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I'm absolutely loving KDE since I returned to desktop Linux after a long absence. What really shocks me is how few of the big distros make KDE a default or "fi

I'm absolutely loving KDE since I returned to desktop Linux after a long absence. What really shocks me is how few of the big distros make KDE a default or "first class" DE choice. If I was a novice user coming from Windows, I'd much prefer KDE, which if you stick to the GUI is very navigable and similar in some ways.

qiine 1y ago
Does not make any sense to me either
happymellon 1y ago
There are two minds of thought. 1. Like yours, KDE is similar to Windows so it's less scary for new users. 2. KDE is similar to Windows so will confuse users when it doesn't run Windows software or doesn't quite behave in the same way. Macs don't look the same and people don't get scared or expect their Windows software to run on it. I can see both arguments, and I've definitely seen internet complaints about both KDE and Gnome being either too similar or not similar enough and they are confused.
- goalieca 1y ago
  I think there’s more thoughts to… I migrated my non-technical mom from windows to Ubuntu in 2005 and my daily support questions on how to do this and that went to once a few weeks. Gnome 2 and Firefox was very simple. The OpenOffice stability was also great when Microsoft switched to ribbon. Eventually I got her on a Mac and she hasn’t asked a question since. She keeps buying new ones ever since.
- dapperdrake 1y ago
  Point 2 doesn’t count. As far as Windows 11 is concerned even Windows doesn’t run games like old Windows.
  - daveidol 1y ago
    What do you mean?
    - dapperdrake 1y ago
      Many people (myself included) seem to get the impression that software that used to run on MS Windows before version 11 doesn’t enjoy the same level if backwards compatibility and forwards compatibility like it used to. People were half-joking that Linux/WINE now runs some older games better than Windows 11. The impression might, of course, be mistaken.
- Forgeties79 1y ago
  Maybe I need to lower my expectations a bit but I feel like someone who is explicitly leaving windows for Linux by that point would understand it can’t run everything windows does right? In the same way basically everyone gets that a lot of software doesn’t operate on Mac and Windows.
  - happymellon 1y ago
    > I feel like someone who is explicitly leaving windows for Linux by that point would understand it can’t run everything windows does right? I get it, but it's unfortunately not true. The amount of folks I've seen complain about their Windows pirate copy of Photoshop CS6 not working on Linux so they will go to Mac over the years has been quite silly.
    - Forgeties79 1y ago
      They’re complaining but I think they at least knew that it wasn’t going to work out the box if at all, they just tried anyway. I work in film production so I’ve seen this exact scenario multiple times and you’re absolutely right, but they weren’t surprised IME. They just thought they could figure it out. I usually tell them “if you have to use Adobe, then move on. If you don’t care that much, there are plenty of free/affordable programs with feature parity (or better) for Linux against CS6.” I mean it’s pretty old!
- wkat4242 1y ago
  KDE looks different enough to windows in its default install though. And you can make it look like whatever you want, that's the best thing about it. Mine is heavily customised.
  - c-hendricks 1y ago
    > KDE looks different enough to windows in its default Uhhhh it does? https://kde.org/content/plasma-desktop/plasma-launcher.png https://kde.org/content/plasma-desktop/plasma-launcher.png https://laptopmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/win10-start1-940x528.jpg https://laptopmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/win10-sta... https://pointieststick.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/hebrew-calendar.jpg https://pointieststick.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/hebrew... https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22899858/lkArZH0.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100 https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/cho... I like KDE a lot, and yes you can configure it to look and act just abut any way you like, but it's default definitely has a lot in common with Windows.
    - andmarios 1y ago
      It's the other way round, at least some, if not all, of these screens were in KDE before they were released in Windows. In general, KDE tends to be widely copied. Even macOS has borrowed a lot from KDE. It has been over 10 years since I stopped being a KDE fanboy and became just a regular fan, but I remember that during my flame-war era, many features from KDE would often appear in Mac OS and Windows and their most popular applications (such as iTunes). These days I don't care so much, I use KDE and I'm too old to switch.
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      In common yes but it's not windows, that's pretty obvious. Especially that start menu with the tiles on windows is very different (and horrible because the default doesn't look like that screenshot, it's filled with ads, news and other crap)
outadoc 1y ago
I can easily see a novice user coming from Windows accidentally getting into the edit mode of Plasma and being completely confused. I like KDE as an advanced user but I wouldn't install it on my grandma's laptop. I agree that it would be great to have it as a first-class citizen in more distros, but I guess the maintenance burden is not negligible. I'm glad Fedora promoted it though.
- Sammi 1y ago
  The average Linux user is not your grandma and lets not overstate how easy it is to mess up your KDE config. Most of the config ui in KDE is delightful compared to other desktop environments, and most non-technical users would shy away from even trying to fiddle with technical stuff. And those that do fiddle and mess up are likely to have a technical person at hand to help them, because someone had to install Linux for them in the first place. KDE is a much more sensible default for the highly technical person who is likely to install Linux themselves. There are other great options if you want something more locked down and noob proof. KDE really is the most relevant choice for default for most distros atm.
  - noisy_boy 1y ago
    Playing devil's advocate, KDE settings are clear but there might be a possibility for a "Advanced Mode" button (with a first-time click warning) on the top-right of the "Quick Settings" screen that opens up when we launch the Settings. That can hide the "risky" stuff (e.g. "Window Management" etc). There might be value in adding a "Lock Panels" options to handle accidental modifications/removal etc.
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      I agree with the “Advanced Mode” button. That’d solve a great deal of the issues that KDE Settings suffers. On the other hand I think it could use a fair deal of work on the clarity front. There are a number of settings that are confusing or ambiguous even for some technical users.
dapperdrake 1y ago
GNOME essentially gutted itself when it switched away from GNOME 2. Somehow they still stuck around as a broken default. Go figure. IIRC, then a lot of documentation still mentions GNOME first and then KDE second. Furthermore, Ubuntu without the prefix is GNOME. Kubuntu is KDE. And all the others like Lubuntu, etc. all seem "special" to casual users. Think of what the average university student installs in a VM, when they need to run some random command-line tool. Plain stock Ubuntu. And GNOME lives on as a sorry excuse for a bad copy of MacOS desktop looks without the feel.
- guerrilla 1y ago
  As a long-time GNOME user, I support this sentiment entirely. What a disaster. It keeps getting worse too. Now you can barely even tell foreground from background windows thanks to this Adwaita bullshit. First they removed all the features, now they're removing all of the visual information.
  - dandellion 1y ago
    Same, I've using GNOME for a long time and haven't switched yet out of laziness and being busy with other things, but the next time I have to upgrade my laptop I'm giving KDE a spin, I'm tired of GNOME replacing useful features with... nothing. They deprecate something and replace it with an app that looks sleek because it has no buttons, and it has no buttons because it has none of the features that I use. And this has happened with the file browser, the image browser, the pdf browser, the text editor... I've lost count. GNOME is seriously worse to use now than it was 15 years ago. At this point I'm not sure what they have left to butcher, but every new version they seem to surprise me with something new they found to mess with.
    - guerrilla 1y ago
      It's not just worse. It's MUCH worse. I'm in the same boat. I want to change but I don't know what to and haven't had the energy to put into that yet. This desktop is dead though and they're just beating it's dead corpse at this point. I've tried KDE a few times and it was just too disorganized for me, so I might just do something simpler like awesome or one of those tiling things and add in what I want. I used to just use openbox. There must be something equally simple for Wayland.
torben-friis 1y ago
I’ve been trying it out coming from the Mac recently, mostly because I had to do stuff that didn’t play well with an arm processor. It is surprisingly elegant and polished now. There’s a couple rough edges - the settings menu needing the apply button on every change like a form is weirdly ancient, and notifications are a bit noisy, but overall I could see myself ditching macOS for it.
WD-42 1y ago
What’s up with this constant insistence that the Linux desktop should be familiar to windows users? I feel like people are just as likely to be familiar with OSX at this point. Also I’m not sure why sticking with a 30 year old mouse driven desktop metaphor is a hard requirement.
sombragris 1y ago
I second this. Once and once again I saw new distros being created, some with quite ambitious goals for the desktop, and then crippling themselves by choosing Gnome. I have nothing against it, but it seems to me clearly inferior in functionality and customizability.
arvigeus 1y ago
> What really shocks me is how few of the big distros make KDE a default or "first class" DE choice. There’s a reason for that: KDE has more irregular release schedule than GNOME. KDE folks are working on that, so expect situation to change.

qiine 1y ago

Does not make any sense to me either

happymellon 1y ago

There are two minds of thought. 1. Like yours, KDE is similar to Windows so it's less scary for new users. 2. KDE is similar to Windows so will confuse users when it doesn't run Windows software or doesn't quite behave in the same way. Macs don't look the same and people don't get scared or expect their Windows software to run on it. I can see both arguments, and I've definitely seen internet complaints about both KDE and Gnome being either too similar or not similar enough and they are confused.

goalieca 1y ago
I think there’s more thoughts to… I migrated my non-technical mom from windows to Ubuntu in 2005 and my daily support questions on how to do this and that went to once a few weeks. Gnome 2 and Firefox was very simple. The OpenOffice stability was also great when Microsoft switched to ribbon. Eventually I got her on a Mac and she hasn’t asked a question since. She keeps buying new ones ever since.
dapperdrake 1y ago
Point 2 doesn’t count. As far as Windows 11 is concerned even Windows doesn’t run games like old Windows.
- daveidol 1y ago
  What do you mean?
  - dapperdrake 1y ago
    Many people (myself included) seem to get the impression that software that used to run on MS Windows before version 11 doesn’t enjoy the same level if backwards compatibility and forwards compatibility like it used to. People were half-joking that Linux/WINE now runs some older games better than Windows 11. The impression might, of course, be mistaken.
Forgeties79 1y ago
Maybe I need to lower my expectations a bit but I feel like someone who is explicitly leaving windows for Linux by that point would understand it can’t run everything windows does right? In the same way basically everyone gets that a lot of software doesn’t operate on Mac and Windows.
- happymellon 1y ago
  > I feel like someone who is explicitly leaving windows for Linux by that point would understand it can’t run everything windows does right? I get it, but it's unfortunately not true. The amount of folks I've seen complain about their Windows pirate copy of Photoshop CS6 not working on Linux so they will go to Mac over the years has been quite silly.
  - Forgeties79 1y ago
    They’re complaining but I think they at least knew that it wasn’t going to work out the box if at all, they just tried anyway. I work in film production so I’ve seen this exact scenario multiple times and you’re absolutely right, but they weren’t surprised IME. They just thought they could figure it out. I usually tell them “if you have to use Adobe, then move on. If you don’t care that much, there are plenty of free/affordable programs with feature parity (or better) for Linux against CS6.” I mean it’s pretty old!
wkat4242 1y ago
KDE looks different enough to windows in its default install though. And you can make it look like whatever you want, that's the best thing about it. Mine is heavily customised.
- c-hendricks 1y ago
  > KDE looks different enough to windows in its default Uhhhh it does? https://kde.org/content/plasma-desktop/plasma-launcher.png https://kde.org/content/plasma-desktop/plasma-launcher.png https://laptopmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/win10-start1-940x528.jpg https://laptopmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/win10-sta... https://pointieststick.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/hebrew-calendar.jpg https://pointieststick.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/hebrew... https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22899858/lkArZH0.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100 https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/cho... I like KDE a lot, and yes you can configure it to look and act just abut any way you like, but it's default definitely has a lot in common with Windows.
  - andmarios 1y ago
    It's the other way round, at least some, if not all, of these screens were in KDE before they were released in Windows. In general, KDE tends to be widely copied. Even macOS has borrowed a lot from KDE. It has been over 10 years since I stopped being a KDE fanboy and became just a regular fan, but I remember that during my flame-war era, many features from KDE would often appear in Mac OS and Windows and their most popular applications (such as iTunes). These days I don't care so much, I use KDE and I'm too old to switch.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    In common yes but it's not windows, that's pretty obvious. Especially that start menu with the tiles on windows is very different (and horrible because the default doesn't look like that screenshot, it's filled with ads, news and other crap)

outadoc 1y ago

I can easily see a novice user coming from Windows accidentally getting into the edit mode of Plasma and being completely confused. I like KDE as an advanced user but I wouldn't install it on my grandma's laptop. I agree that it would be great to have it as a first-class citizen in more distros, but I guess the maintenance burden is not negligible. I'm glad Fedora promoted it though.

Sammi 1y ago
The average Linux user is not your grandma and lets not overstate how easy it is to mess up your KDE config. Most of the config ui in KDE is delightful compared to other desktop environments, and most non-technical users would shy away from even trying to fiddle with technical stuff. And those that do fiddle and mess up are likely to have a technical person at hand to help them, because someone had to install Linux for them in the first place. KDE is a much more sensible default for the highly technical person who is likely to install Linux themselves. There are other great options if you want something more locked down and noob proof. KDE really is the most relevant choice for default for most distros atm.
- noisy_boy 1y ago
  Playing devil's advocate, KDE settings are clear but there might be a possibility for a "Advanced Mode" button (with a first-time click warning) on the top-right of the "Quick Settings" screen that opens up when we launch the Settings. That can hide the "risky" stuff (e.g. "Window Management" etc). There might be value in adding a "Lock Panels" options to handle accidental modifications/removal etc.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    I agree with the “Advanced Mode” button. That’d solve a great deal of the issues that KDE Settings suffers. On the other hand I think it could use a fair deal of work on the clarity front. There are a number of settings that are confusing or ambiguous even for some technical users.

dapperdrake 1y ago

GNOME essentially gutted itself when it switched away from GNOME 2. Somehow they still stuck around as a broken default. Go figure. IIRC, then a lot of documentation still mentions GNOME first and then KDE second. Furthermore, Ubuntu without the prefix is GNOME. Kubuntu is KDE. And all the others like Lubuntu, etc. all seem "special" to casual users. Think of what the average university student installs in a VM, when they need to run some random command-line tool. Plain stock Ubuntu. And GNOME lives on as a sorry excuse for a bad copy of MacOS desktop looks without the feel.

guerrilla 1y ago
As a long-time GNOME user, I support this sentiment entirely. What a disaster. It keeps getting worse too. Now you can barely even tell foreground from background windows thanks to this Adwaita bullshit. First they removed all the features, now they're removing all of the visual information.
- dandellion 1y ago
  Same, I've using GNOME for a long time and haven't switched yet out of laziness and being busy with other things, but the next time I have to upgrade my laptop I'm giving KDE a spin, I'm tired of GNOME replacing useful features with... nothing. They deprecate something and replace it with an app that looks sleek because it has no buttons, and it has no buttons because it has none of the features that I use. And this has happened with the file browser, the image browser, the pdf browser, the text editor... I've lost count. GNOME is seriously worse to use now than it was 15 years ago. At this point I'm not sure what they have left to butcher, but every new version they seem to surprise me with something new they found to mess with.
  - guerrilla 1y ago
    It's not just worse. It's MUCH worse. I'm in the same boat. I want to change but I don't know what to and haven't had the energy to put into that yet. This desktop is dead though and they're just beating it's dead corpse at this point. I've tried KDE a few times and it was just too disorganized for me, so I might just do something simpler like awesome or one of those tiling things and add in what I want. I used to just use openbox. There must be something equally simple for Wayland.

torben-friis 1y ago

I’ve been trying it out coming from the Mac recently, mostly because I had to do stuff that didn’t play well with an arm processor. It is surprisingly elegant and polished now. There’s a couple rough edges - the settings menu needing the apply button on every change like a form is weirdly ancient, and notifications are a bit noisy, but overall I could see myself ditching macOS for it.

WD-42 1y ago

What’s up with this constant insistence that the Linux desktop should be familiar to windows users? I feel like people are just as likely to be familiar with OSX at this point. Also I’m not sure why sticking with a 30 year old mouse driven desktop metaphor is a hard requirement.

sombragris 1y ago

I second this. Once and once again I saw new distros being created, some with quite ambitious goals for the desktop, and then crippling themselves by choosing Gnome. I have nothing against it, but it seems to me clearly inferior in functionality and customizability.

arvigeus 1y ago

> What really shocks me is how few of the big distros make KDE a default or "first class" DE choice. There’s a reason for that: KDE has more irregular release schedule than GNOME. KDE folks are working on that, so expect situation to change.