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I loved the KDE 3.x series, it felt like the future to me. It was _way_ ahead of both Windows and Mac at the time in terms of features and power. KDE 4 was a d

I loved the KDE 3.x series, it felt like the future to me. It was _way_ ahead of both Windows and Mac at the time in terms of features and power. KDE 4 was a dud. Too much of a radical make-over instead of iterating on what worked. Ugly. Very crashy. I'm not sure how close KDE 4 came to killing KDE altogether, but it must have been pretty close. KDE 5 was a vast improvement over 4, going back to what made 3 so good. Earlier releases left a bit to be desired and still had a few stability issues. Later releases were pretty well refined. I switched (back) to KDE at this point, when I switched to Debian 12 (bookworm) at the same time. KDE 6 is just a continuation of KDE 5, but using Qt 6 under the hood and defaulting to Wayland. It's very solid, fast, and just gets out of your way so you can do real work with it.

cogman10 1y ago
I'm loving KDE 6. It's what a good desktop environment should be. Just enough eye candy to make it feel pleasant, and yet also very fast and responsive on even a potato of a computer.
meekins 1y ago
The 4.x series was the one where the ideas still making Plasma so powerful were seeded. While I loved KDE 3 the design for 4 seemed revolutionary. Too bad it was alpha/beta quality up until the 4.6 release years later. I fared through all the bugs, crashes and performance issues with a young student's determination (while running Fluxbox on the side) but I can very well understand people doing serious work had limited patience for the issues. Anyhow, happy anniversary from a long-time KDE user!
- Sammi 1y ago
  It's a story that's very similar to Windows Vista. It gets a lot of hate for breaking stuff at the time it was originally released, but the reason it broke stuff is because it put in a new foundation for later releases to build upon. The later releases were better because of the breakage. Something something gotta breaks some eggs to make an omelette something something.

cogman10 1y ago

I'm loving KDE 6. It's what a good desktop environment should be. Just enough eye candy to make it feel pleasant, and yet also very fast and responsive on even a potato of a computer.

meekins 1y ago

The 4.x series was the one where the ideas still making Plasma so powerful were seeded. While I loved KDE 3 the design for 4 seemed revolutionary. Too bad it was alpha/beta quality up until the 4.6 release years later. I fared through all the bugs, crashes and performance issues with a young student's determination (while running Fluxbox on the side) but I can very well understand people doing serious work had limited patience for the issues. Anyhow, happy anniversary from a long-time KDE user!

Sammi 1y ago
It's a story that's very similar to Windows Vista. It gets a lot of hate for breaking stuff at the time it was originally released, but the reason it broke stuff is because it put in a new foundation for later releases to build upon. The later releases were better because of the breakage. Something something gotta breaks some eggs to make an omelette something something.