True, but frankly, KDE team repeatedly said that 4.0 to 4.2 is considered beta, and not production ready. I'm also coming from 3.5.x days, and just waited for KDE to mature a little before jumping 4.x bandwagon, and I'm still on KDE.
Maybe, we, the users shall read the announcements with a keener eye.
It states the following:
Some of the more obvious issues are listed below. If these issues are important to you, you should stay with KDE 3.5 (KDE 3.5.10 was released in August 2008) until KDE 4.2 is released (scheduled for release in January 2009) when most of these issues are scheduled to be resolved.
It is possible that distributions will work around some of these issues before distributing to users.
[0]: https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Is_KDE_4.1_for_you%3F
It is safe to say that many other projects have not done beta .0 releases like that because they don't want the same to happen to them - even though they really need beta testers. Of course few projects will admit that they learned the lesson from KDE.
Yeah, I remember that turmoil, and was really sad for all KDE devs.
> It is safe to say that many other projects have not done beta .0 releases...
This was a brave move by KDE back then, and still a brave move, but with proper communication, it can be done, I guess...
KDE developers and volunteers embody a great trove of wisdom about software development. I learnt how to make proper bug reporting from AmaroK project, and still use the same methodology, even with projects which do not enforce any style. It makes things much easier. ...and everyone needs beta testers. That's true.
So I'm not sure whether it's try that that caused a bad reputation that sticks around to this day. (I have other reasons for not preferring it.)
I'm sure if you're missing anything useful diagnostics-wise it's worth a FREQ though. A lot of us also do travel with our laptop to numerous FOSS events all over the place and encounter sub-par networks left and right, after all.
Myself and my family are running Fedora's KDE edition. The Fedora team has a long history of working very closely with the Plasma dev team, quite actively contributes upstream, and I haven't been disappointed. I'd vouch for this one from first-hand experience!
We also have a new project to produce a distro of our own in the works, called KDE Linux. That has recently had its first alpha release. It still has some real feature gaps and may not serve you well if one of the missing bits is something you require, but it's definitely worth looking into. It has a lot of next-gen ideas baked and some things we got to learn during the SteamOS effort, and think it has a place in the ecosystem.
In the dev community I generally see a lot of people running KDE on Arch, Debian and openSUSE as well.
> However, KDE considered my TV the primary desktop and put the task bar only in that monitor, and even disabling the TV didn't add the task bar to my monitor.
You can order the screens however you want; the first one will be considered primary.
I always want the taskbar on every screen personally. I think that'd be a friendlier default, but since it's KDE it's at least not too hard to change, and everything is configurable down to fine details
It selects the first screen just as a default.
E.g. the machine we optimized for during at least one or two Plasma dev meetings I remember was the original Pine64 Pinebook, which was a very under-powered device. We had a stack of them to hand to devs. Intentionally as a "if we can get it to fly there, it'll fly anywhere".
So it's not just that we haven't gotten worse, we also did get legitimately better in later releases compared to some of our porkier ones (which also did exist).
Though, my monitors are also from 2010, so a lot of the visual problems people have with XFCE, I don't.
The only desktops I've used since 2007 are XFCE and macOS, so I guess I don't know what I might be missing from KDE or MATE. But XFCE absolutely blows macOS out of the water, so at least I'm not missing anything from that alternative.
I run KDE Plasma on my laptop. KDE animations are too bloated and heavy for the Rock64, and there's way too many preferences to fiddle with to disable them all. If there was some kind of global "lightweight mode" checkbox in the plasma prefs, I might give it another try.
LxQT is fine. The main gripe I have with it is there's no sort of LxQT-meta package on ArchLinux which installs everything I actually need without a lot of fiddling. I spent a couple weeks just gradually figuring out things were missing that would make the environment a lot better. It would be nice if it just included things like oxygen icons and whatever. I understand lightweight, but they should have an "opinionated" lightweight option since I just want something that runs well on a SBC.
I used to run XFCE on an arm chromebook for a few years as my daily driver. Between the two, XFCE seemed much easier to install/customize. IDK about now, since that was before the latest release which uses latest GTK. I assume it is less lightweight now as a result of that change.
I get the idea of a desktop environment offering more consistency. But, my system feels very consistent. It is really easy, because there are only ~4 types of windows: Firefox, Evince, a terminal, or some ephemeral matplotlib graph.
I wouldn’t think of it as missing out on anything. You just become familiar with the ecosystem of mostly terminal utilities.
What kinds of things are you talking about?
These days I feel like all of the major desktop environments are good enough. 95% of what I do with them is launch applications and move or resize windows and that’s easy enough on all of them.
On windows you have to click the icon before you can interact with it. IIRC on Mac too.
Wow! (about) A whole week!
So, I gave up and just use Windows for gaming. Sigh.
Missed opportunity for "comparing apples and penguins!"
These days, I daily drive Niri and love it. I love the workflow of a scrolling WM. I love that I can configure it via a single text file in the standard configuration directory, I love how lightweight it is. It’s just about perfect for me.
But enough about Mac OS Tahoe!
Apple should at once hire the people who are responsible for Gnome's UI, because they've got it figured out. Even better, put back together the Nokia N9 GUI team.
It may have, yes!
One of the ways we run the KDE community is that we have an annual process to elect community-wide goals, which then have their own leadership team, infra, budget, etc. The goals themselves are long-running, i.e. it's not one year and done, either.
In about 2020/21 one of the goals that won/was added was titled "Improve Consistency across the Board", which lead to e.g. a comprehensive update of the HIG, renewed efforts on the controls library, and many cleanup passes across the products to get them up to date and in line.
It's an ongoing process and I'm sure plenty of people can still point to a pet peeve or an ugly corner - we're happy to have discerning users with high expectations - but the general state of things should be much better than half a decade ago.
There's also a next-gen styling/theming system project called Union in the works along with a next-gen design system developed in collaboration to take things to the next level in a few years, but we're taking our time to get it really right instead of pulling a Liquid Glass (one lesson we've learned through the years is that clawing your way back from reputational damage is really hard, and compromising on release quality is never the way to go). You can see annual updates on this e.g. in the feeds from our flagship dev conference.
(this wasn't my main reason to switch from Gnome though, I just couldn't stand the random design decisions in each Gnome update anymore, and generally Gnome never really clicked with me the way KDE immediately did - which is also strange since Gnome is supposed to be the 'Mac desktop clone', while KDE is supposed to be the 'Windows desktop clone' heh)
IDK mate, I care more about the utility than the looks since I spend my time using the DE, not hanging it on my wall to admire it.
And to me and my use case and formed habits, utility wise KDE >>> Gnome by a wide margin, though KDE still has some annoyances.
None of that really matters compared to usability and functionality. Most of the time I have one panel showing and everything else I can see is applications. The applications are a mix of things anyway.
It looks amazing and feels super snappy, I have never had such a painless Linux desktop experience. It even has a tiling window manager functionality built-in that was enough for me to sway away from i3/sway. But it also just works like a normal desktop that a non-technical user can use with ease.
https://bsky.app/profile/system76.bsky.social/post/3lylz3cfy...
[0]https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thiagokokada/blog/main/pos...
Now it is definitely my preferred Linux desktop environment as well.
Gnome is configurable, but in a way that isn't really well integrated. It seems buggy to me, but I think it's because my preferences aren't standard.
For instance, I like having my dock on the left, and I like top bar stuff to be in the dock, so the dock is the only thing that can take up screen space, and I like the dock to disappear when I'm not using it.
Simple, right? Can't do it in the regular configuration. Can do part of it in tweaks, which is a separate configuration app, but then some of it requires extensions. So, that's 3 places to go to
What's it called when hiding complexity makes it more complex?
So, that gets me there, but then the dock fails to hide half the time on zoom calls. And when I unlock the screen, I can see the empty space where the top bar used to be for a quick flash before the full sized app window goes back to where I left it.
So far, I don't have those issues with KDE. I don't like the annoying and krappy branding with the launcher icon and more than half the apps having a K in the name, but you can change the launcher icon and use whatever apps you want.
I'm not sure why you think requiring extensions is a bad idea. I have tried out at least 20 GNOME extensions, and I appreciate the flexible underlying architecture to allow extensions to flourish. With extensions, the same GNOME can have Windows XP style taskbars or Mac-style docks or anything in between.
I'm glad the wobbly windows desktop effect has stuck around too: absolutely unnecessary, but it's silly and fun.
My biggest complaint has nothing to do with KDE itself, but the fact that GTK apps are so ugly by default. QT apps look fine in GTK desktop environments though. (At least KDE has easy built-in settings for handling GTK theming these days...I remember it being more of an issue a while back)
I'm pretty happy with budgie though. But I think I will have to give KDE a try some day.
I have to say I am really impressed with KDE, and the large selection of decent applications. I'm new to linux desktop, but I already hope that nothing changes, because to me it already seems complete.
The best part of the experience is feeling like I own my computer again.
Reminder that its built-in browser Konqueror debuted the KHTML rendering engine circa ~1999, which was then forked to become WebKit, and now (including all subsequent forks) powers something approaching 90% of web views globally. Pretty amazing!
The laptop isn't running Linux yet, I'm not confident the battery lifetime story is great.
But, I settled on KDE as well. Gnome just wasn't configurable enough. There were a number of rough edges that I couldn't find a setting in Gnome to fix, so I switched over.
I'm running zfs on root, so I can have snapshots (every 5 minutes) and incremental backups to my NAS, also running zfs. Using zfsbootmenu. Which was interesting to set up, I learned a lot more about UEFI, framebuffer drivers, kexec kernel handoffs etc. than I ever expected to.
For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.
On macOS use option-click on the Wifi indicator in the top bar to get a "debug" version of the menu, with all the same data.
netbioserror•54m ago
rtaylorgarlock•49m ago
abhinavk•42m ago
[1]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=433569
bayindirh•41m ago
One of the tricks Debian team does is they first compile the old KDE with newer libraries, then migrate KDE itself, like Intel's Tick Tock. This gives both a performant and issue-free experience as far as I can tell.
Note: I run Debian Testing on my Desktop systems. Servers always run stable.
BoredPositron•36m ago
cosmic_cheese•29m ago
Don’t get me wrong, KDE is a nice desktop in many ways, but it would benefit considerably from attention of a professional UI designer.
tsimionescu•21m ago
I know, of course, that it's an extremely minor thing, but it felt quite representative. It also reminded me that Linux is stuck in this bygone age where it's expected for a computer to be a multi-user system, so of course they can't have a "privileged" user account other than root (and god forbid you'd think of using root as your normal every day user).