Counterpoint: KDE is literally the best to ever do it and none even compare
do what? look good while it chokes on itself? because i'd say unity did that even better.
Be the most versatile and usable DE with the best applications
Also works on my machine (14 year old thinkpad)
You're running a t410??
that's amazing that it's still usable today after 14 years, gives me hope that I can keep my t430 running until a similarly good device appears on the market
A t420, but yes
It's not my main machine but it is my only laptop, and sticking an extra 8gb of ram and an ssd in it was all it needed to become very responsive even for modern software. Unless you're playing video games or doing some heavyweight media editing projects, those older CPUs and GPUs can cope better than one might expect
Eyy a fellow t420 user in the wild! There is the rare game that can be played on it, I once survived off of Minecraft and holocure when my desktop's motherboard decided "no" and it was my only machine until I could get a replacement
versatile
sure. idk about "the most", i haven't seen it do anything that other DMs can't do with some tinkering. hell just installing cairo-dock yields a very similar ui experience imo.
usable
i can't agree, my experience is things not staying where i put them, random crashes, layout and themes not "sticking" between logins, and occasionally the entire session crashing - all this from a fresh install on an untinkered-with system, and it's been a consistent experience through the years. maybe you're luckier than i am?
best applications
i never met an application i wanted to run that i couldn't because i had the wrong DE. what are you talking about?
No I think KDE is the best de out there fight me.
Same
Never had a problem with KDE. Are you sure you aren’t using KDE 4.0?
i've had problems with every version i've installed on every distro i've installed it on since the mid '00s when i started using linux
Man, I don't understand this sentiment at all. I don't know what would be different from my setups, but KDE has always been rock solid for me. Back when I used it on Mandrake Linux and today.
OP, might you be an Arch user?
I'm using KDE on Arch, no problems here.
KDE on Arch + Nvidia Wayland was a buggy experience for me a few months ago. But honestly, even X11 on Intel integrated graphics gets a few buggy releases every couple months.
I still love KDE though. Way better than MacOS
i usually stick to debian flavors, i haven't had good experiences with arch
I'm sorry, but KDE apps are literally the ugliest things on the planet. I really like how many features KDE has, but I just can't switch due to the looks
I like how the KDE apps look on the plasma desktop. I hate how they look everywhere else.
qt allows for theming
Hard disagree. My desktop is as stable as it's pretty and I find it really good that both me and a friend of mine that uses KDE have very different workflows that KDE is able to adapt to. I am quite the fanboy of KDE tbh. It never failed me and is s dream to use everytime I turn on my PC
see i hear things like this but when i install it's basically the same resource-hungry unstable mess as it was the first time i checked it out over a decade ago. i figured maybe it's me and tried some distros that come with it preinstalled and it's not any different. are you running a supercomputer or what?
I was running xfce for a while on my old laptop with only 8 GB of ram. Thinking that it was the least resource usage DE. (Which i think it still is but i havent tested in a bit).
Then i got a new pc and tried kde and to my amazment it used just a tiny bit more resources than xfce did on my old laptop. I then installed kde on that old pc and it ran perfectly well. kde had a lot more QOL compared to xfce in my opionion, with none of the jank.
Its intersting how much different our experiences are.
What would you recomend for a DE?
KDE is buttery smooth (165Hz, no stutters ever) for me and kwin is a much nicer compositor than mutter.
I always hear about people saying KDE breaks too easily. I've literally used it for years and I've never had serious issues outside of the Plasma 6 Beta for obv reasons. Like what are y'all doing to your DE?
Being on a rolling release I get a similar feeling, it just works and any noticeable bugs gets fixed pretty shortly
even upgrading to KDE 6 was hilariously smooth, almost scary
I think most issues with KDE are from fixed point release distros which just don't bother with backporting minor bug fixes
it's something I've been pointing out for almost half a decade now, the main problem with KDE isn't any of the bugs, it's the lack of vision of what the project wants to be
it ends up being a mix of windows with now GNOME's design due to it never being able to say no when people want "more features and more preferences"
It wants to be feature rich, configurable, and flexible
GNOME already has the Apple "we know better than you so it's our way or the highway" design strategy down to an art
it's a project with a cohesive idea of what it wants to build, to a certain extent they are perfectly right to stand with "their way or the highway"
this isn't an apple thing, it's just that in the operating system market there isn't any other example of someone having a defined idea of what they want to build
KDE tries to be all of those things, but trying to cast too wide of a net just gets you a mess of settings and unfortunately buggy experience overall
small edit: I have a ton of respect for the KDE devs, I just realized I've been sounding too negative about them, I just don't like the end product
it's been the same buggy mess for as long as i've been using linux, always with the promise that the next update will take it from "neat tech demo" to "suitable permenant DE", i'm just really confused why it's the hot shit right now because my experience with the current release was literally identical to the first time i tried it way, way back on maverick meerkat. if i didn't know any better i'd say they changed the version number and nothing else.
Does that mean you're on Kubuntu? Which would mean you haven't even tried Plasma 6 yet right?
Honestly Plasma is moving so fast it feels like the experience would unironically be better on something like Arch or Fedora where you get new updates almost instantaneously. Anyway, I'm on Fedora and Plasma is pretty stable for me, especially since Plasma 6. Some minor annoyances I encountered are also getting fixed in 6.1.
Sounds like a you problem, aka skill issue.
idk man, when the distro has kde out of the box and it's still a dumpster fire from the first boot idk how that's on me
6.1 promises to fix some of that jank. I'm a few changes away from switching over.
been waiting over a decade, still janky. don't hold your breath.
I look at the KDE UI guidelines and then I look at Gnome and I wonder what went wrong with Gnome.
now it's my turn to go "yeah it's ugly as sin but i've never had a single issue with it".
Used to crash a lot for me prior to 5.24 on Wayland, but now on 6.0 I’m dailing it. Full screen tearing works on Wayland as well so it’s suitable for gaming now
It's the definition of "customization for customizations sake". It's ok if you like that, just not for me
Valve should have used GNOME on SteamOS so I could actually use it with the touch screen, and no on can convince me otherwise
GTK4 has issues with some touch screens that causes the UI to lock up until the user pushes esc. No idea why.
KDE has always been buggy for me, switching to AMD makes it a lot more usable but still too annoying, last time I tried KDE, all the panel widgets refused to load and deleting my panel and making a new default panel did nothing to solve this.
I'm on NixOS.
KDE X11 is also quite janky for me. KDE with Wayland is pretty smooth. I'm using Fedora 40 btw so no idea if that is because Wayland is the new default when using the KDE spin.
I love how it works, I hate how careless they handle user data. I don't trust kdewallet because it forgot my wifi passwords multiple times, suddenly demanded a password for a passwordless wallet, or lost the wallet alltogether. I lost tons of old emails when kmail switched to akonadi storage instead of plain mail folders. And why did they change my desktop background after an update? Can't they just respect my settings and stuff a little bit -.-
if kde systemmonitor (the Plasma 6 replacement for ksysguard) would stop crashing every 5 seconds and become aware of which UI layer the thimg i'm dragging is on i would appreciate it
KDE was always the bleeding edge side. I always stuck with Gnome in the past for stability.
Honestly, I'm using Cinnamon, it has all the stability and practicality of old style gnome with the eyecandy of KDE. However I also use MATE and XFCE if I wanna be frugal on resources.
Yes, it's a little bit beautiful and a little bit overrated
Well yes, it's ugly as hell but fairly stable and not really overrated.
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