3 ms·
> For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off. It has. I believe thi
by topspin 1y ago
> For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.
It has. I believe this is a consequence of the 4.x debacle 18 years ago. KDE was doing great in the 3.x release, capturing a lot of users, and then everything went sideways with 4.x.
They recovered: by the later releases of 4.x most of the problems were fixed and 4.x was entirely livable. The KDE developers learned a hard lesson and have been very conservative since then. Since the release of Plasma (5.x) in 2014, KDE hasn't self-inflicted any great regressions or misfeatures, and now there is 10+ years of "polish."
It is very nice.
I too have used the "Window Rules" mentioned in the blog post. Very useful for game development where you want certain windows to appear at precise locations on different displays every time, day after day, for years. KDE just gives you features like this, whereas this is considered unnecessary elsewhere.
- unstruktured 1y ago18 years ago? Holy crap I feel old. I remember how disruptive the very stable 3 to completely unstable 4 was.
- Twirrim 1y agoI most remember the performance issues with 4. That went from silky smooth to staggering along on my machine at the time. Same thing happened with Gnome, but to a much lesser degree.
- earthnail 1y agoI remember seeing tons of mockups for how KDE 4 should look like. One was absolutely stunning but I can’t find it anymore. I remember a mostly flat theme with the idea that an app’s settings could be on the backside of a window. The dock was also brilliantly made. Oh gosh I wish I could find those old designs again. Unfortunately they didn’t go for it and went with tons of silvery gradients instead.
- koyote 1y agoSo disruptive that I haven't tried KDE since. Articles like this one might encourage me to give it another go. Is there a distribution that's considered the 'best' for a KDE environment or will any do?
- topspin 1y agoMy choice has been Kubuntu. With all vestiges of snapd removed.
- heavyset_go 1y agoUse a rolling release so you get the latest KDE and not whatever Debian froze two years ago.
- youainti 1y agoI don't know if there is a "best" but I've been using OpenSUSE Leap 15.6 with KDE on my work, personal, and family machines for the last year or so. Even my non-technical (but technologically capable) spouse has been using and enjoying it over that time on their personal laptop.
- jcelerier 1y agoWhatever you do, don't use anything debian or ubuntu-derived, they have tons of bugs that aren't upstream. CachyOS and Fedora KDE are great options.
- HoHoHoe 1y agoKDE now has its own Linux distribution called KDE Linux! https://kde.org/linux/ https://kde.org/linux/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45204393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45204393 https://news.itsfoss.com/kde-linux-alpha/ https://news.itsfoss.com/kde-linux-alpha/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/09/kde-officially-release-the-first-alpha-of-kde-linux-their-new-reference-implementation-os/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/09/kde-officially-release... https://linuxiac.com/kde-linux-alpha-launches-with-immutable-base-and-flatpak-support/ https://linuxiac.com/kde-linux-alpha-launches-with-immutable...
- jlpcsl 1y ago