3 ms·

Meh, GNOME has 1/10th of the features of KDE, but it's much more stable and consistent. I've used KDE for the past year, and it's just too much, too many optio

by sph 3y ago

Meh, GNOME has 1/10th of the features of KDE, but it's much more stable and consistent. I've used KDE for the past year, and it's just too much, too many options, and if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs. Then what's the point of offering so many options. I'm back to GNOME. KDE enjoys a lot of reputation from people that believe the Windows-style UI paradigm to be the best. That's arguable. I would certainly install KDE to a user new to Linux, but I have been running Linux long enough not to get lost if I don't have a taskbar or desktop icons. GNOME could be so much better, sure, but I prefer 2 options that work (4 code paths to test), than 10 that don't really work all that well (1024 code paths to test). My dream DE has the simplicity and design of GNOME with the completeness of QT. GTK is a dead-end, but at least it's written in C, so it is future-proof compatible with better languages such as Rust, instead of being stuck with C++ until the heat death of the universe.

notarget137 3y ago
My personal KDE looks and operates nothing like Windows and more copies the MacOS workflow (although I am not a Mac user at all). GNOME is not that much customizable and it is the main reason I stick to KDE. Also, quite stable. I do rarely have any issues to be honest and it usually is Latte that has bugs but it is in the state maintaining limbo for a while now.
pid-1 3y ago
Just a single data point, but I had GNOME hanging and crashing in clean Ubuntu and Fedora installs as recently as 2022. I've migrated to Mint and haven't tried KDE for the last 10 years, but I would have a hard time calling GNOME stable.
- sph 3y ago
  On the other hand, I haven't had GNOME crash in years. KDE 3 or 4 times in the past year. YMMV
- jlpcsl 3y ago
  Yeah similar experience here, At work we are forced to use a distro with GNOME (well at least it is GNU/Linux and not that Microsoft bloated spyware) and yeah I have plenty of crashes in GNOME. No crashes at home with KDE Plasma on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been rock stable.
jchw 3y ago
Stability is a mixed bag on GNOME. It's been a couple years but I was surprised last time I used GNOME to have Mutter crash back to gdm randomly while drawing due to a bug in graphics tablet code. I typically use SwayWM and while the graphics tablet support is nothing to write home about... It's very uncommon for it to segfault for me. My sessions in Sway tend to last months long, normally interrupted by rebooting for kernel updates or something like that. I do like that it can be extended with JS but that also ran me into all sorts of weird problems, more than it used to when GNOME was newer; I just want basic features like tray icons/app indicators... (P.S.: I think I am probably the main user of graphics tablets in SwayWM, but if anyone had been using it, I'm sorry for the tool buttons being buggy in 1.8. It was my bug and it should be fixed in 1.9, fingers crossed, it looks like 1.9 will be hitting nixos-unstable later today for me to check.)
- fullstop 3y ago
  I have to periodically restart my session if I'm using Gnome with Wayland, as memory use keeps growing. With the X11 version, you could alt + f2, then "r" to restart gnome-shell. This is, for some reason, not possible when using Wayland.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    That's because under Wayland there's no separation between display server and window manager.
    - jchw 3y ago
      To be completely pedantic, I don't believe the Wayland protocol itself actually dictates a design like this: you can separate the Wayland server from the compositor and display server bits if you want. I am not aware of many implementations of this, though; the best example is probably still Arcan. That said, the very vast majority of Wayland compositors, including Mutter, Weston and everything using wlroots, is implemented without separation between the display server, compositor, etc. so in practice this is still mostly true, it just needn't remain true into the future.
veidr 3y ago
> if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs But to me the happy path (the defaults) out-of-the-box on KDE are just better. The console and text editor are legitimately 10x better than GNOME's. The settings app, disk manager, the open/save dialogs, and -- especially -- the file manager. I do most of my work in VS Code and web browsers, so I am not even a heavy user of the apps that come with the desktop environment, but the quality of those ancillary tools really dictates the quality of life in a GUI environment. I ended up using GNOME a bunch in the last year because I have to use Wayland (X11 doesn't support my monitor setup) but remote desktop is an important tool in my day-to-day, and for a while only GNOME had a decent RDP story (for accessing the Linux desktop environment from Windows or Mac) on Wayland. I think that is no longer the case, though, with krdp[1] — seems to have not made it into Plasma 6 after all, but it does work pretty well so far — so I am so excited for KDE 6 that I enabled the testing repos so I could install it on my Arch Linux workstation right away, without waiting for the official packages. [1]: https://debugpointnews.com/krdp-wayland/ https://debugpointnews.com/krdp-wayland/
- kaba0 3y ago
  Well, the applications are not the same as the desktop environment. You can install Konsole, Dolphin, etc on gnome as well.
  - veidr 3y ago
    Definitely true (and I do install Konsole on GNOME if I have to use GNOME) but probably not super common. Most people, myself included, are gonna install the DE and its apps by choosing it in the OS installer (or at least with a single command, a la "pacman -S plasma-meta kde-applications-meta sddm").

by sph 3y ago

notarget137 3y ago

My personal KDE looks and operates nothing like Windows and more copies the MacOS workflow (although I am not a Mac user at all). GNOME is not that much customizable and it is the main reason I stick to KDE. Also, quite stable. I do rarely have any issues to be honest and it usually is Latte that has bugs but it is in the state maintaining limbo for a while now.

pid-1 3y ago

Just a single data point, but I had GNOME hanging and crashing in clean Ubuntu and Fedora installs as recently as 2022. I've migrated to Mint and haven't tried KDE for the last 10 years, but I would have a hard time calling GNOME stable.

sph 3y ago
On the other hand, I haven't had GNOME crash in years. KDE 3 or 4 times in the past year. YMMV
jlpcsl 3y ago
Yeah similar experience here, At work we are forced to use a distro with GNOME (well at least it is GNU/Linux and not that Microsoft bloated spyware) and yeah I have plenty of crashes in GNOME. No crashes at home with KDE Plasma on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It has been rock stable.

jchw 3y ago

Stability is a mixed bag on GNOME. It's been a couple years but I was surprised last time I used GNOME to have Mutter crash back to gdm randomly while drawing due to a bug in graphics tablet code. I typically use SwayWM and while the graphics tablet support is nothing to write home about... It's very uncommon for it to segfault for me. My sessions in Sway tend to last months long, normally interrupted by rebooting for kernel updates or something like that. I do like that it can be extended with JS but that also ran me into all sorts of weird problems, more than it used to when GNOME was newer; I just want basic features like tray icons/app indicators... (P.S.: I think I am probably the main user of graphics tablets in SwayWM, but if anyone had been using it, I'm sorry for the tool buttons being buggy in 1.8. It was my bug and it should be fixed in 1.9, fingers crossed, it looks like 1.9 will be hitting nixos-unstable later today for me to check.)

fullstop 3y ago
I have to periodically restart my session if I'm using Gnome with Wayland, as memory use keeps growing. With the X11 version, you could alt + f2, then "r" to restart gnome-shell. This is, for some reason, not possible when using Wayland.
- vidarh 3y ago
  That's because under Wayland there's no separation between display server and window manager.
  - jchw 3y ago
    To be completely pedantic, I don't believe the Wayland protocol itself actually dictates a design like this: you can separate the Wayland server from the compositor and display server bits if you want. I am not aware of many implementations of this, though; the best example is probably still Arcan. That said, the very vast majority of Wayland compositors, including Mutter, Weston and everything using wlroots, is implemented without separation between the display server, compositor, etc. so in practice this is still mostly true, it just needn't remain true into the future.

veidr 3y ago

> if you stray out of the happy path, you encounter plenty of bugs But to me the happy path (the defaults) out-of-the-box on KDE are just better. The console and text editor are legitimately 10x better than GNOME's. The settings app, disk manager, the open/save dialogs, and -- especially -- the file manager. I do most of my work in VS Code and web browsers, so I am not even a heavy user of the apps that come with the desktop environment, but the quality of those ancillary tools really dictates the quality of life in a GUI environment. I ended up using GNOME a bunch in the last year because I have to use Wayland (X11 doesn't support my monitor setup) but remote desktop is an important tool in my day-to-day, and for a while only GNOME had a decent RDP story (for accessing the Linux desktop environment from Windows or Mac) on Wayland. I think that is no longer the case, though, with krdp[1] — seems to have not made it into Plasma 6 after all, but it does work pretty well so far — so I am so excited for KDE 6 that I enabled the testing repos so I could install it on my Arch Linux workstation right away, without waiting for the official packages. [1]: https://debugpointnews.com/krdp-wayland/ https://debugpointnews.com/krdp-wayland/

kaba0 3y ago
Well, the applications are not the same as the desktop environment. You can install Konsole, Dolphin, etc on gnome as well.
- veidr 3y ago
  Definitely true (and I do install Konsole on GNOME if I have to use GNOME) but probably not super common. Most people, myself included, are gonna install the DE and its apps by choosing it in the OS installer (or at least with a single command, a la "pacman -S plasma-meta kde-applications-meta sddm").