9 ms·

Why KDE Plasma was chosen as the default desktop environment for Asahi Linux

146 points by jlpcsl 3y ago

sho_hn 3y ago
There's an interesting pattern where particularly device applications that don't use one of the "big distros" end up picking KDE Plasma over the alternatives, e.g. - Steam Deck: Desktop mode is KDE Plasma - PinePhone and PinePhone Pro: KDE Plasma Mobile - Asahi: KDE Plasma One may speculate what distros would do if it wasn't for inertia and compatibility.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  No need to speculate. Every Linux distro I have looked at recently allows the user to install loads of different desktop environments. KDE and Gnome are just the big ones. I use Cinnamon (a fork of Gnome 3 that looks more like Gnome 2) on Linux Mint on my laptop, XFCE on an old netbook also with Mint. Just pick whatever DE you prefer.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    Sure, but their default is usually GNOME3 these days. And there's always a ton more effort towards making the default work seamlessly. Kubuntu is notorious for having issues trying to fit the "Ubuntu" way and not quite getting it right. (Font/theme issues, primarily) Fedora's KDE spin is pretty decent, but that's mostly because it is bog standard aside from the logo and RPM/dnf integration. Outside of those two, you're better off using a KDE-primary distro in most cases.
- fgonzag 3y ago
  Why compatibility? Or inertia for that matter? Switching DEs in Linux is generally as easy as installing a package and switching the DE at login, and you can use any app compiled for a certain toolkit in any other DE. The default choice is usually done for either pragmatic or preferential reasons (Developer preference, easy of upstream collaboration, flexibility, stability, bug fix schedule)
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    Compatibility e.g. with user support docs they have, or installed bases. It's not easy for distros to decide to switch defaults. That's why what new systems choose is interesting.
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    >Or inertia for that matter? Humans, including devs and distro builders, are creatures of habit. They tend to stick to using whatever they already know.
wkat4242 3y ago
KDE is so great <3. It's everything Mac and Windows should have been. I also donate to it monthly because I feel it's software really worth paying for. On the contrary, I despise Gnome 3. Gnome 2 wasn't bad but in 3 everything rubs me the wrong way. It's like they went out of their way to design something that wouldn't suit me :) The mimimalism, the thick "touch-style" window decorations, the "always an extra click" hamburger menus. The "You're holding it wrong" attitude. Basically all the issues that come with Apple-style opinionated design. And mentioned in the source article too. Nevertheless I'm glad other people do like it. That's the good thing about FOSS, there's something for everyone. I had the same feeling about recent macOS versions so I'm really happy I moved to KDE (on FreeBSD). Having choice and configurability again is amazing. This is really the power of FOSS and calls for a unified desktop would seriously undermine that. One size does not fit all.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Yeah i need to start donating too. Gave kde 3 a chance and wasnt disappointed. If you want a good looking, privacy friendly (no ads or data harvesting) and stable de then kde is a good option. Only thing i dislike is their choice of qml for widgets. Also i think it has good potential for some form of monetisation so that kde positions itself as a strong competitor against windows and macos.
- melx 3y ago
  I'm giving a KDE a go as I finally convinced the wifey (non-technical human) to use "the Linux" daily. I haven't used KDE myself for past decade so should be fun.
- sureglymop 3y ago
  Is there a good tiled window manager for KDE such as Pop Shell for Gnome? That's the only thing keeping me back on gnome.
  - Sparkle-san 3y ago
    Plasma 5.27 added in some native tiling support. There are also some kwin scripts available to add tiling to it. https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite
rektide 3y ago
> Meanwhile on GNOME the situation is you can't control the keyboard brightness out of the box, because they decided all laptops with a keyboard backlight must surely have dedicated keys for that purpose and therefore there's no need for a slider nor configurable keybinds and... I wrote then lost a gnome hotkey plugin to help with this, as the desktop display my parents were using had a menu system they hated/couldnt manage to use. It's wild that Gnome has such a narrow lo-fi user as their only target persona, but they probably make a vast amount of their earned income selling to such users.
- blacksmith_tb 3y ago
  Gnome sells something? Other than t-shirts? I can't imagine they have 'vast income', they're a non-profit[1]... presumably if they did, Nautilus would work better... 1: https://foundation.gnome.org/ https://foundation.gnome.org/
  - rektide 3y ago
    Gnome is the default desktop of Red Hat, whose target audience is definitely business. There hopefully are some breakdowns somewhere of where they get funding from. But I expect Red Hat gives them a bunch of money. Whether their income is "vast" or not, my statement was specifically about the relative proportions of where it comes from. I definitely expect them to have an overall fairly mild budget. But where it comes from, I think, has largely shaped their current strategy, which is to target extreme end users with little customizability.
    - blacksmith_tb 3y ago
      That makes sense, I guess I'd say that they have hewed closer to macOS in terms of not allowing for much customization, which clearly alienates many users. I'd be more willing to toe their line if it all worked better, though.
      - beebeepka 3y ago
        Default gnome 3 doesn't make any sense. It's obvious they're making it horrible on purpose. I wonder why I have to install extensions for the most basic stuff.
lucasyvas 3y ago
I have to say that it took until Valve adopted KDE for the Steam Deck for me to really take it seriously - I have just always used a GNOME distro. KDE has pretty ugly default window theming IMO. Like, quite grotesque. But the GNOME project is overall quite preposterous. It's a main-stream-but-hipster GUI environment where their philosophy does not match how any user wants to use it, hence all the (basically) mandatory extensions. Yes, I want window controls and a dock! KDE has way too much customization I think, but at least it has accepted a more sane philosophy. I was thinking of trying the Fedora KDE spin next. I feel that the other shoe has dropped recently - I could honestly see GNOME getting dropped. Cosmic did it and nearly every major distro has a KDE spin.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  I must be the only user that like the gnome defaults then. Only thing I need to configure is focus over mouse (no extension needed) and I like to have the top bar transparent (extension needed but I can live without it, it is cosmetic and I haven't installed it on all my machines).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  In my eyes the biggest problem with GNOME's theming is the egregious padding everywhere in Adwaita. Installing a theme with cut down padding makes it much more reasonable and in my opinion puts it among the best looking DEs. Agreed on GNOME's lack of functionality though…
- dabluecaboose 3y ago
  >KDE has way too much customization I think My biggest issue with KDE themeing (or just linux ricing in general) is just the massive amount of possibilities and no guard rails. All it takes is changing one color and you end up with some godawful ugly setup. I was messing with a live Manjaro USB on one of my annual "Is desktop linux there yet" expeditions and found the best success in just picking one of the top-downloaded themes in the store and maybe tweaking one thing from it, like the folder colors. Much as I'd love a perfect and elegant personally-customized theme, I don't have the skills to do it, and I'd rather just have something that's 99% there.
kps 3y ago
It would be nice if this led to Qt/KDE exposing the ‘Mac mode’ toggle that makes the GUI key the default for GUI shortcuts. As someone who lives in the terminal and needs control keys left alone, the Windows style drives me nuts. (KDE shortcuts are at least configurable, but it would be nice not to have to do them all one by one.)
dvh 3y ago
I personally don't like DE (desktop environments). I don't want my PC to be doing something or managing something on my desktop besides switching and moving/resizing windows. WM (window managers) are smaller, faster, less brittle and don't require grand visionary changes every 2 years.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  The problem I ran into with minimal WM setups is keeping the farm of various daemons required for various bits of functionality all happy and healthy took more thought and effort than I cared to put forth. It wasn't uncommon for some random thing to break after updating which got tiresome.
ACV001 3y ago
KDE is indeed very good. I tried adopting it in the past multiple times then reverting, but with the latest version is so much better than the others.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
While KDE certainly has a lot in its favor (as listed in the post, "batteries included" factor, configurability, dev team responsiveness), I've never been able to make it work for me. Even after pouring hours into customizing it, it still feels "off" somehow, and I don't think I could fix that without getting waist-deep in a custom fork. It would be nice if there were more DEs that shared those positive traits with KDE, but reality isn't so kind.
shmerl 3y ago
KDE is highly recommended.
p4bl0 3y ago
I can totally vouch for the "the developers care, answer questions, and actually accept PRs" aspect. I had some time last summer and decided to spend it on Kate (KDE advanced text editor) and the experience was great! I had never approached KDE or Qt development before, and never even done actual C++ development (just some small course exercises). The devs were great at coaching on their IRC channel and in the GitLab issues. The maintainer even made a blogspot at some point to explain my contributions: https://kate-editor.org/post/2022/2022-08-24-kate-new-features-august-2022/ https://kate-editor.org/post/2022/2022-08-24-kate-new-featur... Globally KDE is a fantastic experience, whether from a user's or a developer's perspective.
davidy123 3y ago
I tried KDE a few times over the years, but it always felt a bit off. However, six months ago I tried it again, and really like it. As others say, it has a lot of useful customization. What worries me more is the switch to Wayland, when essential apps like synergy/barrier don't work well there yet.
pshirshov 3y ago
With all its ugliness, Plasma is the only environment which works acceptable for multi-head wayland setups with fractional scaling.
magicalhippo 3y ago
I've been running KDE Neon on a NUC for years as a secondary desktop PC, and it's pretty great overall. It's customizable, performance is good and it looks nice. The only things I really miss are deeper issues, like non-existing to terrible SMB support and lack of decent remote desktop solution (I've tried all the options, they're all functional at best). With Proton having solved the gaming issue, I'm sure I would have loved switching my primary box over to Linux with KDE if it were not for those two remaining thorns.
teunispeters 3y ago
I've tried multiple and now stick with KDE for two reasons: 1. it gets out of the way when needing to do something (a lot better than some of the alternatives) - for instance games, 3D tools or the like. 2. It recovers from a restart, often back to normal use. It's nowhere near as consistent as the gold standard (MacOSX) - but it works. Gnome 2 worked - more or less - although the terminal restore was kludgy it still worked. Nothing else since has. Given I need to restart from time to time and restoring my desktop can be somewhere between minutes (if I knew where everything was) and hours (if I have to go through a bunch of files to figure out what all was running)... so yeah. KDE for the win. (among other reasons the intel AX210+ wireless chips are still rather dodgy with suspend/resume on a laptop, so tend to crash hard within an hour of a suspend).
ACS_Solver 3y ago
I really like KDE and think it's some of the best free software out there, in function and in spirit. I'm glad I stuck with it despite the dark years of KDE 4, which was an absolute disaster and only appeared worse in contrast to the amazing 3.5. I'm not a KDE developer but I greatly appreciate the development process. I've made a few minor changes in KDE and it was very easy to get a development environment set up, and then process for getting those PRs approved was easy. Better yet, that showed me that it's relatively easy to use your own builds of KDE on top of an otherwise complete system. I use Debian as my daily driver but sometimes I want new KDE features that won't hit the Debian repos for a while so I build those KDE components myself and use them. I wouldn't recommend that to new users but it's very viable if you understand how your system works.
mazu1 3y ago
KDE is by far my favorite computing environment, but its default settings slow its adoption, I believe. For example, the default task switcher is overly complicated, and even worse, in some distributions, an actual extra package has to be installed to just get a useful and basic switcher. I believe, more than anything else, if KDE wants to get more users, it should urgently work to make its default settings less surprising to new users, despite its ability to wow with neat (but not necessarily useful) user interface effects.
- ankurdhama 3y ago
  The are fixing the default task switcher in plasma 6: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/53 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/53
winrid 3y ago
I found it interesting when I checked Gnome and KDE orgs on github that by far most KDE repos are C++ and most Gnome repos are C (some Vala). It's neat to see how this tends to affect the quality of the software.
- rcoveson 3y ago
  > It's neat to see how this tends to affect the quality of the software. In which direction? I’ve used both recently and while I prefer the design decisions of KDE/plasma over those made by GNOME3 in almost every case, I definitely noticed more bugs in KDE. I had frozen copies of my mouse cursor left behind when I moved between monitors quickly, for example. Frankly it’s hard to imagine seeing that kind of instantly obvious bug in a stable GNOME build.
  - winrid 3y ago
    I guess by quality I was thinking size of feature set. It feels more feature complete, I guess? I noticed display bugs in KDE with Wayland earlier this year too but it sounds like that is cleaning up quickly.
- spystath 3y ago
  Regardless of the DE preference I believe the Gtk/GObject/GLib ecosystem is quite well designed and it's relatively easy to reason around and get into developing with even without using C since there's a ton of available bindings. KDE development is tied to the Qt framework which is essentially C++ only (with Python bindings for the Qt libs). The language is based on pragmatic requirements and I can't see any correlation to the quality of the software.
jmmv 3y ago
I've been out of touch with the Linux distro ecosystem for a while. My current favorite for a desktop environment is Fedora, and it seems like most major distros default to Gnome these days. They may provide KDE, but KDE seems to be a second thought for them (which later shows in how well-integrated other pieces of the system are). So, question: is there any major distro that defaults to KDE these days? I think openSUSE used to... but I can't easily tell if it still does, nor if it is "major".
- KingJulian 3y ago
  KDE Neon[1] is based on Ubuntu LTS. [1] https://neon.kde.org/ https://neon.kde.org/
plaguepilled 3y ago
Adding to the pile of "KDE have been great to work with". Community is friendly and professional. Answers usually work. Lots of attention on user experience and stability.
heywoodlh 3y ago
I am actually a pretty happy GNOME user -- granted, it is due to being able to tweak my experience with GNOME extensions and managing the aspects I care about with dconf settings managed with Home-Manager/Nix. These are the GNOME extensions I find critical to me enjoying the UI: - PopOS' Shell[0] for tiling windows - Just Perfection[1] for making the appearance even more minimal/removing elements I don't use I think if the GNOME team removed extension support altogether, I would absolutely switch to KDE. But for now, I get an extremely minimal desktop, and I really like it. That being said, I typically live in my terminal, so I don't spend much time actually using the tools provided with my desktop environment. (Just want to vocalize that there is at least one person who enjoys GNOME's approach of visually staying out of my way, but giving me a robust backend when I need it) [0] https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell [1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3843/just-perfection/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3843/just-perfection/
- deaddodo 3y ago
  > PopOS' Shell[0] for tiling windows You'll probably see much less support for this, and maybe even death of the project, once COSMIC releases though.
  - heywoodlh 3y ago
    I hope not, but can understand if things went that route. And if COSMIC embodies the "stay out of my way" approach better than GNOME, I'd probably be happy to switch to it.
albertopv 3y ago
"But also, I've had very positive experiences interacting with the KDE community. Bugs get fixed, the developers care, I can send out PRs and they get merged." I'm not an OSS dev, isn't so with Gnome community?
npteljes 3y ago
KDE is indeed a nice suite of software. I used it on my workstation for the last several years, and I'm using it now on my gaming PC as well. It seems to have more features than the other DEs I have tried, yet it's fast and stable, and it also feels reasonably modern and beautiful.

146 points by jlpcsl 3y ago

There's an interesting pattern where particularly device applications that don't use one of the "big distros" end up picking KDE Plasma over the alternatives, e.g. - Steam Deck: Desktop mode is KDE Plasma - PinePhone and PinePhone Pro: KDE Plasma Mobile - Asahi: KDE Plasma One may speculate what distros would do if it wasn't for inertia and compatibility.

kwhitefoot 3y ago
No need to speculate. Every Linux distro I have looked at recently allows the user to install loads of different desktop environments. KDE and Gnome are just the big ones. I use Cinnamon (a fork of Gnome 3 that looks more like Gnome 2) on Linux Mint on my laptop, XFCE on an old netbook also with Mint. Just pick whatever DE you prefer.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  Sure, but their default is usually GNOME3 these days. And there's always a ton more effort towards making the default work seamlessly. Kubuntu is notorious for having issues trying to fit the "Ubuntu" way and not quite getting it right. (Font/theme issues, primarily) Fedora's KDE spin is pretty decent, but that's mostly because it is bog standard aside from the logo and RPM/dnf integration. Outside of those two, you're better off using a KDE-primary distro in most cases.
fgonzag 3y ago
Why compatibility? Or inertia for that matter? Switching DEs in Linux is generally as easy as installing a package and switching the DE at login, and you can use any app compiled for a certain toolkit in any other DE. The default choice is usually done for either pragmatic or preferential reasons (Developer preference, easy of upstream collaboration, flexibility, stability, bug fix schedule)
- sho_hn 3y ago
  Compatibility e.g. with user support docs they have, or installed bases. It's not easy for distros to decide to switch defaults. That's why what new systems choose is interesting.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >Or inertia for that matter? Humans, including devs and distro builders, are creatures of habit. They tend to stick to using whatever they already know.

wkat4242 3y ago

KDE is so great <3. It's everything Mac and Windows should have been. I also donate to it monthly because I feel it's software really worth paying for. On the contrary, I despise Gnome 3. Gnome 2 wasn't bad but in 3 everything rubs me the wrong way. It's like they went out of their way to design something that wouldn't suit me :) The mimimalism, the thick "touch-style" window decorations, the "always an extra click" hamburger menus. The "You're holding it wrong" attitude. Basically all the issues that come with Apple-style opinionated design. And mentioned in the source article too. Nevertheless I'm glad other people do like it. That's the good thing about FOSS, there's something for everyone. I had the same feeling about recent macOS versions so I'm really happy I moved to KDE (on FreeBSD). Having choice and configurability again is amazing. This is really the power of FOSS and calls for a unified desktop would seriously undermine that. One size does not fit all.

gumballindie 3y ago
Yeah i need to start donating too. Gave kde 3 a chance and wasnt disappointed. If you want a good looking, privacy friendly (no ads or data harvesting) and stable de then kde is a good option. Only thing i dislike is their choice of qml for widgets. Also i think it has good potential for some form of monetisation so that kde positions itself as a strong competitor against windows and macos.
melx 3y ago
I'm giving a KDE a go as I finally convinced the wifey (non-technical human) to use "the Linux" daily. I haven't used KDE myself for past decade so should be fun.
sureglymop 3y ago
Is there a good tiled window manager for KDE such as Pop Shell for Gnome? That's the only thing keeping me back on gnome.
- Sparkle-san 3y ago
  Plasma 5.27 added in some native tiling support. There are also some kwin scripts available to add tiling to it. https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite

rektide 3y ago

> Meanwhile on GNOME the situation is you can't control the keyboard brightness out of the box, because they decided all laptops with a keyboard backlight must surely have dedicated keys for that purpose and therefore there's no need for a slider nor configurable keybinds and... I wrote then lost a gnome hotkey plugin to help with this, as the desktop display my parents were using had a menu system they hated/couldnt manage to use. It's wild that Gnome has such a narrow lo-fi user as their only target persona, but they probably make a vast amount of their earned income selling to such users.

blacksmith_tb 3y ago
Gnome sells something? Other than t-shirts? I can't imagine they have 'vast income', they're a non-profit[1]... presumably if they did, Nautilus would work better... 1: https://foundation.gnome.org/ https://foundation.gnome.org/
- rektide 3y ago
  Gnome is the default desktop of Red Hat, whose target audience is definitely business. There hopefully are some breakdowns somewhere of where they get funding from. But I expect Red Hat gives them a bunch of money. Whether their income is "vast" or not, my statement was specifically about the relative proportions of where it comes from. I definitely expect them to have an overall fairly mild budget. But where it comes from, I think, has largely shaped their current strategy, which is to target extreme end users with little customizability.
  - blacksmith_tb 3y ago
    That makes sense, I guess I'd say that they have hewed closer to macOS in terms of not allowing for much customization, which clearly alienates many users. I'd be more willing to toe their line if it all worked better, though.
    - beebeepka 3y ago
      Default gnome 3 doesn't make any sense. It's obvious they're making it horrible on purpose. I wonder why I have to install extensions for the most basic stuff.

lucasyvas 3y ago

I have to say that it took until Valve adopted KDE for the Steam Deck for me to really take it seriously - I have just always used a GNOME distro. KDE has pretty ugly default window theming IMO. Like, quite grotesque. But the GNOME project is overall quite preposterous. It's a main-stream-but-hipster GUI environment where their philosophy does not match how any user wants to use it, hence all the (basically) mandatory extensions. Yes, I want window controls and a dock! KDE has way too much customization I think, but at least it has accepted a more sane philosophy. I was thinking of trying the Fedora KDE spin next. I feel that the other shoe has dropped recently - I could honestly see GNOME getting dropped. Cosmic did it and nearly every major distro has a KDE spin.

prmoustache 3y ago
I must be the only user that like the gnome defaults then. Only thing I need to configure is focus over mouse (no extension needed) and I like to have the top bar transparent (extension needed but I can live without it, it is cosmetic and I haven't installed it on all my machines).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kitsunesoba 3y ago
In my eyes the biggest problem with GNOME's theming is the egregious padding everywhere in Adwaita. Installing a theme with cut down padding makes it much more reasonable and in my opinion puts it among the best looking DEs. Agreed on GNOME's lack of functionality though…
dabluecaboose 3y ago
>KDE has way too much customization I think My biggest issue with KDE themeing (or just linux ricing in general) is just the massive amount of possibilities and no guard rails. All it takes is changing one color and you end up with some godawful ugly setup. I was messing with a live Manjaro USB on one of my annual "Is desktop linux there yet" expeditions and found the best success in just picking one of the top-downloaded themes in the store and maybe tweaking one thing from it, like the folder colors. Much as I'd love a perfect and elegant personally-customized theme, I don't have the skills to do it, and I'd rather just have something that's 99% there.

kps 3y ago

It would be nice if this led to Qt/KDE exposing the ‘Mac mode’ toggle that makes the GUI key the default for GUI shortcuts. As someone who lives in the terminal and needs control keys left alone, the Windows style drives me nuts. (KDE shortcuts are at least configurable, but it would be nice not to have to do them all one by one.)

dvh 3y ago

I personally don't like DE (desktop environments). I don't want my PC to be doing something or managing something on my desktop besides switching and moving/resizing windows. WM (window managers) are smaller, faster, less brittle and don't require grand visionary changes every 2 years.

kitsunesoba 3y ago
The problem I ran into with minimal WM setups is keeping the farm of various daemons required for various bits of functionality all happy and healthy took more thought and effort than I cared to put forth. It wasn't uncommon for some random thing to break after updating which got tiresome.

ACV001 3y ago

KDE is indeed very good. I tried adopting it in the past multiple times then reverting, but with the latest version is so much better than the others.

kitsunesoba 3y ago

While KDE certainly has a lot in its favor (as listed in the post, "batteries included" factor, configurability, dev team responsiveness), I've never been able to make it work for me. Even after pouring hours into customizing it, it still feels "off" somehow, and I don't think I could fix that without getting waist-deep in a custom fork. It would be nice if there were more DEs that shared those positive traits with KDE, but reality isn't so kind.

shmerl 3y ago

KDE is highly recommended.

p4bl0 3y ago

I can totally vouch for the "the developers care, answer questions, and actually accept PRs" aspect. I had some time last summer and decided to spend it on Kate (KDE advanced text editor) and the experience was great! I had never approached KDE or Qt development before, and never even done actual C++ development (just some small course exercises). The devs were great at coaching on their IRC channel and in the GitLab issues. The maintainer even made a blogspot at some point to explain my contributions: https://kate-editor.org/post/2022/2022-08-24-kate-new-features-august-2022/ https://kate-editor.org/post/2022/2022-08-24-kate-new-featur... Globally KDE is a fantastic experience, whether from a user's or a developer's perspective.

davidy123 3y ago

I tried KDE a few times over the years, but it always felt a bit off. However, six months ago I tried it again, and really like it. As others say, it has a lot of useful customization. What worries me more is the switch to Wayland, when essential apps like synergy/barrier don't work well there yet.

pshirshov 3y ago

With all its ugliness, Plasma is the only environment which works acceptable for multi-head wayland setups with fractional scaling.

magicalhippo 3y ago

I've been running KDE Neon on a NUC for years as a secondary desktop PC, and it's pretty great overall. It's customizable, performance is good and it looks nice. The only things I really miss are deeper issues, like non-existing to terrible SMB support and lack of decent remote desktop solution (I've tried all the options, they're all functional at best). With Proton having solved the gaming issue, I'm sure I would have loved switching my primary box over to Linux with KDE if it were not for those two remaining thorns.

teunispeters 3y ago

I've tried multiple and now stick with KDE for two reasons: 1. it gets out of the way when needing to do something (a lot better than some of the alternatives) - for instance games, 3D tools or the like. 2. It recovers from a restart, often back to normal use. It's nowhere near as consistent as the gold standard (MacOSX) - but it works. Gnome 2 worked - more or less - although the terminal restore was kludgy it still worked. Nothing else since has. Given I need to restart from time to time and restoring my desktop can be somewhere between minutes (if I knew where everything was) and hours (if I have to go through a bunch of files to figure out what all was running)... so yeah. KDE for the win. (among other reasons the intel AX210+ wireless chips are still rather dodgy with suspend/resume on a laptop, so tend to crash hard within an hour of a suspend).

ACS_Solver 3y ago

I really like KDE and think it's some of the best free software out there, in function and in spirit. I'm glad I stuck with it despite the dark years of KDE 4, which was an absolute disaster and only appeared worse in contrast to the amazing 3.5. I'm not a KDE developer but I greatly appreciate the development process. I've made a few minor changes in KDE and it was very easy to get a development environment set up, and then process for getting those PRs approved was easy. Better yet, that showed me that it's relatively easy to use your own builds of KDE on top of an otherwise complete system. I use Debian as my daily driver but sometimes I want new KDE features that won't hit the Debian repos for a while so I build those KDE components myself and use them. I wouldn't recommend that to new users but it's very viable if you understand how your system works.

mazu1 3y ago

KDE is by far my favorite computing environment, but its default settings slow its adoption, I believe. For example, the default task switcher is overly complicated, and even worse, in some distributions, an actual extra package has to be installed to just get a useful and basic switcher. I believe, more than anything else, if KDE wants to get more users, it should urgently work to make its default settings less surprising to new users, despite its ability to wow with neat (but not necessarily useful) user interface effects.

ankurdhama 3y ago
The are fixing the default task switcher in plasma 6: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/53 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/53

winrid 3y ago

I found it interesting when I checked Gnome and KDE orgs on github that by far most KDE repos are C++ and most Gnome repos are C (some Vala). It's neat to see how this tends to affect the quality of the software.

rcoveson 3y ago
> It's neat to see how this tends to affect the quality of the software. In which direction? I’ve used both recently and while I prefer the design decisions of KDE/plasma over those made by GNOME3 in almost every case, I definitely noticed more bugs in KDE. I had frozen copies of my mouse cursor left behind when I moved between monitors quickly, for example. Frankly it’s hard to imagine seeing that kind of instantly obvious bug in a stable GNOME build.
- winrid 3y ago
  I guess by quality I was thinking size of feature set. It feels more feature complete, I guess? I noticed display bugs in KDE with Wayland earlier this year too but it sounds like that is cleaning up quickly.
spystath 3y ago
Regardless of the DE preference I believe the Gtk/GObject/GLib ecosystem is quite well designed and it's relatively easy to reason around and get into developing with even without using C since there's a ton of available bindings. KDE development is tied to the Qt framework which is essentially C++ only (with Python bindings for the Qt libs). The language is based on pragmatic requirements and I can't see any correlation to the quality of the software.

jmmv 3y ago

I've been out of touch with the Linux distro ecosystem for a while. My current favorite for a desktop environment is Fedora, and it seems like most major distros default to Gnome these days. They may provide KDE, but KDE seems to be a second thought for them (which later shows in how well-integrated other pieces of the system are). So, question: is there any major distro that defaults to KDE these days? I think openSUSE used to... but I can't easily tell if it still does, nor if it is "major".

KingJulian 3y ago
KDE Neon[1] is based on Ubuntu LTS. [1] https://neon.kde.org/ https://neon.kde.org/

plaguepilled 3y ago

Adding to the pile of "KDE have been great to work with". Community is friendly and professional. Answers usually work. Lots of attention on user experience and stability.

heywoodlh 3y ago

I am actually a pretty happy GNOME user -- granted, it is due to being able to tweak my experience with GNOME extensions and managing the aspects I care about with dconf settings managed with Home-Manager/Nix. These are the GNOME extensions I find critical to me enjoying the UI: - PopOS' Shell[0] for tiling windows - Just Perfection[1] for making the appearance even more minimal/removing elements I don't use I think if the GNOME team removed extension support altogether, I would absolutely switch to KDE. But for now, I get an extremely minimal desktop, and I really like it. That being said, I typically live in my terminal, so I don't spend much time actually using the tools provided with my desktop environment. (Just want to vocalize that there is at least one person who enjoys GNOME's approach of visually staying out of my way, but giving me a robust backend when I need it) [0] https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell [1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3843/just-perfection/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3843/just-perfection/

deaddodo 3y ago
> PopOS' Shell[0] for tiling windows You'll probably see much less support for this, and maybe even death of the project, once COSMIC releases though.
- heywoodlh 3y ago
  I hope not, but can understand if things went that route. And if COSMIC embodies the "stay out of my way" approach better than GNOME, I'd probably be happy to switch to it.

albertopv 3y ago

"But also, I've had very positive experiences interacting with the KDE community. Bugs get fixed, the developers care, I can send out PRs and they get merged." I'm not an OSS dev, isn't so with Gnome community?

npteljes 3y ago

KDE is indeed a nice suite of software. I used it on my workstation for the last several years, and I'm using it now on my gaming PC as well. It seems to have more features than the other DEs I have tried, yet it's fast and stable, and it also feels reasonably modern and beautiful.