breakers were? It is difficult to understand the whys without knowing about the usage-pattern was broken. I'm genuinely curious.
  - oriolid 4y ago
    IIRC KDE4 wasn't as much breaking existing usage patterns but pushing intrusive things like desktop widgets and generally trying to lock me into tightly integrated system. I remember it was really easy to create a desktop note by accident and somehow really difficult to delete one. KDE3.5, or Xfce for that matter, felt more like something that is good for launching apps, managing desktop and some generic utilities. The clumsy UI design didn't also help.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago

0xZy4d 4y ago

[flagged]

agumonkey 4y ago

I went away from KDE because of this constant fluctuation phase, plasma felt never finished, always new ideas but never clicking (unlike eos). Maybe it's time to also revisit. I agree that Kate, kdev etc are great.

willnonya 4y ago

I get much of the praise and dislike for KDE. What I've never understood is the success of gnome. KDE isn't perfect but gnome is a textbook example of broken workflows and poor UI design. How it became the default for many distros never made sense to me.

LarryMullins 4y ago
GNOME became "the default" in large part due to the licensing uncertainty that has historically clouded Qt and by extension KDE. After that, it's been inertia.
- lpcvoid 4y ago
  For me it was very good out of the box Wayland support which made me use GNOME for a long time.
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    Wayland wasn't relevant until very recently, and hasn't existed even in concept for much longer than that. The Qt licensing matter I'm talking about was back in the 90s.
    - chungy 4y ago
      GNOME's been pretty damn usable with Wayland since around 2015 or so. Enough time that I can distinctly remember three Debian stable releases that run it by default.
chungy 4y ago
GNOME takes a hard-nose approach to application and technology design, making each application they ship feel like part of a greater whole. Rather than feeling like applications made by developers each with their own ideas of how to design an application (which is very much what KDE looks and feels like), GNOME pushes every one of its components into a unified look and feel and it really makes it feel like everything was made by the same people (despite the actual development story). It permeates everything from user interface design to what libraries the applications use (eg: GNOME applications use SQLite for database needs. And that's it. You don't get some using SQLite, others using PostgreSQL, others using MySQL; that's the situation KDE found/finds itself in.) On top of all that, IBM and Novell have put some serious development money behind making GNOME check all the accessibility boxes and the remote administration boxes. It's the only environment outside of Windows that can match the accessibility and administrative control Windows offers.

bergheim 4y ago

I LOVED KDE 3.5. Holy smokes that was a good experience for me growing up. 4 made me switch, and years later, I tried KDE 5 (last year). And eh, I really tried for two weeks. That was super annoying, and coming back to i3 just felt like finally getting air. It was slow, things didn't work, and weird. I totally understand that people would use gnome or kde and call it a day, because it is much easier to get going with. But if you think you should invest time into your interface I would say try other things as well. Still lots of other good things from the kde project though!

E39M5S62 4y ago
My experience mirrors yours. I started using KDE back in the 1.x days, and continued up through 3.5. I switched to OS X for a few years, then when I came back to Linux I discovered how wonderful i3 was to use. I've been on Sway now for a few years, but they're functionally equivalent with each other. I try KDE each time a major new release hits, but I just can't give up my Sway workflow. Maybe KDE+ Bismuth would do it.
woolion 4y ago
It seems that virtual desktops have fallen out of fashion, but I still use them and found that they made tiling entirely unnecessary to me. Each program is on its own desktop (Firefox, thunderbird, ...) and the terminal is everywhere through Guake (or Yakuake). Most 'comparative' views are already managed by specialized programs, but if you really need to 'tile' two windows, using meta+left or meta+right to take half the screen is very fast. Compared to tiling with i3, it's a workflow that requires almost no configuration or learning.
- int_19h 4y ago
  I don't think it's fair to say that multiple virtual desktops have fallen out of fashion, given that even Windows has added them a few years ago.

mixmastamyk 4y ago

Tried it recently to kick the tires on fedora and wayland as well. Pretty good and better than before but still so goddamn cluttered. Wish most stuff was plugins that I could remove. All I want is a desktop as good as Win 2k with a modern terminal. Cinnamon seems to be the closest to that today, finally gave up on mate as it has been rotting from beneath.

lelanthran 4y ago
> Cinnamon seems to be the closest to that today, finally gave up on mate as it has been rotting from beneath. I've had the opposite experience. Cinnamon was always buggy and crashing, while Mate never crashed. Of course, I switched to Plasma about 2 years ago, so I am willing to concede that Mate has had an awful two years while Cinnamon has been bugfixed until the bug reports stopped :-)
- bigger_cheese 4y ago
  I've been using Cinnamon for years now on Fedora. No issues with crashes on my end. I like it as far as I'm concerned it is a solid piece of software, it works and it does what I want I don't need to touch anything to have it working the way I prefer. It may not be the fanciest or have all the bells a whistles but it is what I like. When I first started using Linux in the early 2000's as a university student KDE was the environment that managed to get me to switch over from Windows. I appreciated just how configurable it was. I would spent hours tweaking my desktop getting everything setup just how I liked it to look. It felt like there was a configuration setting in KDE for just about everything. I remember spending an afternoon procrastinating as a student picking the perfect font for the system clock. All of that seemed to come at a cost I remember it gradually felt more and more bloated and things became less responsive over time I reached a point where I cared less and less about being able to customize things and more about just having a useable system. I kind of grudgingly used Gnome (in the Gnome 2.6 days) I was never really enamored with it but it "worked". Gnome 3 lost me as a user completely I just did not mesh with the new paradigm they were going for. I tried out KDE again but this was around the time they were having stability issues and there was some new file indexing system they were using I'm not sure if it was just badly implemented by my distro but it was incredibly resource intensive it would freeze the system for 2 to 3 seconds at a time whenever it kicked it. So I moved on tried out a few other environments like XFCE for a while before settling on Cinnamon. On a semi-related note does anyone know what happened to Enlightenment? I remember that was the much hyped up desktop environment back in the old Slashdot days I never really hear about it these days.

eointierney 4y ago

Apart from an early dalliance with Enlightenment 16 due to scavenging 486 computer components from skips in Cork (I fondly remember the donation of a P90 from my friend Barry) KDE has provided me with an almost ideal desktop environment of unparalled configurability and utility. It is fast, light, and as beautiful as you wish it to be. And then there are the applications

noisy_boy 4y ago

> Whereas on KDE applets typically quickly allow me to to perform the required action without having to dive into the full settings. Indeed, but I had to actually remove applets which I wanted to use because once I added a few (Command Output applet to be precise), CPU usage started to jump by 2-5% on every addition and fans started to run full tilt. Running shell scripts that don't do anything CPU intensive once every 5 or 10 seconds shouldn't result in that. Completely agree with the points regarding Task Switcher - when I use Breeze, I get this huge list of icons on the left which frankly looks terrible. There should atleast be an option to switch to smaller icons in the task switcher (I don't see any "Small Icons" option, only the names of the themes). None of these are deal-breakers though; I think KDE is the best "mainstream" DE experience on Linux.

tmtvl 4y ago
There is a "Small Icons" option, it's just below "Large Icons".
- noisy_boy 4y ago
  I don't see either Large or Small Icons (KDE 5.25.5): https://imgur.com/a/3qV1z0h https://imgur.com/a/3qV1z0h
  - tmtvl 4y ago
    In OpenSUSE Tumbleweed the additional task switchers are provided by the package plasma5-addons. Depending on which distro you're on it may have another name, like kdeplasma-addons in Arch. Look for a package which provides /usr/share/kwin/tabbox/small_icons/contents/ui/main.qml.
    - noisy_boy 4y ago
      I couldn't find the package for Ubuntu (I'm using Pop!_OS which is based on Ubuntu) - trying to install kdeplasma-addons returns error "Unable to locate package kdeplasma-addons". Anyhow, I searched for alternative switchers and found one called "MediumDefault" which works pretty well - medium size icons in the middle of the screen which is pretty much a "sane" setup.

tmtvl 4y ago

Looking back I'm not sure the Oxygen theme has aged particularly well Well, I am currently using the Oxygen theme (with a GTK 3 version called Oxygen SCSS) and I like it a lot better than the default Breeze theme. Buttons that look like buttons, a nice glow effect when highlighting things, and some of the icons* I find absolutely gorgeous (the Log Out, Restart, and Shut Down icons, for instance, have this nice glassy look). * https://iconarchive.com/show/oxygen-icons-by-oxygen-icons.org.html https://iconarchive.com/show/oxygen-icons-by-oxygen-icons.or...

__float 4y ago
"Nice glossy look" is very Vista-era: it's has fallen out of fashion since then.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  Who cares about fashion? If something looks good, it looks good, even if it's not fashionable. It's like saying the style of a nice Gothic cathedral has fallen out of fashion, it still looks better than a concrete and glass box.
  - paul_funyun 4y ago
    Correct about fashion, but wrong about the icons. Glassy icons are like concrete boxes, not cathedrals. They never looked good and were just the fashion for a while, like shag carpets or powdered wigs.
    - tmtvl 4y ago
      Oh come now, as long as you don't overdo it cut glass looks neat. Millions of crows and magpies can't be wrong.

linuxhansl 4y ago

KDE is great. I've been using the Fedora KDE spin for years now. Just works. Everything just seems to make sense, and I have not experiences the crashes or wake-up failures the author describes. Probably Fedora pre-vets which packages and version work well together.

hackerbrother 4y ago
Seconding KDE + Fedora! Great twice annual upgrade cycle, SELinux by default, popular enough for e.g. a first-party Google Chrome package, and close to bleeding edge kernel! KDE feels like Windows 10 (meant in a good way).
- kombine 4y ago
  I've been meaning to switch to Fedora because of more up to date packages after 10+ years on Ubuntu. It does work for me though, and by now I reached a point of where everything works, so I'm afraid to change things too much.

tommica 4y ago

I went with KDE from gnome shell, and it just works so nicely - would have stayed with gnome-shell, but it had some weird glitches in regards of screen freezing, while mouse moves, but with KDE life is so much smoother. If year of the linux happens, KDE will play a big part in that.

nikanj 4y ago

I wonder what desktop Linux would look like today if Qt licensing issues in the 1990s didn’t stop KDE from getting widespread support from Debian.

moistly 4y ago

I jumped to macOS 20-odd years ago, mostly out of frustration with the build quality of Windows laptops and the endless PITA experience of Windows itself. Figured the resale value of Apple laptops made it a minimal risk. Bought a Lenovo laptop the other year and installed Ubuntu. Thoroughly meh experience there, really disappointed. But then I found KDE, and it’s my main dev environment now. If Lenovo could come out with a laptop with the build quality of Mac, running a KDE environment integrated with their new Lenovo phone, I think they’d stand a very good chance of going head-to-head with Apple.

vouaobrasil 4y ago
It makes sense but I think there are other factors preventing Linux going head to head with Apple, even with the same quality build. There are apps. I was a long-time Linux user also (and still use it technically), but my main computer is also Apple now. There are the apps, and even with KDE MacOS is still more consistent-looking than Linux sadly.

IshKebab 4y ago

> I think this is partially my fault for using Flatpak applications and expecting the desktop integration be 100% seamless. Ha yes, definitely your fault for expecting Linux desktop stuff to work seamlessly!

Daunk 4y ago

KDE is what kept me away from Linux for a long time. I think everything they make "looks bad" (layout, design, graphics etc.) and I feel like they're just pushing out half-finished features. It's really a desktop about quantity over quality. Cinnamon is what finally "clicked" for me. I wish KDE the best of luck, but I just cannot stand it.

indymike 4y ago

I've been on KDE since coming back home to Linux a few years ago. A few thoughts: * KDE feels like we just kept on iterating on the same UI since the early 90s. The functionality is very deep, but also intuitive. A lot of the depth comes from things like KIO, kparts and dbus, where we see a lot of functionality being reused from one app to the next. This means if you learn how Konsole works, when you fire up a terminal in other KDE apps, it works the same way. * Customization is really a good thing. Everyone isn't learning to use a computer for the first time. Computers have been personal for almost 50 years now. * Would really love kmail and the whole korganizer get a refresh. It's really good when it works, but needs some crashy-ness and jank removed. (BTW Akregator, the KDE-PIM RSS feed reader is still EXCELLENT)

catfishx 4y ago
> Would really love kmail and the whole korganizer get a refresh Korganizer is being rewritten as Kalendar: https://apps.kde.org/en-gb/kalendar/ https://apps.kde.org/en-gb/kalendar/

anotherevan 4y ago

Have been a long time KDE user from the 3.x days through to 2019 when a long standing itch to try a tiling window manager moved me to Awesomewm. I still use Dolphin, Konsole and a few other bits though. I also seem to remember using the Suse distro in those early times as it was the only one I could find that treated KDE as a first-class citizen and not a bolt-on. (Think I was Redhat before that. This is before the Opensuse and Fedora days.)

WesolyKubeczek 4y ago

My wish for KDE is that they move some of their quirks used, for example, to launch GTK3/GTK4 applications so they start in the right size, or XWayland itself, somewhere scriptable. Right now, if something doesn’t quite work, you need to fix it in C++ and recompile the whole plasma-desktop, which is not very tinker-friendly. Otherwise KDE has quite a renaissance for the last few years, I hope it continues.

foresto 4y ago
What is the "right" size? Do Window Rules do what you need? That's what I used to make a certain app's window size/position persist between runs. Title bar menu: More Actions: Configure Special {Application,Window} Settings: Add Properties
- WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
  The right size as in "the right DPI". There was this bug with GTK4 apps that they launched at 4x when everything else was 2x (and the usual quirks for GTK3 apps didn't work), and all those XSettings + environment variable stuff Plasma sets were all in the C++ parts of the code.
  - foresto 4y ago
    If this is the bug, it looks like it's fixed in the upcoming 5.27 release. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442901 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442901

Kenji 4y ago

[dead]

crispinb 4y ago

It really is time for the HN mods to review the guidelines. Nearly every comment here has been made almost verbatim thousands of times, in dozens of different forums, repeated for years on end. The same thing happens when there's any mention of an electron app, or Windows, or software having the temerity to not reveal its source. These issues turn so many HN commenters into echolalics. This guideline should be extended to cover this kind of repetitive and pointless content: > Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. Assuming that the guideline writers really mean the justification stated here: more than 50% of the comments in this kind of thread are so often canonical examples of 'too common to be interesting', so the guideline should apply to this kind of standard trigger issue.

Octabrain 4y ago

KDE 3.X was the first Linux desktop I ever used. It was back in the old days, when I installed a SUSE Linux that came in a magazine that my mother bought me after me finding it unexpectedly in a groceries shop while shopping with her. I felt pure and simple fascination. I was a teenager that only knew Windows. I spent hours playing around with it and its familiar and attractive aspect helped me a lot on making easier to dig into the GNU/Linux idiosyncrasies. Later, I moved to Ubuntu and Gnome 2.X, then Debian, then Slackware, then Arch then whatever was the trend at the time. All great experiences, and despite nowadays I use Gnome (in Fedora) exclusively (and enjoy it quite a lot) I will always have KDE in my heart. The only shame is the fact that no mainstream distro (from the subset I prefer to use for technical reasons: RHEL based) use it as a first class citizen. I would be open to give it a try if that wasn't the case.

throwaway2037 4y ago
You wrote: "no mainstream distro". What is wrong with Debian and its variants? Assuming that you are vanilla x86-64, GNOME, KDE, and many other windowing systems are first class citizens on Debian.
- kombine 4y ago
  Well, in Ubuntu and Fedora all DEs are equal but GNOME is more equal than the rest. I just wish they switched to KDE because it is so much better.
- Octabrain 4y ago
  I wrote "no mainstream distro *(from the subset I prefer to use for technical reasons: RHEL based)*. So no, Debian doesn't apply.
Maakuth 4y ago
I use KDE on Fedora in my daily driver. I have not experienced issues that would suggest of KDE being lower than first class. In Fedora it's installed with dnf groupinstall -y "KDE Plasma Workspaces"

0000000000100 4y ago

My experience with KDE has been great, until you start using proprietary drivers / hardware. I got an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 (solid laptop aside from the spotty keyboard) and it was an absolute nightmare getting the keyboard lighting and the laptop GPU to work reliably with KDE Neon. I ended up just nuking it and restarting with Gnome. Gnome turned out to be a lot more restrictive, but the initial setup load was significantly less than KDE. The graphics card / keyboard LEDs just worked straight out of the box. The new widgets in KDE were pretty cool and very fluid. The desktop state didn't save for me though and any time I rebooted/logged out, everything disappeared from my desktop...

pragmatic8 4y ago
Wait what? KDE & Gnome are only desktop environments and have no bearing on gpu / kb rgb drivers.
- octotoad 4y ago
  Yeah, “KDE Neon” is the key here. The problem is in the distro, not the DE.
- ben-schaaf 4y ago
  Keyboard RGB no, but the DE certainly needs to support the GPU in some way, especially when it comes to wayland.
  - tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa 4y ago
    Sure, in the same way that most DE's will give you a GUI for adjusting monitor layout, but it actually working has nothing to do with the DE itself and everything to do with the underlying distro/OS.

ruph123 4y ago

I know it is a very unpopular opinion on HN but I don't get KDE. Sure, all applications are super feature-packed, which is mostly a good thing (Konsole, Dolphin, Okular are chef's kiss) but also has its downsides: e.g. that, last time I checked, you cannot have a simple dedicated calendar app like gnome-calendar (or macOS Calendar) but must open the outlook-heavy KOrganizer which comes with mail, contacts, etc. Not really what I want when I just quickly want to check my calendar. But this is just a small annoyance. What really bothered me though was the UI. All these lines! Everything has an outline. Every UI element has a heavily highlighted outline. It feels super dated and cluttered. But the last time I daily-drove it, I thought "Hey I embrace the KDE life style. I am finally on the right side of the Linux Desktop according to HN and Reddit. Whenever people sh*t on Gnome, one of the big arguments is that you cannot customize it. So I just customize it, make it mine, lets go!" Well surprisingly the other themes were almost all equally bad or caused inconsistencies. So I went further down the rabbit hole and installed Kvantum. I found a theme that I liked and happily used it for some time. Until I noticed that the theme altered the functionality of KMail. Namely, when tabbing away from KMail, it would select another Email. Super annoying when you want to keep an Email open in the background as a reference while e.g. doing something in your browser. I raised the issue with the Kvantum dev who redirected me to an issue with KDE. I don't remember all the details but it is an issue in KDE and for them it is a wontfix. So, for me I basically had a similar experience to others here with Gnome. I try to make it work for me until I hit a wall where the maintainers tell me that my use case is not supported by the desktop. So I went back to Gnome. And you know what. I like Gnome. It works for me. It looks nice and is functional. However I don't want or need to convert other happy KDE'ers which is also not the point of my little comment. I don't want to dunk on KDE. It does a lot of cool things, but I just cannot stand the UI. Isn't it great to have choice?

jcelerier 4y ago
> e.g. that, last time I checked, you cannot have a simple dedicated calendar app like gnome-calendar (or macOS Calendar) but must open the outlook-heavy KOrganizer which comes with mail, contacts, etc. Not really what I want when I just quickly want to check my calendar. But this is just a small annoyance. Kalendar doesn't cut it? https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/ https://apps.kde.org/kalendar/

foobarbecue 4y ago

Coincidentally, I was cleaning out my garage last week, and I booted up an old ASUS eeebox running Kubuntu 12.10. The desktop looked just like the picture in this blog post. I love that style. I had to copy some things off and I was struck by how lovely the interface was to use. It was still quick, and to my eyes really pretty. Made me a little sad to shred that disk and give the machine away (but the general junk reduction is a real relief). Kubuntu (or, better, KDE on Debian) has always been my OS of choice for desktop use.

lemper 4y ago

kde is my go to choice whenever i set up a linux desktop. it just works, for some values of work. furthermore, it works on my machine.

fareesh 4y ago

KDE is great. The customizability really makes it shine above Gnome. I use AwesomeWM and some KDE apps like Dolphin.

aitchnyu 4y ago

Tangential, each time I used Kubuntu, stuff broke left and right. Did they improve over the last few years?

aquir 4y ago

I really wanted to change to Linux but a simple thing (what is mentioned in this article that it works flawlessly) of using my laptop on a second screen with the lid closed was not working automatically at all. Probably it is caused by the fact that I have a laptop with a discrete GPU. Tried different distros with KDE, but no luck. Btw, the same things was not working with other window managers either (tried Gnome(s) and xfce) Shouldn't be this way, having switchable graphics is not exactly a new tech. I give it a try next year.

feldrim 4y ago

I'm not a KDE usr, but in KDE's defense, when you typed "mo" it seems like it assumed "monitor" would be the search phrase instead of "mouse". In that case, both are valid use cases and to me, it's not that weird. However, I'd prefer something which weighs application names over some other metadata.

WhyNotHugo 4y ago

It's a huge shame that KDE applications won't really work outside of KDE. I get that most KDE developers use KDE themselves, so non-KDE desktops aren't their main focus. But it still seems a shame that so much effort is put into all these tools, but they barely run outside KDE. For example, if one isn't using KDE, there's no configured KDE icon theme, and most applications will default to simply rendering blank icons. So buttons that have just icons are completely blank. I also just downloaded `plasma-sdk` to try out `cuttlefish`, an application that's designed to preview the icons from the KDE breeze icon theme. But it's totally broken. The menus render some entries with the text having the same colour as the background. The icons are a mix of KDE icons, GTK icons and some black and white ones (so it's not even usable for its main purpose). Scrolling with the mouse wheel has a weird lag (no touchpad, just a mouse). Clicking on the scrollbar doesn't work, nor does dragging the little "thing" inside the scrollbar. I don't know how many of these issues are related to me using swaywm, and how many or something else, but there's so many I don't even know where to start. If just one thing is broken, and try to figure it out and report upstream. But if almost nothing works, the same attitude doesn't really work.

tjrDL6MjB2Zwwa 4y ago
That sounds like an issue with your install, I've never experienced any of those issues and I would be surprised if it's a common issue considering the freedesktop.org stuff. https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ The whole interoperability between desktop frameworks isn't always _perfect_, but it's worked fairly well for probably 10+ years for me (been using linux since the 90's).

jtode 4y ago

Switched to Arch recently, also after years of lazily using Ubuntu (though it was what they used at work as well, so it just made sense to use it on my desktop), and I also am giving KDE another go, and I can confirm a similarly usable experience these days. I absolutely do remember KDE being extremely buggy ten years ago but they seem to have made a ton of progress.