9 ms·

This week in KDE: “More Wayland fixes”

mnd999 4y ago
KDE is genuinely really good now. As fully featured desktop environments go it’s right up there with the commercial offerings. Unfortunately I’ve moved on and I don’t want that anymore. A minimalist tiling desktop like sway or i3 suits me much better. Particularly on a touchpad where dragging windows is a faff.
- RedShift1 4y ago
  There are commercial desktop environments?
  - veidr 4y ago
    Maybe you're joking, but I think the comparison here is macOS and Windows, not commercial desktop environments for Linux.
    - RedShift1 4y ago
      I wasn't joking no, I thought commercial DEs for Linux.
  - another_story 4y ago
    I think they mean Windows and Mac.
  - 0dayz 4y ago
    There's was the Unix Desktop Environment. It used to be commercial.
- jrepinc 4y ago
  I would say KDE Plasma surpasses anything out there even closed proprietary alternatives. From time to time I have to use Windows and mac at work (to test on other platforms than GNU/Linux) and they are much worse when it comes to desktop use, especially macos is quite terrible. Not even considering all the trends of surveillance and ads they try to add into those two now and constant dumbing down of the interface.
  - still_grokking 4y ago
    I feel the same. What I'm constantly wondering is why macOS is so popular, especially with tech people, like developers. It's the most terrible platform, imho. It's more buggy than Windows, it has the same malware problem as Windows, it's spy- & adware as Windows, it's inflexible, it's completely dumbed down, and it's incompatible to anything (even it former self). The usability of macOS is even worse than Windows, imho. Still it's very popular. Why is the brainwashing by Apple's marketing so effective? I don't get it.
    - jlpcsl 4y ago
      I also agree with this. Have to use all three OSes and Apple is a disaster. KDE Plasma on Linux is years ahead and only getting better, while the closed source OSes are just getting worse. Really too bad that KDE and Linux communities don't have the same marketing powers.
    - mikhailt 4y ago
      Because macOS has been the most consistent in the past 20 years and it works out of the box and has exceptional integration with exceptional hardware. Plus enterprise support. (Being consistent doesn't make it good or bad on its own, just being consistent can be a bonus for some). A lot of developers are not technical-savy either to deal with linux's hardware issues, dependency issues, etc. Many IT doesn't want to deal with linux for the same reasons. It's also easier to fix if everyone has the same hardware and software. Many devs use brew/iterm2 for package mgmt and advanced terminal support. KDE may be the best DE out there but it doesn't matter as long it is not available on typical commercial devices and works out of the box with 100% hardware integration support. Business has an impact on what hardware their employees can use and it is often macOS/Windows because it has the lower overall investment cost and much better integration support with their device management tools. > It's more buggy than Windows, it has the same malware problem as Windows, it's spy- & adware as Windows, it's inflexible, it's completely dumbed down, and it's incompatible to anything (even it former self). And Linux has been the most unstable OS for me with broken nvidia drivers, bricked installs and so on all from updating Linux a few times in the past 3 years. We can blame Nvidia for this but it doesn't matter to everyone else, it is still Linux's responsibility to ensure it doesn't happen. I never had to reinstall MacOS on any of my devices in the past few decades. Windows, I did have to reinstall because of bad Windows updates. macOS is nowhere as bad as Windows with its spyware/adware, it's there a bit but it's not that big of an issue. > it's inflexible, it's completely dumbed down, and it's incompatible to anything (even it former self). That's the best part of macOS and why businesses want it. KDE itself was hard to use for casual users because it is too flexible and comes with defaults that are not tailored to them. (I said was, because last time I tried it was a year ago and it had some weird defaults). If KDE could optimize their initial defaults for the incoming new users (which are growing up with iOS/Android devices first), then they might have a better chance.
- nvarsj 4y ago
  I pretty much went the opposite and gave up on sway/i3 after many years. I just want my computer to work so I can focus on things that matter to me now (tinkering with my Linux OS used to matter to me, but I'm over that). Every little thing on i3/sway is a chore to set up. I even went full click ops with OpenSuse Tumbleweed now. No more toiling over my NixOS/Arch configs - I don't need fully reproducible environments for 1 or 2 machines. I want to add a printer, I click YaST printer, add it, done. I want to install full Qt Creator IDE, I download it from the website, double click the rpm and I'm up and running in < 5 minutes. Want to auto hide my taskbar? Right click, set auto-hide, done in 30s. Plug into conference room HDMI cable and mirror? Go to monitor settings, set to mirror, done in 30s. Etc.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  > As fully featured desktop environments go it’s right up there with the commercial offerings. It's not right up there, it's ahead. As others here pointed out, it beats macOS regarding multi-monitor support. And it beats both, Windows and macOS regarding features, polish, stability, and configurability.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- imiric 4y ago
  I've used bspwm for many years now, and recently started experimenting with KDE on NixOS. I have to say, the Plasma desktop is very polished and mostly works as I want it to. The amount of knobs I can tweak to set it up just as I want is not far off from minimalistic WMs. For window tiling, Bismuth[1] looks interesting, though I've yet to give it a try. There are some major issues, though, like random freezes and the compositor failing sometimes, which might be caused by Intel drivers, but I'm hoping that switching to Wayland might resolve it. I'd really like this to be my main productivity environment, as when it works, the experience is pretty slick. [1]: https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I would say that it’s not everybody’s jam, though. I’ve tried using it several times and something about its general UI/UX and design philosophy feels odd/grating to me, and no amount of twiddling with its numerous knobs fixes it. A lot of non-KDE Qt software also shares this problem.
odiroot 4y ago
The new welcome screens are something baffling to me. When I open Kate, a text editor, I immediately want to type my text, not be greeted by options and look for "new file".
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  Like a lot of things in KDE, this is configurable: Settings -> Configure Kate -> Session (from the sidebar) -> Uncheck "Show welcome view for new windows" under "Application Startup/Shutdown Behavior"
  - tssva 4y ago
    If the Kate one is like the one shown for ark, I hope they are consistent, there will also be a checkbox on the welcome screen to disable it being shown again.
    - arusahni 4y ago
      Yes - the checkbox is below the saved sessions list.
  - asddubs 4y ago
    that's what I really like about KDE, there is a lot of configurability.
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      I think I have 5-6 things I configure on a new KDE installation, but I'm sure they're different things to everyone else.
    - GreenWatermelon 4y ago
      DISCOVERABLE configurability. Things I can find in the UI. I hate the universal "add this line to <obscure config file> to fix that" thing that's prevalent in Linux. Having a gui for settings helps with not having to memorize in what forsaken directory an application keeps its config files, because apparently that's not standard. Is it in .config? Or maybe .<app name>? Maybe /etc/thing?
veidr 4y ago
This is great. I recently moved to KDE Plasma (on Nobara Linux) after many years of Pop OS, because I recently moved into a new office, and no longer have room to have my Mac and Linux setups side by side, but have to consolidate them in a single seat. There are 4-5 monitor arms and the monitors are a mix of 4K and 8K. AFAIK (and I have tried quite a lot, including the latest of all major distros like Fedora, Ubuttnu, OpenSUSE, etc) KDE Plasma using Wayland is the only way to have a typical "full desktop environment" (like GNOME, KDE, MATE, etc) that supports this kind of multi-monitor setup (where the monitors have significantly different ppi and thus need different scaling factors) and "just work" like Windows does. (BTW even macOS doesn't support this well in my experience - it renders the 8K at 6K and downscales that to 4K, and also with all monitors connected, one of them (seemingly random) blanks out for 1 second every few minutes. But I have only tested this on an M1 Max laptop.) Any modern Linux "kinda" works — if you are OK with the 4K monitors being HUGE or the 8K monitors unreadably small. Per-monitor fractional scaling is an iffy thing on Linux, and only KDE + Wayland. It almost works on X11 but just doesn't. The usual jank happens when switching monitors via a KVM, or unplugging one or plugging one back in — but then it goes into a "jank loop". So this is what finally dragged me reluctantly to Wayland. But I'm grateful to the KDE guys for hammering doggedly on multi-monitor Wayland support lately, because it is literally the only thing I have found that lets me boot up Linux and have all my displays work. I still feel like KDE is a little buggy overall, but not significantly more so than GNOME, which is the only other desktop environment with a similar breadth. P.S. If you want to deal with a desktop that is simpler (yet more DIY and higher maintenance), I think you can make Sway or Hyprland work with arbitrary resolution multi-monitor setups. But it is a lot of work. I mainly use desktop Linux for writing code at my day job, so I hoped to have something I can just install and use right away without tweaking and reading docs (fun as that might be). Pop OS works really well on 8K or 4K, but not both at the same time.
- artogahr 4y ago
  Im curious what work you do that you need that many 4k monitors, let alone 8k ones?
  - noisy_boy 4y ago
sprash 4y ago
Since KDE is shipped with build in telemetry now I can't recommend it to anyone. Opt-in or not, I've seen this game played before and it never ends well.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  Meaning? Okay, I get the privacy concern, but "never ends well"?
  - Forestessential 4y ago
    When your machine metrics are recorded it is much like a fingerprint. Who is tracking you can sell to you better, which by definition means you get a worse deal. Also you are better surveyed for how you can be used. You think KDE doesn't have people who do this? IT-sort of people on the internet: "Security is very important. We dont want to get hacked" Also IT-sort of poeple on the internet: "Why are you paranoid of a tech company is collecting your data? You really think they are gonna hack you?" Also others in the field: We need Intrusion Prevention Software, IDS, pfSence firewall, etc... So we can be safe from hackers while our machines host extra automated services we dont need, among reasons.
    - dale_glass 4y ago
      > When your machine metrics are recorded it is much like a fingerprint. Who is tracking you can sell to you better, which by definition means you get a worse deal. Also you are better surveyed for how you can be used. KDE e.V. is a registered non-profit, I don't think this would be legal for them. > You think KDE doesn't have people who do this? No, because it's not a commercial company. I do think they have an interest in collecting metrics because really it can be very hard to get useful information otherwise. In something of the scale of KDE it's going to be hard to determine which parts of it get the most use, and what crashes in some particularly weird circumstances. In fact for instance I recall KDE upset quite a few people when at one point Kate lost the project functionality -- apparently the KDE devs didn't realize that the function was actually quite widely used. If you don't have data on this kind of thing it can be hard to figure out a good way forward.
moffkalast 4y ago
Has the stability improved in recent years? Last I used KDE was 20.04 and while the usability was amazing (with a few minor annoyances and bluetooth not working because of course not) the shutdown menu eventually straight up broke and crashed every time it was opened, so I had to resort to terminal poweroff from that point onward haha. Not a major problem, but I wonder how the hell can something like that even make it into an LTS.
- ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago
  Yeah it still does that for me most of the time. I’ve been on Ubuntu / KDE for the last 2 years, I keep it all patched an up to date. The other week I was playing around with the task bar widgets and somehow managed to delete or hide the text menu from top of every single app window. It drove me nuts, I could alt + f to bring it back for a second but I still can’t figure out what setting it is that I’ve screwed up. I’ve got a work around in place of a little hamburger widget on each window which expands out to the full menu but it’s still annoying.
- ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago
  I’ve been on Ubuntu / KDE for the last 2 years, I keep it all patched an up to date. The other week I was playing around with the task bar widgets and somehow managed to delete or hide the text menu from top of every single app window. It drove me nuts, I could alt + f to bring it back for a second but I still can’t figure out what setting it is that I’ve screwed up. I’ve got a work around in place of a little hamburger widget on each window which expands out to the full menu but it’s still annoying.
  - still_grokking 4y ago
    If I would need to guess I would say you've added the global menu widget to the taskbar. That would hide the "regular" menu bar in the applications. Removing the global menu widget should bring back the "regular" menu in the application windows. OTOH, who really needs a menu bar? You can have nowadays a "command palette" like app menu in KRunner. Much better usability than remembering or searching a menu structure imho—in case you don't need the discoverability of a menu, of course.
Aardwolf 4y ago
For me KDE 3.5 was still the best. But I use cinnamon now, it comes pretty close. Any attempt to try KDE 4 or KDE plasma over the years made me give up quickly again due to annoying issues (like showing a giant volume icon in the center of the screen whenever changing volume with no setting to disable it)
- bityard 4y ago
  I was you until about six months ago. KDE 3 got nearly everything right and instead of continuing to evolve, they pretty much threw it all away and went in a radical new direction, promising to revolutionize the Linux desktop. Note to aspiring developers: This is not how you keep users. Continually frustrated by the "opinionated" nature of GNOME, I kept trying KDE 4 and then 5 every few years, always hoping for the best, and already getting disappointed by stability issues, show-stopping usability bugs, or half-working implementations. It's like they just kept adding features but never bothered to test any of them. That changed recently. I gave one of the newer 5.x releases a try (on debian testing, if it matters) and have been very pleasantly surprised to see that all of my previous issues are just simply gone. I don't know what changed but they are certainly doing something right because the current releases are excellent. I would suggest giving KDE another try. I also feel like you will get a better experience by staying away from any distros that try to layer on their own tools and customizations like Mint and Kubuntu.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  In Plasma 5: System Settings -> Audio -> Configure Volume Controls... -> uncheck Audio Volume under Show visual feedback for changes to:. I know it's not the only issue you have, and not all of them will be solvable, but I found this solution quite quickly (though I did search for volume in the notifications settings first, which didn't show me anything). Also, if you like KDE 3.5, have you tried Trinity?
pentagrama 4y ago
What's the difference between KDE and Plasma?
- jrepinc 4y ago
  KDE is the name of the community, e.g. like GNU or Mozilla. Plasma is software they create, like Bash or Firefox.

KDE is genuinely really good now. As fully featured desktop environments go it’s right up there with the commercial offerings. Unfortunately I’ve moved on and I don’t want that anymore. A minimalist tiling desktop like sway or i3 suits me much better. Particularly on a touchpad where dragging windows is a faff.

RedShift1 4y ago
There are commercial desktop environments?
- veidr 4y ago
  Maybe you're joking, but I think the comparison here is macOS and Windows, not commercial desktop environments for Linux.
  - RedShift1 4y ago
    I wasn't joking no, I thought commercial DEs for Linux.
- another_story 4y ago
  I think they mean Windows and Mac.
- 0dayz 4y ago
  There's was the Unix Desktop Environment. It used to be commercial.
jrepinc 4y ago
I would say KDE Plasma surpasses anything out there even closed proprietary alternatives. From time to time I have to use Windows and mac at work (to test on other platforms than GNU/Linux) and they are much worse when it comes to desktop use, especially macos is quite terrible. Not even considering all the trends of surveillance and ads they try to add into those two now and constant dumbing down of the interface.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  I feel the same. What I'm constantly wondering is why macOS is so popular, especially with tech people, like developers. It's the most terrible platform, imho. It's more buggy than Windows, it has the same malware problem as Windows, it's spy- & adware as Windows, it's inflexible, it's completely dumbed down, and it's incompatible to anything (even it former self). The usability of macOS is even worse than Windows, imho. Still it's very popular. Why is the brainwashing by Apple's marketing so effective? I don't get it.
  - jlpcsl 4y ago
    I also agree with this. Have to use all three OSes and Apple is a disaster. KDE Plasma on Linux is years ahead and only getting better, while the closed source OSes are just getting worse. Really too bad that KDE and Linux communities don't have the same marketing powers.
  - mikhailt 4y ago
    Because macOS has been the most consistent in the past 20 years and it works out of the box and has exceptional integration with exceptional hardware. Plus enterprise support. (Being consistent doesn't make it good or bad on its own, just being consistent can be a bonus for some). A lot of developers are not technical-savy either to deal with linux's hardware issues, dependency issues, etc. Many IT doesn't want to deal with linux for the same reasons. It's also easier to fix if everyone has the same hardware and software. Many devs use brew/iterm2 for package mgmt and advanced terminal support. KDE may be the best DE out there but it doesn't matter as long it is not available on typical commercial devices and works out of the box with 100% hardware integration support. Business has an impact on what hardware their employees can use and it is often macOS/Windows because it has the lower overall investment cost and much better integration support with their device management tools. > It's more buggy than Windows, it has the same malware problem as Windows, it's spy- & adware as Windows, it's inflexible, it's completely dumbed down, and it's incompatible to anything (even it former self). And Linux has been the most unstable OS for me with broken nvidia drivers, bricked installs and so on all from updating Linux a few times in the past 3 years. We can blame Nvidia for this but it doesn't matter to everyone else, it is still Linux's responsibility to ensure it doesn't happen. I never had to reinstall MacOS on any of my devices in the past few decades. Windows, I did have to reinstall because of bad Windows updates. macOS is nowhere as bad as Windows with its spyware/adware, it's there a bit but it's not that big of an issue. > it's inflexible, it's completely dumbed down, and it's incompatible to anything (even it former self). That's the best part of macOS and why businesses want it. KDE itself was hard to use for casual users because it is too flexible and comes with defaults that are not tailored to them. (I said was, because last time I tried it was a year ago and it had some weird defaults). If KDE could optimize their initial defaults for the incoming new users (which are growing up with iOS/Android devices first), then they might have a better chance.
nvarsj 4y ago
I pretty much went the opposite and gave up on sway/i3 after many years. I just want my computer to work so I can focus on things that matter to me now (tinkering with my Linux OS used to matter to me, but I'm over that). Every little thing on i3/sway is a chore to set up. I even went full click ops with OpenSuse Tumbleweed now. No more toiling over my NixOS/Arch configs - I don't need fully reproducible environments for 1 or 2 machines. I want to add a printer, I click YaST printer, add it, done. I want to install full Qt Creator IDE, I download it from the website, double click the rpm and I'm up and running in < 5 minutes. Want to auto hide my taskbar? Right click, set auto-hide, done in 30s. Plug into conference room HDMI cable and mirror? Go to monitor settings, set to mirror, done in 30s. Etc.
still_grokking 4y ago
> As fully featured desktop environments go it’s right up there with the commercial offerings. It's not right up there, it's ahead. As others here pointed out, it beats macOS regarding multi-monitor support. And it beats both, Windows and macOS regarding features, polish, stability, and configurability.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
imiric 4y ago
I've used bspwm for many years now, and recently started experimenting with KDE on NixOS. I have to say, the Plasma desktop is very polished and mostly works as I want it to. The amount of knobs I can tweak to set it up just as I want is not far off from minimalistic WMs. For window tiling, Bismuth[1] looks interesting, though I've yet to give it a try. There are some major issues, though, like random freezes and the compositor failing sometimes, which might be caused by Intel drivers, but I'm hoping that switching to Wayland might resolve it. I'd really like this to be my main productivity environment, as when it works, the experience is pretty slick. [1]: https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth
kitsunesoba 4y ago
I would say that it’s not everybody’s jam, though. I’ve tried using it several times and something about its general UI/UX and design philosophy feels odd/grating to me, and no amount of twiddling with its numerous knobs fixes it. A lot of non-KDE Qt software also shares this problem.

odiroot 4y ago

The new welcome screens are something baffling to me. When I open Kate, a text editor, I immediately want to type my text, not be greeted by options and look for "new file".

badsectoracula 4y ago
Like a lot of things in KDE, this is configurable: Settings -> Configure Kate -> Session (from the sidebar) -> Uncheck "Show welcome view for new windows" under "Application Startup/Shutdown Behavior"
- tssva 4y ago
  If the Kate one is like the one shown for ark, I hope they are consistent, there will also be a checkbox on the welcome screen to disable it being shown again.
  - arusahni 4y ago
    Yes - the checkbox is below the saved sessions list.
- asddubs 4y ago
  that's what I really like about KDE, there is a lot of configurability.
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    I think I have 5-6 things I configure on a new KDE installation, but I'm sure they're different things to everyone else.
  - GreenWatermelon 4y ago
    DISCOVERABLE configurability. Things I can find in the UI. I hate the universal "add this line to <obscure config file> to fix that" thing that's prevalent in Linux. Having a gui for settings helps with not having to memorize in what forsaken directory an application keeps its config files, because apparently that's not standard. Is it in .config? Or maybe .<app name>? Maybe /etc/thing?

veidr 4y ago

This is great. I recently moved to KDE Plasma (on Nobara Linux) after many years of Pop OS, because I recently moved into a new office, and no longer have room to have my Mac and Linux setups side by side, but have to consolidate them in a single seat. There are 4-5 monitor arms and the monitors are a mix of 4K and 8K. AFAIK (and I have tried quite a lot, including the latest of all major distros like Fedora, Ubuttnu, OpenSUSE, etc) KDE Plasma using Wayland is the only way to have a typical "full desktop environment" (like GNOME, KDE, MATE, etc) that supports this kind of multi-monitor setup (where the monitors have significantly different ppi and thus need different scaling factors) and "just work" like Windows does. (BTW even macOS doesn't support this well in my experience - it renders the 8K at 6K and downscales that to 4K, and also with all monitors connected, one of them (seemingly random) blanks out for 1 second every few minutes. But I have only tested this on an M1 Max laptop.) Any modern Linux "kinda" works — if you are OK with the 4K monitors being HUGE or the 8K monitors unreadably small. Per-monitor fractional scaling is an iffy thing on Linux, and only KDE + Wayland. It almost works on X11 but just doesn't. The usual jank happens when switching monitors via a KVM, or unplugging one or plugging one back in — but then it goes into a "jank loop". So this is what finally dragged me reluctantly to Wayland. But I'm grateful to the KDE guys for hammering doggedly on multi-monitor Wayland support lately, because it is literally the only thing I have found that lets me boot up Linux and have all my displays work. I still feel like KDE is a little buggy overall, but not significantly more so than GNOME, which is the only other desktop environment with a similar breadth. P.S. If you want to deal with a desktop that is simpler (yet more DIY and higher maintenance), I think you can make Sway or Hyprland work with arbitrary resolution multi-monitor setups. But it is a lot of work. I mainly use desktop Linux for writing code at my day job, so I hoped to have something I can just install and use right away without tweaking and reading docs (fun as that might be). Pop OS works really well on 8K or 4K, but not both at the same time.

artogahr 4y ago
Im curious what work you do that you need that many 4k monitors, let alone 8k ones?
- noisy_boy 4y ago

sprash 4y ago

Since KDE is shipped with build in telemetry now I can't recommend it to anyone. Opt-in or not, I've seen this game played before and it never ends well.

dale_glass 4y ago
Meaning? Okay, I get the privacy concern, but "never ends well"?
- Forestessential 4y ago
  When your machine metrics are recorded it is much like a fingerprint. Who is tracking you can sell to you better, which by definition means you get a worse deal. Also you are better surveyed for how you can be used. You think KDE doesn't have people who do this? IT-sort of people on the internet: "Security is very important. We dont want to get hacked" Also IT-sort of poeple on the internet: "Why are you paranoid of a tech company is collecting your data? You really think they are gonna hack you?" Also others in the field: We need Intrusion Prevention Software, IDS, pfSence firewall, etc... So we can be safe from hackers while our machines host extra automated services we dont need, among reasons.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    > When your machine metrics are recorded it is much like a fingerprint. Who is tracking you can sell to you better, which by definition means you get a worse deal. Also you are better surveyed for how you can be used. KDE e.V. is a registered non-profit, I don't think this would be legal for them. > You think KDE doesn't have people who do this? No, because it's not a commercial company. I do think they have an interest in collecting metrics because really it can be very hard to get useful information otherwise. In something of the scale of KDE it's going to be hard to determine which parts of it get the most use, and what crashes in some particularly weird circumstances. In fact for instance I recall KDE upset quite a few people when at one point Kate lost the project functionality -- apparently the KDE devs didn't realize that the function was actually quite widely used. If you don't have data on this kind of thing it can be hard to figure out a good way forward.

moffkalast 4y ago

Has the stability improved in recent years? Last I used KDE was 20.04 and while the usability was amazing (with a few minor annoyances and bluetooth not working because of course not) the shutdown menu eventually straight up broke and crashed every time it was opened, so I had to resort to terminal poweroff from that point onward haha. Not a major problem, but I wonder how the hell can something like that even make it into an LTS.

ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago
Yeah it still does that for me most of the time. I’ve been on Ubuntu / KDE for the last 2 years, I keep it all patched an up to date. The other week I was playing around with the task bar widgets and somehow managed to delete or hide the text menu from top of every single app window. It drove me nuts, I could alt + f to bring it back for a second but I still can’t figure out what setting it is that I’ve screwed up. I’ve got a work around in place of a little hamburger widget on each window which expands out to the full menu but it’s still annoying.
ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago
I’ve been on Ubuntu / KDE for the last 2 years, I keep it all patched an up to date. The other week I was playing around with the task bar widgets and somehow managed to delete or hide the text menu from top of every single app window. It drove me nuts, I could alt + f to bring it back for a second but I still can’t figure out what setting it is that I’ve screwed up. I’ve got a work around in place of a little hamburger widget on each window which expands out to the full menu but it’s still annoying.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  If I would need to guess I would say you've added the global menu widget to the taskbar. That would hide the "regular" menu bar in the applications. Removing the global menu widget should bring back the "regular" menu in the application windows. OTOH, who really needs a menu bar? You can have nowadays a "command palette" like app menu in KRunner. Much better usability than remembering or searching a menu structure imho—in case you don't need the discoverability of a menu, of course.

Aardwolf 4y ago

For me KDE 3.5 was still the best. But I use cinnamon now, it comes pretty close. Any attempt to try KDE 4 or KDE plasma over the years made me give up quickly again due to annoying issues (like showing a giant volume icon in the center of the screen whenever changing volume with no setting to disable it)

bityard 4y ago
I was you until about six months ago. KDE 3 got nearly everything right and instead of continuing to evolve, they pretty much threw it all away and went in a radical new direction, promising to revolutionize the Linux desktop. Note to aspiring developers: This is not how you keep users. Continually frustrated by the "opinionated" nature of GNOME, I kept trying KDE 4 and then 5 every few years, always hoping for the best, and already getting disappointed by stability issues, show-stopping usability bugs, or half-working implementations. It's like they just kept adding features but never bothered to test any of them. That changed recently. I gave one of the newer 5.x releases a try (on debian testing, if it matters) and have been very pleasantly surprised to see that all of my previous issues are just simply gone. I don't know what changed but they are certainly doing something right because the current releases are excellent. I would suggest giving KDE another try. I also feel like you will get a better experience by staying away from any distros that try to layer on their own tools and customizations like Mint and Kubuntu.
tmtvl 4y ago
In Plasma 5: System Settings -> Audio -> Configure Volume Controls... -> uncheck Audio Volume under Show visual feedback for changes to:. I know it's not the only issue you have, and not all of them will be solvable, but I found this solution quite quickly (though I did search for volume in the notifications settings first, which didn't show me anything). Also, if you like KDE 3.5, have you tried Trinity?

pentagrama 4y ago

What's the difference between KDE and Plasma?

jrepinc 4y ago
KDE is the name of the community, e.g. like GNU or Mozilla. Plasma is software they create, like Bash or Firefox.