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).
Everything is sooo small on my 16" notebook and when I zoom it gets blurry.
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.
My goal was to have my own setup without "bloat" I never used. So my own task manager of choice, my search bar of choice, etc.
My initial impression of xfce was that it was much snappier than kde. My main gripe with xfce was the lack of wayland support.
A big personal issue; while my own custom setup was ok, I still had to maintain it, and I found myself trying to make xfce like kde. So might as well use kde I guess.
Another super specifc thing I missed was that its window manager didn't support defining horizontal gradients in the titlebar, so I couldn't rock a true windows classic theme. It could do vertical gradients, but that's not the same.
Now I'm back to using KDE.
I switched from X11 and LXDE to Sway and had a good experience. But Sway was my slippery slope to labwc.
I actualy liked Ubuntu's Unity, and the move to GNOME did not made me an happy user.
As someone that used Gtkmm during the GNOME 1.0 days, the way current GNOME works and the overuse of JavaScript made me look elsewhere.
XFCE was good enough for me (I am old enough to have used twm), and looks rather nice.
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.
Not anymore! This changed in some win11 update I can't remember, but I recall celebrating this improvement.
However, this being windows, of course it's half-assed. This works with the mouse wheel but not by scrolling the touchpad (as of up-to-date 24h2).
I've used a variety of environments extensively (Windows, macOS, KDE, GNOME, Xfce, i3, dwm, you name it) and this is basically the one feature I find myself regularly missing from another environment.
On my work macbook - I can't install third-party software and the default window management is just not there. It has problems restoring windows to correct size when i switch external monitors... The experience just isn't as nice as KDE on my home laptop.
I had to install inputactions to get mac like touchpad gestures on my home kde set up but after that it just feels nicer and smoother than my office mac
But that doesn't work anymore since a while (I guess due to SIP).
Wow! (about) A whole week!
So, I gave up and just use Windows for gaming. Sigh.
Edit: Why someone downvotes the most innovative CD ripping solution on the planet is beyond me. =)
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.
There's many things to not like with Gnome, but they've got the user interface figured out. Contrast is correct both in light mode and dark mode. Readability is excellent. Margins and paddings are consistent across the board. Buttons, checkboxes and other gizmos look exactly as they should, with subtle shadows and 3D effects. Border radiuses are consistent and not to large.
Icons are not great, but that's the same on all desktop environments now. OS X had great icons, but that age is over.
And since they have all the important basics correct, it is trivial to fix any short comings in the UI. The team deserves praise for what they've achieved.
macOS is nearly the opposite in this regard. I wouldn’t mind giving it a facelift but doing it GNOME style would mean it losing much of what has kept many users on it.
Let them cook!
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.
But I don't mean to trash KDE. Some people don't care about that padding or visual layering or whatever but do care about the extra options and features. At the end of the day, I'm just happy that we're on a platform where all these approaches have their space and people can chose and build commnities that grow tools that adapt to their own sensibilities and needs.
KDE is great, Gnome is great, free software is great. Mac and Windows are hell.
I will say that the permission editing is (as you can also see in the nav bar there) a few levels down digging into menus, and if you go into those kinds of corners of other systems the UIs often tend to start looking a bit more "developer-y". E.g. check the analogous bits of Android, and also MacOS has a few things like plist editor windows and such where you're suddenly well off the consumer track and into unloved form-shaped things. It's a bit like the backrooms.
But that's not meant as a defense or justification!
In fact blogs like this and lists of warts often help us. If you play fly on the wall in some of our channels (e.g. the promo ones), you will also often see people doing the legwork of parsing reviews and ticketizing criticisms. We try to listen quite actively because if someone dislikes a UI they're most often right.
The most important thing is that what's bad today can in fact be good tomorrow, especially if you don't get defensive about it.
(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)
KDE does have a lot more similarities to Windows but saying it's a clone might put the wrong idea on peoples mind when they transition from Microsoft's system.
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 its artistic attention to detail.
Like I'm sure those inconsistencies exist, but am I the only one whose brain just filters them out like they just don't exist? Kind of like how your brain filters out your nose from your eyesight and you only become aware of it when you look for 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 I wish they would tackle, but for a free product, I can't complain.
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...
Actually, the only situations where I think about it is when I'm driving a mac or a win and the window management gets on my nerves, although I'm a generally a pretty chill guy.
[0]https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thiagokokada/blog/main/pos...
I gree. Something looks off about it, but I can't put my finger on what. It's the empty space? The fonts? I don't know exactly.
desktop: https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/debian12.png
code setup: https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/vscode2025.png
Hahhaha, absolutely classic linux on HN post. Couldn't be better written satire.
Except that I guess you at least acknowledged it. Which non-abandonded OS/DE hasn't significantly changed in 5 years? I can't think of one. Maybe GNOME, but they were early movers and everyone hated them for that.
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 i3-style tiling or anything in between.
Making one is more work than what I can do from basic configuration settings in KDE. I want to spend my time on other projects. The marketplace suffers from the same problems as most marketplaces. Plenty of unmaintained extensions. No guarantees of quality. Now I need to do research on extensions instead of just changing a configuration setting.
The existence of extensions allows gnome devs to figure they don't have to support basic features because someone will make an extension for it.
Extension configurations don't live in the same place as standard configurations.
The experience is fragmented and has friction.
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.
Depending on the laptop, you may be surprised. My HP EliteBooks (800 g8 series, AMD and Intel) are an absolutely better experience on Linux than Windows, it's not even close. I'm thinking specifically about sleep, of all things.
The other day, my 2020 845g8 (amd) laptop crapped out during sleep while on windows, but was not actually dead, since it was hot to the point that it heated a different laptop which was lying underneath (a 14" mbp, so a pretty chunky piece of metal). I had to forcefully power it off. I was under the impression that some windows or driver update had fixed this, but apparently not. This never happened on linux, ever, which is my main os for this particular machine since day one and I never turn off the laptop, only reboot it for a kernel update. The Intel one is fairly reliable on Windows, but it did crash a few times (garbled screen).
Battery life on the Intel model is better under linux (around +25%). On the Amd I can't comment, since I rarely use it on windows, and basically never on battery.
At the office I have a 27" 5k screen which I have to use at 200%. Windows is basically always a blurry mess for some reason, although it recognizes the correct resolution. The only way to be sure to have sharp output is by booting it up with the screen attached. Which then goes to hell when the screen shuts off (think going to the toilet). Wayland on Linux (sway / arch) just works and is always sharp.
I also can basically not connect my sony bluetooth headphones when running Windows. They connect instantly with LDAC under linux.
For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.
Super solid, <3 for the KDE team and product.
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.
Is there an easy way to get the Windows XP/Gnome 2 experience out of KDE?
It would be magic if there were a Debian package called "I don't care about my desktop, it takes me months to change the wallpaper from the default."
I do not care about beauty, I only care about stability (i.e. my desktop from 30 years ago.) If I could get WinXP out of XFCE, I would switch to that, but my attempts have been disappointing ergonomically. All of the webcruft and sparkle in Cinnamon is also very offputting, although I've been happy to recommend it to others who don't have the same irritation triggers as me.
There's only one fly in the ointment: Gnome's onscreen keyboard is both terrible and difficult to replace.
It's a very complete package, it has a quick launcher that's good, a good screenshot tool and very very nice window management features.
When combined with libinput gestures, you can get macOS style three finger swipe between desktops. And not just a swap, but a nice swipe animation that pauses when you do on the touchpad.
On a laptop, this is such a big timesaver.
Its bottom bar icon handling is very good, customising is easy, and the settings panel is very clear. Everything is just so polished.
Then there is kde connect as well, it integrates so effertlessly. Kde is truly a software powerhouse, well done.
Having said that, it's a marginal difference. KDE is on my kid's computer and I use that from time to time without imploding in a ball of emotional-intellectual panic.
In all that time, I was quite disappointed to see major distro after major distro (and even Sun Microsystems back in the day) choose GNOME over KDE/Plasma as their default desktops. How could they choose GNOME when KDE/Plasma is/was (in my very subjective opinion) way better? Go figure. Still until today, and with the exception of Steam Desktop, it's disappointing to see that Plasma is not the default/preferred desktop environment in (almost?) all major distros.
So, it's really refreshing to see posts like these. I like when someone finally "gets it" and realizes the advantages and potential Plasma offers.
In case you can't use Plasma, I'd recommend (in no particular order) LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE or XFCe as adequate options. But if you haven't, try Plasma, and customize it to your heart's content. More often than not, you'll end up liking it quite a bit.
It would be hilariously fast nowadays and totally usable, all under like 64mb of RAM :)
After Plasma 6 dropped, I decided to try it, and it quickly became my favorite Linux experience. Coming from GNOME, I was pleasantly surprised that many GNOME extensions I would rely on had equivalent feature functionality built into KDE (things like a Dock, Clipboard Manager, KWin Scripts, Tiling/Fancy Zones, animation configuration). I can pretty much echo everything said by the blog author here.
I still think GNOME is slightly prettier, but KDE is infinitely more usable for me.
netbioserror•1h ago
rtaylorgarlock•1h ago
abhinavk•1h ago
[1]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=433569
bayindirh•1h 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•1h ago
cosmic_cheese•1h 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•57m 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).