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KDE has come a long way but I still find it just too buggy to be usable as a daily driver…which is unfortunate because I don’t really like Gnome either but it’s
by lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
KDE has come a long way but I still find it just too buggy to be usable as a daily driver…which is unfortunate because I don’t really like Gnome either but it’s the least worst of all the real options at the moment. Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day just doing regular things but I can’t even remember the last time Gnome crashed on me. The ghost of KDE4 still haunts me.
- fooker 10mo ago> Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day You are doing something really wrong, I haven't seen a plasma crash for years.
- sho_hn 10mo ago(Plasma dev here.) I don't think it's something the user is "doing". A crash is never the user's fault. I will say it's atypical though. We measure session uptimes in months. There is probably a very specific cause that can be addressed or mitigated.
- lifetimerubyist 10mo agoIf it means anything, I always make sure to send in a report when it crashes. I use Opensuse tumbleweed and update compulsively so I should have the newest package versions with all of the latest fixes too.
- small_scombrus 10mo agoNot to it works for me, but I'm on tumbleweed and can't say I'm even crashing once a week
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo agoI'll do you one better: I daily-drive Kalpa (so effectively tumbleweed packages) and I can't recall it ever crashing.
- com2kid 10mo agoPlasma doesn't crash for me but it definitely bugs out and I need to log out and log back in to fix things. That said I'm running a shader as my desktop wall paper on Nvidia drivers so I don't feel like any of my complaints are all that justified. :D
- dpacmittal 10mo agoHave you tried killing plasmashell and restarting it? That way you won't have to close your apps and logout
- addy34 10mo agoI'm guessing this doesn't capture manual restarts? I have the same experience as the commenter below: Plasma requires a restart a few times per day for me, as the panels disappear and one monitor's (of two) desktop goes black - usually after wake from sleep. This occurs on both machines that I run it on (only common component is Radeon graphics). That said, it's a single command and not a big deal, and it's a great DE, so thanks for your work.
- tonyhart7 10mo agocould you fix when ram is full and DE would always hang/freeze in there????? (rust analyzer and java eat all my ram)
- lifetimerubyist 10mo agoEditing text files (code), executing simple programs in the terminal (work is done on my Mac Studio, not my personal desktop), browsing the web with Firefox and playing the odd Steam game. I use the stock Opensuse Tumbleweed panel setup and don’t even tweak the animation speeds or configured effects. So I don’t think I’m holding it wrong. My hardware is old-ish (Ryzen 1800x and a Vega56) but I’ve had no issues in literally any other environment, use stock drivers with no customizations, no custom kernels or anything, and only with packages from the official repos, so I don’t believe I should have many major quirks. Heck, I don’t even have Bluetooth or wifi enabled.
- Propelloni 10mo agoHmh, I'm running Tumbleweed on a Ryzen 5 7600 and an AMD Rx 7800. Like you I don't fiddle with the defaults and this is my gaming rig (I'm working on starting just into Steam). I just have default KDE Plasma to launch Steam and play my games, I do my work on a Debian Trixie laptop. I have set up TW two years ago and only DUP-ed it since then. Actually, it is more stable then the Debian machine :o I know, this is not helping you in any way. I only encountered weird instability with Linux when my RAM was not OK. Maybe check your RAM?
- terribleperson 10mo agoAre you certain the Vega56 is still healthy and stable? It's possible it's just KDE, but it's also possible KDE is triggering hardware issues. RAM is also always one to check, especially on an older machine.
- ahartmetz 10mo agoMight be a driver issue, too. I remember Vega as a sort of short-lived in-between generation with especially many driver problems. Actually, early Ryzen 1800X also crashed under certain workloads on Linux, especially compilation and downloading games on Steam(!) IME - another KDE guy and me were some of the first world-wide to communicate about the problem. AMD had a hardware replacement program, maybe it's still active. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ryzen-Segv-Response https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ryzen-Segv-Response should get you started. People made special software packages to trigger the hardware problem in a minute or so. There was IIRC another problem with early Ryzen, something about transitions from idle power causing instability, fixed by essentially raising idle power consumption a little with a special BIOS switch and / or playing with load line calibration. That one crashed the whole computer, not just the offending program. (Actually, crashes while downloading games on Steam might have been that one.) And yes, do run memtest (from the boot menu) for a couple of hours or over night, too.
- zenoprax 10mo agoReminds me of when people praise the efficiency of their car: "It's great, $30 lasts me all month!". Tells you nothing about the car and hardly anything about the person using it. I have crashes on a monthly basis but I'm also pushing it pretty hard with 4 Activities, 5 Workspaces, and 3 Screens. That's 60 desktops for it to manage (granted, only about 10-15 in total actually have anything on them) with my tiling window management scripts on top of that. Plasmashell and Kwin take up 20% of my CPU on average which is unfortunate but that's the cost for my setup I guess.
- wolvoleo 10mo agoActivities are really great though. It's a wonderful idea. And I love the flexibility in workspaces too.
- vladvasiliu 10mo agoHow do you use them? I used to daily drive KDE up until shortly after the 4 switch, when I moved to Mac. I've moved back to Linux starting in 2018 but went with i3. I installed KDE around Christmas to try it, and while I'm mostly impressed with the general polish (except that firefox doesn't react the same way as other windows to clicking on the frame), I have a hard time figuring out what activities are and how they're different from multiple workspaces. Speaking of workspaces, is there no way to only have it show a small rectangle per space in the taskbar instead of a big wide one (I'm using multiple screens)? That's just a useless waste of space.
- zenoprax 10mo agoActivities function best as "context domains" (the classic split is "Personal" and "Work") while preserving your existing Workspaces. I use workspaces to group apps/tasks/programs functionally (eg. "Active Projects", background stuff like music or a long running terminal task, no tiling). Some things like Obsidian or Spotify are open on multiple Workspaces and multiple activities at the same time but only require a single instance.
- subjectsigma 10mo agoLiterally today I dragged a file to the trash widget on a panel and it crashed the entire WM. If you don’t have at least one story about this after using KDE for a year then you’re lying
- tapoxi 10mo agoI mean, what version of KDE is this? I've had a handful of crashes since 2024, but all of them GPU driver related.
- subjectsigma 10mo agoPlasma 6.4.5 Frameworks 6.19.0 QT 6.9.2 Kernel 6.16.4 Wayland
- tapoxi 9mo agoNvidia? Which distribution? My experience is on Bazzite with a Radeon 7800 XT and 9070 XT. I've had two amdgpu hangs playing The Finals which were a Mesa bug, this crashed kwin but kwin wasn't responsible in the stack trace. It's been fixed since. That's really it since May 2024.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo agoPeople can have different experiences without lying.
- subjectsigma 10mo agoTrue, up to a certain point. Until recently I used all three major OS almost every day for work, school, games, servers, etc. I’ve seen really bad bugs in all of them. Just spend some time looking around the Internet, Linux and KDE crash constantly. There’s also people regularly slobbering over Linux for a variety of reasons. What’s more likely, this guy won the equivalent of the computer lottery and never experienced a single bug, or that he’s one of the many Linux fanboys infesting this site? I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but no I don’t believe your shoes are made of gold just because you said so.
- srjek 10mo agoOr they are just simply not on the happy path. For example, my laptop has been running KDE just fine for years, but my attempts to switch to Linux on my desktop today have turned into a project, as plasma, steam[1], discord, and sometimes kde_powerdevil[2] are crashing every time my monitors turn off. [1] Might be https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5984 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5984 [2] https://github.com/rockowitz/ddcutil/issues/556 https://github.com/rockowitz/ddcutil/issues/556
- Kon5ole 10mo ago>Or they are just simply not on the happy path. I believe this is a very good point! Linux as an OS is so fragmented that the number of paths are basically innumerable. Many of them are "happy" but they can be hard to find and also change from year to year. I have a machine that has run Debian 11 and 12 with no issues but 13 hung before launching the UI. Fixable from the terminal but still, super un-happy path! KDE on SUSE vs on Debian vs on Kinoite and with various sound demons, file systems, file browsers etc will surely differ in ways that are beyond the direct control of the kDE devs too.
- shmerl 10mo agoI use it as a daily driver. There are bugs, but nothing deal breaking lately.
- throwawee 10mo agoThere's other desktop environments. XFCE has worked flawlessly for me for years, though its Wayland support is still experimental.
- voidfunc 10mo agoI love XFCE but I've had a hell of a time getting it to work nicely with multiple high DPI monitors. I finally gave up and went to KDE which.. just works. Unfortunate because the minimalism of XFCE is way more my style.
- wolvoleo 10mo agoHmm I get a crash once a week or so. No biggie because it restarts itself immediately. More annoying is that gwenview often hangs my entire system somehow.
- IshKebab 10mo agoA crash once a week is terrible. If Windows still crashed that regularly people wouldn't be saying "no biggie".
- floitsch 10mo agoWhen Plasma crashes, all programs keep running. The only noticable thing (to me) is that the order of my apps in the task bar is different.
- wolvoleo 10mo agoHuh that's funny for me that doesn't happen. Though I guess I do have most of them pinned, maybe that's why.
- speedgoose 10mo agoI experience similar windows crashes regularly on my old asus laptop. It’s likely from the asus drivers. The screen gets black for a fraction of a second and the explorer.exe restarts.
- wolvoleo 10mo agoIt just means the task bar disappears for 2 seconds and then it pops back because it relaunches. Everything else stays in place just fine. In fact the same happens on Windows a lot when explorer.exe crashes. People often don't even notice it.
- NooneAtAll3 10mo agoyou mean windows that's well known for its BSOD? that one?
- MegaDeKay 10mo ago
- dman 10mo agoWhat distro, what distro version and what hardware (ie gpu, ram etc)?
- weberer 10mo ago>Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day just doing regular things This is not normal. Do a RAM test to see if you have a hardware issue.
- cogman10 10mo agoRAM or the GPU is faulty. Definitely not normal. I've been running plasma for over a year, there was like 1 crash during the 5->6 transition, it's otherwise been perfectly fine.
- marginalia_nu 10mo agoI have the same issue, only on KDE, never anywhere else. Does KDE use RAM differently than every other software?
- fooker 10mo agoYes, KDE aggressively caches and indexes things by default whenever you have free RAM unless you disable this behavior in multiple places in multiple applications. For example, in Okular you can tune it to choose how much of a pdf you want to keep rendered in memory, if you have a tonne of memory, this makes it the smoothest pdf viewer I have ever used. It has become reasonable graceful in giving it back when you you need it nowadays.
- marginalia_nu 10mo agoThe Linux kernel does this too, yet it does not crash like KDE. At any given moment, most of your free RAM is used to cache stuff by the kernel, unless you've recently rebooted.
- fooker 10mo agoNo, what the Linux kernel does instead is randomly kill user processes :) It's kinda infamous for that, and had held up Linux adoption for a decade or so. But you sort of missed the point, I think. The comment chain was about speculating why KDE could possibly crash if there was faulty RAM while other software would be fine. And the kernel absolutely crashes when there's faulty ram.
- smetj 10mo agoThis has not been my experience at all ... I run KDE + Fedora or Ubuntu on laptops for years as my daily driver doing professional work. Its an absolute joy to work with and stable. If there's a hickup then its because some unrelated process is consuming all memory or hogging all CPUs (Slack, Teams I'm looking at you) which would crash any desktop.
- yonatan8070 10mo agoFor me it happens when I forget Wireshark running for a bit too long...
- setopt 10mo agoI get regular "crashes" on the newest Fedora KDE on a new Thinkpad X1 (from this year). I say "crashes" because it’s not the window manager or Wayland session crashing but some non-essential component of the Plasma desktop (don’t remember which one right now), so it doesn’t affect my work at all. From my point of view it basically just causes a crash report popup every 1-2 hours and says whatever service crashed has been restarted.
- flohofwoe 10mo agoFWIW Plasma 6 is running stable and fast for me (via vanilla Kubuntu on a somewhat recent Intel Meteor Lake laptop), best experience I had with desktop Linux all the way back to the late 90s, and especially on a laptop (the touchpad finally doesn't suck anymore compared to Macs). It's also the first time where I think the overall experience is vastly better than running Windows on the same machine.
- thaumaturgy 10mo agoYeah, I've been running Plasma as a daily driver (and without a fallback OS) for around 8 years now without this kind of trouble. I routinely run for months between reboots, and when a reboot happens, it's usually because I did a dumb. I helped someone else earlier today with an unstable Linux laptop, it turned out there was an amd/gpu/drm issue that was crashing Wayland in the background. My first bet would be that you've got something similar going on -- a hardware or device driver problem. You've crawled through journalctl and the like, I assume?
- spiffytech 10mo agoThis is my experience too. Tried again just this week. Zero issues with Gnome or Cosmic (so likely not hardware issues), but an-least-daily Plasma crashes.
- Zardoz84 10mo ago???? I have using KDE plasma as mainly driver for years. I remember having big issues in the KDE 4 era. KDE 5 ran smooth and KDE 6 + Wayland it's amazing. I don't had any issues or problems like you described.
- Kuinox 10mo agoComing from windows and starting to use KDE 6 since a few days, I wouldn't call it amazing. It's usable, but far from amazing.
- monegator 10mo agoI don't know man, i have a bunch of computers, the oldest one is a 2012 macbook, then various laptops from different brands (hp, dell, lenovo), an intel nuc from 2016 and a minisforum using a ryzen 7 that i bought just before the ram craze (phew) all these machines run debian trixie with KDE and i think i only ever seen glitches once, or twice in only one of them. I think the macbook. Granted, all devices run from the internal GPU, intel or AMD. The only time i saw kde "krash" a lot was when i was demoing arch in a VM, to see what the fuss is all about that distro. But i don't know if it was virtualbox, or arch.