We now live in a world where KDE looks nicer, more professional, and more consistent than the latest macOS. I don't know how that happened, and KDE isn't even particularly nice looking, but here we are.
For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.
KDE is, as its name implies, a desktop environment. And it hasn't been "infected" by the "mobile" virus.
I often wondered why desktop UIs became so terrible somewhere in the 2010s and I don't want to attribute it to laziness, greed, etc... People have been lazy and greedy since people existed, there must have been something else. And I think that mobile is the answer.
UI designers are facing a really hard problem, if not impossible. Most apps nowadays have desktop and mobile variants, and you want some consistency, as you don't want users to relearn everything when switching variants. But mobile platforms, with their small touchscreens are completely different from desktop platforms with their large screens, keyboards and mice. So what do you do?
In addition to mobile, you often need to target the browser too, so: native desktop, native mobile, browser desktop, browser mobile. And then you add commercial consideration like cost, brand identity, and the idea that if you didn't change the UI, you didn't change anything. Commercial considerations have always been a thing, but the multiplication of platforms made it worse, prompting for the idea of running everything in a browser, and having the desktop inferface just being the mobile interface with extra stuff.
KDE usability really started improving when the Visual Design Group was launched during the KDE 5 cycle, spearheaded by Jens Reuterberg. There was a real cool atmosphere of designer-developer cooperation which quickly led to very sleek results that persist to this day.
VDG tackled (and tackles) not only design for the desktop itself, but also for KDE applications that had never seen a designer's touch before.
I've been long a KDE user, even through the 4.0 troubles, but also the first to admit that it used to look clunky. Looking at old screenshots is a quick reminder of how far this initiative has taken it.
VDG must be so busy that my #1 feature request for KDE, support for smart copy&paste in Konsole, has been stuck in bikeshedding hell for almost 5 years because the maintainer didn't want to merge an optional feature without the VDG go-ahead :(
I love open source and have been running Linux since 1999, but my experience of contributing to both KDE and GNOME is your PRs never go anywhere unless you're part of the inner cabal of maintainers, otherwise any small bugfix or feature goes into bikeshedding mode, and it's the reason I don't contribute any more.
That said, I run KDE now after two decades of GNOME. It's pretty good and has been looking good for a while now.
Konsole is my least favorite terminal because of all the klutter. Have to remove several buttons, and the context menu with hundreds of options canāt be simplified to my knowledge.
What's up with the massive amount of chrome used for nothing except new tab/copy/paste buttons? Is it really necessary to take up what could be used for 2+ extra lines of terminal output for a labeled Copy button? Compare it to gnome console, or any other terminal really, and you will get far more terminal output for the size of the window, as it should be.
And it's not just Konsole. So many KDE apps have this same problem. Giant labeled buttons taking up space from the actual content, for things you will never use or have well established keyboard shortcuts already.
Major changes aren't even _desirable_ in UI. People kind of emotionally enjoy novelty, however when it actually comes to using a computer consistency is superior to absolute excellence. Figuring out where settings and buttons are just because you ran software updates is a total waste of time on both ends; it wastes the user's time, and was a waste of time to develop. Maybe I'll switch from gnome to KDE this weekend, this looks promising.
Glad to know I'm not alone. As I grow older moving stuff around just to make it prettier doesn't do much except make me angry that 'they' changed things for no reason again.
You are absolutely right on KDE focusing on polish and bug fixes. Back in 2014(?) it was weird, confusing, and never seemed to work right for me. Now, it is my go-to Linux desktop environment.
I looked at some Asahi Linux videos and it always shows KDE and the interface is Windows like (or what I call Windows like). I never liked that and that is single biggest reason I never tried KDE. I know it's Linux and KDE and GNOME can pretty much made to look like each other (i.e their default look and feel). Is it trivial on Asahi Linux or needs a lot of tweaking?
Something like what ElementaryOS would look like - look/feel/UX wise ElementaryOS has been my gold standard sine it released and the last I checked it still felt that way. But since anything other than what Asahi Linux installs and support by default, i.e. Fedora Remix, is neither recommended nor fares well on Mac so I don't think I can use ElementaryOS (which is essentially Ubuntu LTS) really. Even Asahi Linux team recommends KDE.
Also - can one access certain Mac folders in Asahi (e.g. ~/Pictures)? And is it even recommended, if it's possible (Security wise)?
(I have been exploring/searching on Asahi and I am gearing up to use it on my M1 MacBook Pro - will be using/trying Linux desktop after more than a decade)
Well, once installed, Fedora Asahi is just standard Fedora ARM with some drivers and bootloader code. You can do anything you would do with a Fedora.
> (I have been exploring/searching on Asahi and I am gearing up to use it on my M1 MacBook Pro - will be using/trying Linux desktop after more than a decade)
If you are still hesitating, it's actually really easy to try : just run the command on the Asahi website and follow the instructions. The setup will resize your partition automatically and will not touch anything of your macOS install or your data. It's even easier than on PC where you have to boot the installation media and manage the partitionning yourself. IIRC, there isnt even the option to remove your macOS partition at any moment so you can't even lose your data by mistake.
The only prerequisite is having free space on your disk and everything else is automatic.
Also, uninstalling Asahi is as easy as going to macOS Disk Utility App, right click on the asahi partition, delete, and resize the macOS partition. After those three clicks, your Mac is now in the same state than before installing Asahi.
Customize KDE is easy:
- panels could be moved in several clicks
- add / remove widgets also could be done by mouse (and there are additional widgets that could be downloaded)
- themes and animations and configured in settings
Kinda. Itās more like an alternate universe GNOME that embraced OS X 10.9 Mavericks style UI design. Itās gorgeous and I wish more desktop environments would take cues from it but itās only Mac-like superficially.
I agree. ElementaryOS was showing similar promise but their latest major release was a step backwards, tripping over new whistles and bells instead of maintaining rock solid stability with their polished UI.
These people should be forced to use the hair-covered-gum-on-the-floor style UI experience that Windows has become and then perhaps they get to have an opinion.
I find KDE still worse than both Windows 11 and macOS. Sorry, but the UI is just such a mash of margins, borders and icons that it looks downright janky in a way that even Win11 doesn't.
Which parts of Windows 11? Because there are still double digit different context menus in there, on recently developed built-in applications (introduced in 8 onwards). KDE is 1000x more consistent than that and has been that way for a long time now.
It still has weirdly inconsistent margins in places but compared to the disaster that is the jumble of different UIs in Windows that's nothing.
macOS before Tahoe, sure, but now? Have you looked at the screenshots where people layered different fullscreen apps on top of each other and the rounded corners look like a stack of cards because they're all different? It's a complete disaster.
You could power all those fancy new AI datacenters with Steve's spinning skeleton.
Why are there 2 context menus, multiple places to change settings, and a file explorer that is somehow a worse experience to use than one they had in XP?
All the while they develop and push a product that screenshots what you are doing so that AI can "assist" you. Not to mention pushing ads and news and free to play games.
Maybe the margins or icons aren't what you'd prefer, but you're being intellectually dishonest pretending that there is any uniformity in their product let alone even a single iota of care or interest in the experience the user has with their product.
Um, Windows 11 still hasnāt moved all the necessary utilities and administrative panels over to the windowing toolkit Microsoft introduced in 2012, and MacOS 26(??) isā¦ hideous.
I canāt stand those smug one-liners ā they flatten reality instead of reflecting it.
Reality is... often-times the best things are often unused. And if these things were hypothetically used... there'd be significantly less complaints than the status quo.
KDE the desktop is consistent. The problem is the applications aren't. It's completely possible to run a GNOME desktop without a single QT app, it's near impossible to use KDE without any GTK apps. And there are so, so many great libadwaita apps coming out these days. So on KDE you still end up with an inconsistent mash up of toolkits and styles.
I feel like naming everything with a āKā, like how some families name all their kids with names that start with the same letter, is the real genius of KDE. Who doesnāt like those kinds of families.
Add me to the list of people happy with KDE. I tried every desktop environment under the sun over the past fifteen years. I even wrote off KDE foolishly many years ago simply because I thought it looked gaudy.
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. (EDIT: Not to mention that so many of my GNOME extensions would break in between upgrades, or crash regularly, meanwhile KDE has been rock solid for me these past 9 months).
I still think GNOME is slightly prettier, but KDE is infinitely more usable for me.
This is exactly also my story. Was a long term XFCE user (this was long before lxde became popular) because Gnome/KDE felt too heavy for my old computers. These days, KDE still has the silly loader window (no other DM has it) but oh boy the features you get once it is running are outstanding.
This is not only plasma, but all the applications are top-notch quality. Just to name a few: Krita, Kate, the office suite.
Just switched over from gnome. Overall, I'm happy.
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.
KDE won me over for the simple fact that it's highly configurable, and that configuration is all driven out of one UI tool. Gnome drove me nuts with molding it into the shape I wanted.
> Can do part of it in tweaks, which is a separate configuration app, but then some of it requires extensions.
I'm not sure why you think requiring extensions is a bad idea. I have tried out at least 20 GNOME extensions (and kept maybe a third), 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.
Certainly it would be a more refined experience if the core developers took care of every single possible customization users could want under the sun, but at some point it's more effective to outsource that to other developers. Either that or you end up with Apple-style highly uncustomizable experience designed by a UX designer, which is not what I want.
Extensibility can be nice, but the experience has a lot of friction. If you want something that isn't bog standard, you need to get or make an extension.
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 problem is that the extension experience can be really bad. There is no extension API; instead Extensions have (almost) full access to GNOME Shell's code.
This makes them incredibly powerful and flexible... but also fragile. Extensions can crash GNOME Shell/mutter. On Wayland that means your entire session goes down with GNOME Shell. Extensions can interfere with each other, and if you are an extension developer, you may need to update (or at least check) your extension every 6 months (GNOMEs release cycle).
Extension lives in the same memory space as the shell, so itās up to the developer to restrict themselves to not touch internal API. Also, GNOME give you plenty of warning in the changelog (and the changes are usually small).
Supporting extensions is great, but it needs to be done properly. GNOME doesnāt provide a proper extension API which forces devs to muck with GNOME internals, which makes extensions much more flakey than they need to be and causes them to break every other GNOME release.
The last time I used Gnome as my primary desktop (that was still in the Gnome 3 days) extensions broke at every update. I was still using Arch Linux at the time, so it was annoying because every ~6 months a few of my extensions would be broken for 1~2 weeks.
AFAIK Gnome extensions still doesn't have a stable API, so this issue is still present today.
I've used gnome for 7 years in Fedora. Often certain extensions stopped working betweenv after Fedora big upgrades (i.e. from 32 to 33). The JavaScript engine that runs extensions had many memory leaks bugs so I had to kill the gnome-shell process on a TTY session.
After 7 years I was fed up and switched to KDE and never looked back
Yes, changing distros to change DEs is simply nonsensical behavior. If one's distro doesn't support multiple DEs then it's probably time to reconsider if taking reddit's advice on the ArchLinux-spin of the quarter is actually a good idea.
I see these posts a lot, but this really does not match my experience. I find I run into many more bugs in kde than in gnome or other desktop environments. This bug made kde absolutely unusable for me: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=365255
(I think this bug is still present in X11, but I've moved on to Wayland.)
The other bug I run into constantly is that "expose" sometimes makes all the windows invisible. The only fix is logging out and logging in again. I've seen this across a number of different distros. Gnome is mostly boring and just works for me.
Haven't been a Linux daily driver in years, but I love that KDE continues to have such an impact.
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!
I just find it ugly vs Gnome or Mac. Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors. Admittedly, this was maybe 5 years ago. Has that improved?
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. Itās just about perfect for me.
> Admittedly, this was maybe 5 years ago. Has that improved?
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.
BTW, not sure if you were involved with this at all but I really appreciate all the work that's gone into making the Kirigami/Qt Quick KDE programs feel less janky. It's still not perfect (don't know if it ever will be unless Qt releases their AoT QML compiler as open source) but it's gotten MUCH better since the early KDE 6 releases.
The screenshot in the OP article show already quite a few issues. It takes a trained eye to be able to articulate a lot of the issues. I feel like Gmome is designed by professional designers but KDE mostly by developers. I do share the sentiment that Gnome is often too rigid, but the design is coherent, consistent and aesthetically well articulated. I use Hyprland with mostly Gnome apps (have considered Niri too!)
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.
Honestly, I'm not too fond of the screenshots in the OP's article either. I'd say it looks all fairly slapdash and too busy.
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.
KDE Plasma 6 looks absolutely gorgeous on my Kubuntu laptop with highdpi OLED display, and that's coming from a mainly-Mac-user :)
(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)
I really dislike how people present KDE and Gnome as being "clones" of Windows and MacOS. GNOME specially is so distinct (be it for good and bad reasons) that it deserves to be considered it's own thing. I can't stand MacOS with all it's Macosisms that are ingrained since it's Macintosh days. GNOME being grown for PC usages has none of these issues. Window management is also a breeze and easy to pickup rather than a byzantine mess. The only thing they really share is a nice, sparse look & feel.
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.
Gnome has been the best looking desktop for about 5 years now, with OS X in second place. KDE and Windows (after 7) are so far below that they're a category of their own.
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.
GNOME is pretty, but itās not great when it comes to progressive disclosure ā what you see is what you get; thereās no depth in which power user features can be found.
macOS is nearly the opposite in this regard. I wouldnāt mind giving it a facelift but doing it GNOME style would mean it losing much of what has kept many users on it.
Do you have any examples where power features aren't accessible? The OP used a wifi applet as an example of exposing information. I'm not sure if this isn't as common as I think it is - but what's wrong with typing `ip` into a terminal (that's always open anyway)? It's desktop agnostic, works even without a desktop. And then there's no need for an entire applet dedicated just to wifi for the rare occasion you need to lookup your MAC address.
One small example is how holding down Option/Alt modifies behavior in various ways throughout macOS.
Often it functions as a ādo this for everythingā modifier. So for example, option-clicking the minimize traffic light minimizes all windows from the application the window belongs to, and option-clicking a disclosure triangle in a nested list expands or contracts all child nodes.
Thereās tons of little things like that which might sound silly but become significant time and sanity savers after making a habit of using them.
The way for power using gnome is through extensions. But once you got used to the gnome philosophy, you find that you donāt have to fiddle with the UI that much.
They already seem to vaguely echo gnome 3 look in macos. Huge titlebars with buttons, sidebar layouts in apps, transparent title bar, control center, etc., there's just a bunch of things that make you go 'huh'.
I honestly think so, but I'm not surprised some losers here at HN down voted my comment.
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.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted as this is a valid opinion to have. IMO my list is MacOS Sonoma, Windows 7, Gnome 30+. While I like the ideas behind KDE, XFCE and the like, they are terribly ugly by today's standards.
I would recommend checking out Cosmic by System76. It's getting a beta very soon but I've been using the alpha and straight their git main for months now and it's very stable.
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.
I'm actually super excited about this project. Out of curiosity, does the compositor they use have HDR support? It's one of the features I miss on Linux desktops.
No it has not. Despite the praises it is getting here it still looks like the programmer art, which fits with a certain crowd, but if you are (like me) into the Gnome/Mac type of look - its still gives Windows XP vibes.
Me too. I have used it in KDE 4 times when I was in high school, but it still seems to miss the design things. It is great for customization and functionality, but the design itself still seems off. This just is not looking good [0] and it is presented as a showcase here.
Ubuntu's Gnome is ugly imo, but stock Gnome on Arch is incredibly nice. Of course I really only use a terminal and a browser but still, Gnome + Ghosty + Firefox on Arch is just great.
What's special about niri? Asking as a happy user of i3 for... I can't remember how long. It's one of the few pieces of software I don't have to think about, it just gets out of my way.
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.
It's a scrolling window manager, so almost a completely different paradigm (that I find superior) to normal tiling WMs. Ironically the entire scrolling WM craze started with the PaperWM Gnome extension. I still use it, it's great.
i3 is really hard to move on from. Everything is the app and configuration you want since it doesn't have traditional "desktop" suite of apps, so by design it is literally built for your exact wants and needs. Same goes for fluxbox/openbox setups imo
Here is my Debian 12 / KDE setup. With the "Inter" font, macOS icons (whitesur) and a little theming (klassy) I quite like it. Running this on a 5K Apple display and everything is crisp.
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.
>I just find it ugly vs Gnome or Mac. Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors.
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.
That kind of thing is very difficult for visually oriented folks to filter out. Iām in that crowd. No matter how many times I see a poorly laid out dialog, it remains almost as abrasive as the first time I saw it. It can become a major distraction, especially as someone whoās capable of writing code.
I think there's some truth to this (utility is overall more important), but also some falsehood (looks matter too). Aesthetics affect your enthusiasm and therefore your productivity. This is why, for example, most people would rather work in a room with large glass windows overlooking a lake than in a room with a small window overlooking a factory even if they are functionally the same.
I agree with that. I really do not care about the inconsistencies - I did not even notice them until other people pointed them out. There are themes that look nice to me.
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.
Poor design can and does impact usability for a lot of users. If you care about the utility, you should care about e.g. wasted screen space with extraneous padding.
>you should care about e.g. wasted screen space with extraneous padding.
Where KDE is better than Gnome whose UI looks like its was designed for tablet use or 4K+ displays. So yeah, on that front I do care, which is why I prefer KDE.
I tend to prefer gnome's simplicity and its desktop metaphor, though I'm a niri guy now. But KDE is excellent. It's fast, pretty, customizable, and enjoyable to use. My gripe with it is that the sheer number of options and their constant presence in the UI does not play nicely with my gently spectrum brain. It's not even that I can't resist the urge to fiddle--I can, no problem--but that the presence of all the options causes anxiety. (There are also a few, to my eye, inelegant spacing quirks, but nothing I can't ignore.)
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.
I have to say "the computer UI you can use without imploding in a ball of emotional-intellectual panic" is probably the best front of the box quote I've run across in a while ;-)
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.
KDE is truly incredible these days. I'm running Plasma 6 + Karousel[1] for scrolling window management and some custom kwin scripts for incredible maximalist experience. It does everything and does it beautifully https://i.postimg.cc/nznZwg44/Screenshot-20250918-213910.png
Iāve been using KDE as my personal daily driver for a few years now. At work I have to use MacOS, and it feels like a serious downgrade. Just about everything is easier and more intuitive on KDE. Itās the single best desktop Iāve ever used.
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 thatās easy enough on all of them.
The window management and dolphin for file management for one. KDE let's you easily pin windows on top, show on all desktops etc .. Dolphin gives you a nice multi tab, split pane file manager along with a terminal that follows you along.
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
One thing I missed the most from KDE was changing the volume by mouse wheel on the sound volume icon in tray. And in general mouse wheel interactions on tray.
On windows you have to click the icon before you can interact with it. IIRC on Mac too.
KDE has a lot of really nice little things, like how you can mute specific apps with a single click just like muting browser tabs.
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.
If you use desktop environments more to their capacity, you'll start to appreciate more advanced features. Such as how apps can integrate with each other, etc.
Sure! One example is copy-paste, which doesn't always work as expected in Linux. Another is things in OS X, such as deep Spotlight integration with apps, and a unified scripting and automation language between apps.
I have been using kde for 15+ years, except 4.0, which was painful, everything has been mostly a smooth experience.
> 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.
At least on the version currently on Debian, systemsettings has a "primary" radio on the screen configuration panel that let you change it to whatever monitor you want, on whatever order you want.
Yes, but I assumed that disabling the TV would set the monitor as the primary desktop and added the taskbar to it, but it didn't. Now I may have done something wrong, but I was just reporting my experience.
If unplugging the display cable works though. It's most likely the TV pretending to be still on.
I have a LG TV C1 that behaves like that. While my computer monitors do not have this issue.
The TV even has a dual personality. It doesn't appear to report the same informations via EBID when powered off vs powered on.
I also have a MS Windows 10 connected to this same TV, and if I make the mistake of powering up or wake from sleep Windows before turning on the TV, then the NVIDIA GPU setup some broken resolution. And only a reboot fixes it.
So my guess is it's the TV presenting itself with different EBID when off vs powered on. And also somehow presenting itself as active on the HDMI line no matter if off or on. Changing the TV inputs also doesn't tell KDE that the display was turned off.
I haven't debugged any of it. These are just my observations.
It remembers the screens to try to keep your settings if you disconnect and reconnect external screens, but in this case that was not very helpful
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
I agree. Significatly better than Gnome. I don't know why so many distros use Gnome by default. The only thing I can think is that it looks a bit nicer. They definitely have better artists.
KDE has a ton of bugs that I don't like, but it's the DE that I always choose when using desktop Linux because it treats you like an adult. The ability to customize it is unparalleled unless you're building your own DE with a tiling window manager or something.
One killer feature is KDE Connect. Saves me from having to grab my phone when I need to copy an SMS OTP code. It's similar to Phone Link on Windows, minus the privacy violations.
KDE is not just more configurable, they pack incredible innovation, like KDE Connect. Not to mention their semantic desktop ideas, which have been watered down post Nepomuk, nearly 20 years later still ahead of its time. It's the best of open source and user choice to have this international and often quite different source of new ideas and abilities.
XFCE or LXDE anyone? Honest question - If you use XFCE or LXDE or similar minimalistic DEs, are you happy with the choice? or do you feel somethings are missing that are available in KDE, MATE and the likes?
XFCE is fine. I used to use it and there is a lot to like.
It lacks tiling, and I use some KDE apps very heavily (Kate, Dolphin) so KDE integrates a bit better.
I have thought of giving XFCE another go and I do not think there is anything critical I would miss if I had a tiling window manager (which would have some advantages over KDE's tiling, I think), but I have KDE configured in a way that works for me so not very motivated to do it.
I've been a consistent XFCE user for over a decade. I think of it the same way I think of my desk - I'm not proclaiming its the best in the world, all I can tell you is that its pretty stable, clean and utilitarian, and I'm consistently productive on top of it.
I'm concerned about the XFCE team's approach to Wayland, which is to say they are not making any commitments to make a stable release for it. I've already had to take my new Debian install back to X11 to get XFCE working. I know that Wayland is contentious and not developed with clear communication with many DE teams, but the drift here is concerning, and I am considering trying to find something XFCE-like with full Wayland support.
Is XFCE minimalistic? It feels to me like it's just a modern continuation of the desktops we had in the 90s and early 2000s. Instead of adding in a bunch of extra stuff and moving things around to keep people busy, they're just quietly making it a little better with every release.
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.
Back when the lightweight desktops were popping up, KDE was considered pretty memory heavy. Thing is, KDE hasn't really kept up with growing RAM sizes as well as Windows has. ;-) So unless you're trying to run a Linux desktop on a potato, I'd say KDE should now be considered pretty lightweight.
We also did a lot of intentional action to get the resource usage down in the Plasma 5 generation and timeframe.
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).
Even back in the day KDE pointed out that in real world use they were not as memory heavy because everything depended on the same toolkits that were shared. Meaning your startup memory use was higher, but once you launched the applications/tools you were going to use KDE used less. (this of course depended on which tools you ran, KDE assumed all KDE tools, run a non-kde application and it doesn't work)
I've used kde for years, but earlier this year I decided to try xfce.
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.
I've used XFCE as my main DE for around 10 years, (I switched to MacOs a year ago), I think mostly depends on your workflow, for me the best thing was that it gets out your way, you have a simple menu to select apps, a taskbar, and that's about it. I tested Gnome and KDE a few times over the years and for me they are more bloated than what I needed for my workflow, but I agree they feel more cohesive and the aesthetics are nicer.
Desktop Environments always feel a bit clunky to me. A Window Manager like i3 or something is easier.
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 wouldnāt think of it as missing out on anything. You just become familiar with the ecosystem of mostly terminal utilities.
I've been using XFCE for the better part of two decades now (I still run into people upset about the changes XFCE made in 2003, i.e. 4.0), and I am perfectly satisfied. Though as the saying goes: what I don't know I don't know; so I may be missing out on a better experience, but at least I am content enough that I don't bother seeking it out.
Though, my monitors are also from 2010, so a lot of the visual problems people have with XFCE, I don't.
Me and probably a couple of other cave dwellers use Mate (someone must be, because it keeps getting maintained). It has a the Win 9x-era aesthetics and simplicity that I've not found anywhere else.
I've used XFCE for a 2011 laptop, it was about as fast as LXDE but better polished. Windows was unusable there, and XFCE made the computer feel brand new. Only the modern websites that would still cause slowness, but the OS was great.
pixelation in fonts, apps sometimes just not working, input latency, unpleasant to look at, brightness controls, notifications, could probably write out an entire 2500 word essay.
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.
Not just the Plasma desktop, there is a lot of KDE software that works well even outside of the KDE desktop, and some of it is really excellent. I find Kate to be a criminally underrated editor for example. It never comes up in VSCode vs vim/... discussions, but I think it's an excellent VSCode replacement if you're looking for something more familiar. Currently my favorite editor hands down.
Author here. I was surprised that Kate supports LSP now. I will not stop using my neovim setup but I definitely found it good for quickly editing small amounts of text.
I've recently switched to a Windows 95-themed LXQT desktop (Chicago95) and have been having a pretty good experience. KDE is cool too. I used GNOME3 for years but tbh it's sorta just ok. Functional, polished, and slow.
FWIW, the few non-techie people in my life that I care enough to administer their notebooks and provide support all run KDE on Debian happily.
While I had some reservations about acceptance when I made the switch from Windows 7, it turned out that it was one of my better choices of my life, and resulted in much less work for me compared to what Windows caused for me previously. And GNOME just did not work out well for most of these people and the workflows they are used to.
KDE is going to take over the world. It already took over the browser world (yay konqueror), with the SteamDeck leading the way it's going to take over the consumer peripheral world as well.
KDE has been phenomenal since the days of KDE 3.5.x. I wish that I could use it more than I'm able to (limited selection of desktop environments at work etc.). The KDE 4.0 release has given the project an unfortunate lasting bad reputation that stuck around despite the fact that it was really just a single bad release that got fixed very quickly.
Author here. The last time I used KDE was during the 4.x days. I remember trying multiple versions, from the earlier 4.0/4.2 days until something like 4.14. Even so, I kept getting crashes and instability.
I remember the one that finally made me stop using KDE altogether and migrate to Gnome 3 at the time was one crash that I would get frequently with Dolphin while randomly browsing fils (that would stop once I removed all Dolphin configuration files but go back after a few weeks).
I haven't ever really used KDE, and I'm quite sure that it's still not my desktop, but as someone who was aware of the trouble around 4.0, the view I had of the project was that those problems were long gone, and that most people using it today were pretty happy with it.
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.)
> The KDE 4.0 release has given the project an unfortunate lasting bad reputation...
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.
We all (not just KDE) learned that users don't read those. Worse, distro maintainers either don't read them or in their "we are on the latest" push will ignore them. KDE was pushed out to a lot of people who shouldn't have got it.
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.
> Worse, distro maintainers either don't read them or in their "we are on the latest" push will ignore them
Oh, this is so true. Ubuntu adopted Pulse Audio long before anyone (including Poettering) considered it stable. IIRC the readme even said something like "The sound system that breaks your audio"
I probably shouldn't complain though, since as a non-Ubuntu user, I get the benefits of all the Ubuntu users beta testing software for me.
> KDE was pushed out to a lot of people who shouldn't have got it.
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.
This is one of the places I have found the relevant note [0].
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.
Also, IIRC, KDE developers were openly saying that releases from 4.0 to 4.2 will be buggy, and things will stabilize in 4.2 and beyond.
I returned to Linux when Microsoft started aggressively pushing Windows 11 and phasing out 10.
I admit I previously had only a vague idea about KDE's existence - mostly through my know-it-all friend claiming that the Windows Vista/7 look was inspired by it.
Anyway, I installed it as GNOME is not to my taste and indeed it was the Windows experience without the Windows issues, save for some weirdness like e.g. Open In Terminal taking its sweet time to actually open.
Initially I was missing HDR, but Plasma 6 supports it and both Chromium and Firefox (though the latter in developer edition only and behind a flag at that) appear to have shipped their implementations, though I haven't managed to get it to work yet - the important part is that there's no indefinite delivery timeline any more.
I've had Asahi installed on my M1 since I bought it, but only just switched to it as my main development workhorse (upgrading to Asahi Fedora remix 42).
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.
KDE has always been like this since KDE 4 they have a consistent app UI so if you just install from the hundreds of KDE based apps you will feel like it was a hand crafted OS. KDE is more consistent than Windows is these days. On Windows you see several decades of UI in core system components.
I hadn't really kept up with the development of KDE until I got a Steam Deck and booted into desktop mode. Once there, I was quite surprised to find a really performant, attractive, easy-to-use desktop environment. My previous KDE experience was probably a decade prior to that and I didn't really enjoy it that much, so it was a refreshing experience.
Now it is definitely my preferred Linux desktop environment as well.
I've used Linux laptops for work since 2013. I finally switched to Linux on the desktop earlier this year, after getting a laptop and experiencing Windows 11.
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.
> The laptop isn't running Linux yet, I'm not confident the battery lifetime story is great.
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.
As an outsider, it is impressive to see the incremental, "chipping away at problems piecemeal" approach KDE has been taking since their Plasma release a decade ago. Slow, steady and intentional.
To think that almost all of this is volunteer work makes it so much more heartwarming.
Love KDE. Can others share their experience of using the same desktop environment across distributions? Is there a difference? I have only used KDE on Fedora and it's great but getting the itch to try out something new. Void Linux maybe.
I run KDE on Void - both on my workstation and my ARM laptop. It runs perfectly on both. The only thing I've noticed that you'll 'lose' on Void is the 'Applications View' in System Monitor; that's only because it relies on systemd functionality that Void doesn't have because of runit.
I've tried KDE in Debian and NixOS, and the experience is exactly the same. In many ways the choice of distro is much less impactful than the choice of desktop environment.
I would have been a very satisfied Aeon user had it not been for battling gnome. If you look at my comment history, I have described the issues I have had. After about 7 months I used KDE on a friend's computer and switched the same day.
I think the best thing is that I don't have to install anything to make it work like I want, and as such there are no incompatible plugins that leaves me with a broken desktop functionality for a week or two every time there is a new release.
That is an annoyance, but the most annoying things are all the small things that just don't work. Focus issues. Multiple screen issues. Date format issues.
I haven't run into many issues with KDE, and I really like some of the "built-in" KDE apps. For instance, KDE Connect is amazing, despite some bugs, it usually works very well. I also use KWrite and Konsole daily.
I've been a happy KDE user for years, but I recently discovered that Gnome is surprisingly good on a tablet. KDE is usable, but feels about as touch-native as Windows does. Gnome is easily as good a tablet experience as an iPad.
There's only one fly in the ointment: Gnome's onscreen keyboard is both terrible and difficult to replace.
GNOME on touchscreens is in a weird place -- everything it needs to be perfect is right there. But there are a handful of pain points and weird bugs that make me think none of the developers are actually using it on a touch device. The OSK is the worst offender.
I still prefer it over KDE on my 2-in-1/convertible laptop, though. Despite the jank it also irons out a lot of the pain points that more traditional desktops have with touch, and is clearly made with it in mind, even when the execution is iffy.
Maybe of interest: One of our recently-elected community-wide goals is to improve the Input story, and we started a new on-screen keyboard project called Plasma Keyboard in context of that. It's a bit experimental and a very early effort, but maybe something promising for you to track in some way.
Much better than the Gnome OSK despite signs that it's early (I got some transparent flickering over the panel).
I'd like it to have more punctuation and special characters available as long presses on letters, and for it to have a terminal mode with arrows, tab, ctrl, etc....
KDE has been my preferred desktop environment since I started playing with linux sometime in the KDE 3 days.
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)
After reading your reply, I plugged the exact question of my text into an LLM and it answered my question perfectly. Your answer was in the context of commercial support which wasn't in the question or answer.
Well they're also famous for having an LTS version of Ubuntu as well (and coined the term), which I assumed you probably know with an LTS interest. But sorry I couldn't satisfy you!
No questions, just some rough edges to report; infinite clipboard history would be nice, notifications search/sorting would be nice, notifications panel gets slow with hundreds of notifications (from IRC bots) when dragging the scrollbar, notifications panel icons could be removable or made smaller or just have one per app.
This will be a purely personal answer, as we don't really maintain any official list of favorites.
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.
Thank you. After hearing about KDE Linux here on HN I'm now very interested in the project and its future.
Personally I've had an issue with KDE on Fedora several years ago, possibly due unstable Wayland, but I don't know real reason. Something in the graphic stack failed. So that was a reason for me asking about it.
KDE Neon was originally founded by devs who worked on Kubuntu previously, and some of that team has now moved on to KDE Linux.
The company stuff in the background doesn't really matter.
The team working on KDE Linux are motivated by addressing some structural challenges that always plagued KDE Neon from the concept of trying to graft more recent SW on top of the Ubuntu LTS base, plus some lessons learned from the SteamOS project's way of handling updates, and fully utilizing more recent Linux/systemd features.
It's sufficiently different that sticking with the Neon brand and swapping it out for that userbase would have been pretty disruptive, so they felt it was better to go with a distinct identity.
Honestly, this one I'm not sure about as I haven't worked on the connectivity UIs myself. I know we have backends to NetworkManager and ConnMan, and generally I would assume we pass through errors they generate and perhaps try to augment them, but I'm not personally aware of the SOTA on WiFi error reporting and how we stack up.
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.
I really like KDE and use it as my daily driver, but I'm really peeved that the "close" button isn't at the very top right of a maximised window. Instead, I have to hit the top right (extremely easy) and then go a bit down and to the left to actually hit the button. For all its crap, Windows really got that right since 95.
Are you using a non-default theme or are you using custom KWin scripts (e.g. to enable "window gaps")? Both my laptop & desktop run near-default KDE and moving the mouse to the top-right + clicking always closes the maximized window.
I've used dwm forever, switched to kde and realized iād been maintaining my desktop more than using it. Drivers worked, screens behaved, no audio/mic hickups.
I was super happy with KDE, until I found that i3 has a better paradigm for what I want. I tried Gnome on Fedora for a while now on my laptop; i don't mind it but KDE beats it in usability.
During my college days (2000~2004) KDE (I think it was Fedora/RH 8) was hands down my favourite desktop. After that when I joined the corporate world, I lost touch with Linux. Few years ago (thanks to a ton of dark patterns in Windows), I moved back to Linux. This time I chose Linux Mint with Cinnamon / XFCE. When Linux Mint (officially) starts supporting KDE, I would love to try it again. Until then I am really rooting for YOU KDE developers, I have really fond memory of your tools (especially Konqueror browser/file manager it was way ahead of its times then!)
I realized I really like tiling better than floating windows and I like to manage them with keyboard mainly. Hyprland has been very good for that. Everything fits neatly, I can switch desktops and I don't have to move windows around
I have been a KDE user since KDE 1.x in Red Hat Linux 6.2, back in 2000, and used KDE almost exclusively for my Linux desktop since KDE 2.2. Right now using Plasma 6.4.5.
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.
I use KDE but I setup my desktop with two panelsā¦the default launcher panel on the bottom and I add an extra panel atop with the clock and icons for applications I use the most.
Ubuntu and PopOS are linux distributions, KDE is a desktop environment that you can find/install in lots of distributions, such as kubuntu for example.
Iāve been afraid to switch from GNOME to KDE because of what Iāve heard about instability on Wayland as well as Qt being more unstable than GTK.
Are these concerns overstated? Should I bite the bullet and switch?
Iām on Debian but considering switching to Fedora.
Author here: using KDE6 with Wayland. Didn't note any instability, and it was the only desktop environment that I saw to handle HiDPI for X11 applications (except for Hyrpland, but this was clearly using a hack).
KDE is more stable than GNOME, because gnome-shell kills all apps when it dies due to GPU driver bugs or whatever. Qt/KDE has some more crash resilience going on. Not as good as Arcan, but I've never had my session go away since recent KDE6 versions.
Just incidental (KDE is indeed great), but in case anyone is wondering, you can see similar wifi information on macOS by holding option while clicking the icon in the menu bar.
Author here: yes, I knew about this, but the fact that I don't remember exactly which key I need to hold shows why I hate this approach from macOS where "advanced" features are hidden behind shortcuts.
Funny thing is, I showed KDE to a Windows user a few months ago. She loved it, she stuck with windows for now due to "change and all".
But I am sure I could move her over to Linux once Windows does something real bad to her. She is no the fence now, but I do nor what to end up as permanent tech-support :)
FWKW, if I am ever forced into Wayland, right now I would use KDE.
I got Finals working on an i3 nvidia system basically by doing nothing more than installing Steam and then installing The Finals and playing through proton. What issues did you run into?
According to the game's Steam store page, it uses Easy Anti-Cheat, which generally does not work in Proton. Pretty common problem for people who want to play modern online games. I'm surprised you say it works for you.
I like KDE, but every time I use it as a daily driver, I again run into all of those little issues that make it frustrating over time. Little breakages, weird Qt dependency hell, the works. I came to Mint because Cinnamon really has been built with being bomb-proof as the highest priority. The details are sweated, and the feature set is lean, so they can really focus on quality.
Maybe it's because I'm such a latecomer, but I've truly enjoyed using KDE on a mostly-daily basis over the last ~9mo. I haven't extended it or really stretched (e.g. with multi-monitor setup), but I also haven't had to diag any issues or fix anything. Just left it vanilla and did other things.
KDE is a complicated piece of software and packaging it is hard sometimes, but I'm using KDE on Debian since Debian 4, and the team handled all process phenomenally.
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.
Some might say it feels dated, but for me Cinnamon gives more of an impression that the whole thing has been thought through. It has a better grip on various aspects of design like its use of whitespace, control alignment, and typography too.
Donāt get me wrong, KDE is a nice desktop in many ways, but it would benefit considerably from attention of a professional UI designer.
I can turn off other features and work around them but the most annoying yet harmless is the flicker when you switch to an inactive app. The title bar and the window contents change their color at different frames. It requires ditching Breeze and using other theme engines/decorations altogether.
I currently use niri but Plasma has always been my go-to/backup DE. I always have it installed in case someone else has to use my PC.
Last time I experimented with Linux desktop (maybe two years ago?) I had one silly annoyance with KDE on Fedora. I was running this on a laptop with a regular track pad. I was surprised to find out that tap to click was not enabled by default, I had to click the physical button to mimic a mouse click. Not a big deal I thought - I logged in, went to settings, and found a configuration to enable the behavior I wanted - great. However, this behavior was only enabled for my user. Every time I wanted to log in, the login screen would use the default behavior in KDE, since my user preferences weren't applied until I actually logged in, of course.
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).
I feel the same and the more I use the integrated apps the more I see the bad margins, thin fonts and general ux quirks. It's compact and the information density is high but it has so much noise that it just feels uncomfortable to use. I have the opposite problem with gnome. Just give me a modern version of the win2k gui or fluxbox. sic
I've been feeling guilty for not switching to KDE for years now, because I hate fiddling with desktops. I like the defaults to be boring, and basically to be Windows XP. KDE always struck me as annoying, but 1) MATE is bad and buggy, Caja most of all; and 2) as a Redhat and a Gnome hater, I really have no right to still be using it.
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.
Author here: yes, I know about this, but the reason I don't remember the exactly button to press and I always alternate between then until I get what I want is why I hate this approach from macOS.
I admit that one week is not enough to see possible issues like reported by @netbiosterror in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45289071), but it is enough to enjoy the desktop experience and everything it offers.
Author here: to be clear, I am using KDE back and forth since I bought a Steam Deck 3 years ago, and before that I used KDE daily during the 4.x days (so I am familiar with KDE bugs actually).
I am using it in my main machine now for almost 2 weeks, and this is the period of time that this blog post refers too.
We now live in a world where KDE looks nicer, more professional, and more consistent than the latest macOS. I don't know how that happened, and KDE isn't even particularly nice looking, but here we are.
For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.
KDE is, as its name implies, a desktop environment. And it hasn't been "infected" by the "mobile" virus.
I often wondered why desktop UIs became so terrible somewhere in the 2010s and I don't want to attribute it to laziness, greed, etc... People have been lazy and greedy since people existed, there must have been something else. And I think that mobile is the answer.
UI designers are facing a really hard problem, if not impossible. Most apps nowadays have desktop and mobile variants, and you want some consistency, as you don't want users to relearn everything when switching variants. But mobile platforms, with their small touchscreens are completely different from desktop platforms with their large screens, keyboards and mice. So what do you do?
In addition to mobile, you often need to target the browser too, so: native desktop, native mobile, browser desktop, browser mobile. And then you add commercial consideration like cost, brand identity, and the idea that if you didn't change the UI, you didn't change anything. Commercial considerations have always been a thing, but the multiplication of platforms made it worse, prompting for the idea of running everything in a browser, and having the desktop inferface just being the mobile interface with extra stuff.
KDE usability really started improving when the Visual Design Group was launched during the KDE 5 cycle, spearheaded by Jens Reuterberg. There was a real cool atmosphere of designer-developer cooperation which quickly led to very sleek results that persist to this day.
VDG tackled (and tackles) not only design for the desktop itself, but also for KDE applications that had never seen a designer's touch before.
I've been long a KDE user, even through the 4.0 troubles, but also the first to admit that it used to look clunky. Looking at old screenshots is a quick reminder of how far this initiative has taken it.
VDG must be so busy that my #1 feature request for KDE, support for smart copy&paste in Konsole, has been stuck in bikeshedding hell for almost 5 years because the maintainer didn't want to merge an optional feature without the VDG go-ahead :(
I love open source and have been running Linux since 1999, but my experience of contributing to both KDE and GNOME is your PRs never go anywhere unless you're part of the inner cabal of maintainers, otherwise any small bugfix or feature goes into bikeshedding mode, and it's the reason I don't contribute any more.
That said, I run KDE now after two decades of GNOME. It's pretty good and has been looking good for a while now.
Konsole is my least favorite terminal because of all the klutter. Have to remove several buttons, and the context menu with hundreds of options canāt be simplified to my knowledge.
This 100%. Just look at the screenshot on the KDE page for Konsole: https://apps.kde.org/konsole/
What's up with the massive amount of chrome used for nothing except new tab/copy/paste buttons? Is it really necessary to take up what could be used for 2+ extra lines of terminal output for a labeled Copy button? Compare it to gnome console, or any other terminal really, and you will get far more terminal output for the size of the window, as it should be.
And it's not just Konsole. So many KDE apps have this same problem. Giant labeled buttons taking up space from the actual content, for things you will never use or have well established keyboard shortcuts already.
Is that why they don't have alt selection?
Major changes aren't even _desirable_ in UI. People kind of emotionally enjoy novelty, however when it actually comes to using a computer consistency is superior to absolute excellence. Figuring out where settings and buttons are just because you ran software updates is a total waste of time on both ends; it wastes the user's time, and was a waste of time to develop. Maybe I'll switch from gnome to KDE this weekend, this looks promising.
Glad to know I'm not alone. As I grow older moving stuff around just to make it prettier doesn't do much except make me angry that 'they' changed things for no reason again.
It's solid, things are where you expect, beginners can use it with very little guidance, and experts can turn off whatever they don't want or need.
Super solid, <3 for the KDE team and product.
You are absolutely right on KDE focusing on polish and bug fixes. Back in 2014(?) it was weird, confusing, and never seemed to work right for me. Now, it is my go-to Linux desktop environment.
To folks using Asahi Linux:
I looked at some Asahi Linux videos and it always shows KDE and the interface is Windows like (or what I call Windows like). I never liked that and that is single biggest reason I never tried KDE. I know it's Linux and KDE and GNOME can pretty much made to look like each other (i.e their default look and feel). Is it trivial on Asahi Linux or needs a lot of tweaking?
Something like what ElementaryOS would look like - look/feel/UX wise ElementaryOS has been my gold standard sine it released and the last I checked it still felt that way. But since anything other than what Asahi Linux installs and support by default, i.e. Fedora Remix, is neither recommended nor fares well on Mac so I don't think I can use ElementaryOS (which is essentially Ubuntu LTS) really. Even Asahi Linux team recommends KDE.
Also - can one access certain Mac folders in Asahi (e.g. ~/Pictures)? And is it even recommended, if it's possible (Security wise)?
(I have been exploring/searching on Asahi and I am gearing up to use it on my M1 MacBook Pro - will be using/trying Linux desktop after more than a decade)
Well, once installed, Fedora Asahi is just standard Fedora ARM with some drivers and bootloader code. You can do anything you would do with a Fedora.
> (I have been exploring/searching on Asahi and I am gearing up to use it on my M1 MacBook Pro - will be using/trying Linux desktop after more than a decade)
If you are still hesitating, it's actually really easy to try : just run the command on the Asahi website and follow the instructions. The setup will resize your partition automatically and will not touch anything of your macOS install or your data. It's even easier than on PC where you have to boot the installation media and manage the partitionning yourself. IIRC, there isnt even the option to remove your macOS partition at any moment so you can't even lose your data by mistake.
The only prerequisite is having free space on your disk and everything else is automatic.
Also, uninstalling Asahi is as easy as going to macOS Disk Utility App, right click on the asahi partition, delete, and resize the macOS partition. After those three clicks, your Mac is now in the same state than before installing Asahi.
Customize KDE is easy: - panels could be moved in several clicks - add / remove widgets also could be done by mouse (and there are additional widgets that could be downloaded) - themes and animations and configured in settings
ElementaryOS is a Mac clone. You want a Mac-like setup instead of a Windows-like setup.
Kinda. Itās more like an alternate universe GNOME that embraced OS X 10.9 Mavericks style UI design. Itās gorgeous and I wish more desktop environments would take cues from it but itās only Mac-like superficially.
I agree. ElementaryOS was showing similar promise but their latest major release was a step backwards, tripping over new whistles and bells instead of maintaining rock solid stability with their polished UI.
And yet people still complain about some inconsistencies in UI.
These people should be forced to use the hair-covered-gum-on-the-floor style UI experience that Windows has become and then perhaps they get to have an opinion.
I find KDE still worse than both Windows 11 and macOS. Sorry, but the UI is just such a mash of margins, borders and icons that it looks downright janky in a way that even Win11 doesn't.
Which parts of Windows 11? Because there are still double digit different context menus in there, on recently developed built-in applications (introduced in 8 onwards). KDE is 1000x more consistent than that and has been that way for a long time now.
It still has weirdly inconsistent margins in places but compared to the disaster that is the jumble of different UIs in Windows that's nothing.
macOS before Tahoe, sure, but now? Have you looked at the screenshots where people layered different fullscreen apps on top of each other and the rounded corners look like a stack of cards because they're all different? It's a complete disaster.
You could power all those fancy new AI datacenters with Steve's spinning skeleton.
Why are there 2 context menus, multiple places to change settings, and a file explorer that is somehow a worse experience to use than one they had in XP?
All the while they develop and push a product that screenshots what you are doing so that AI can "assist" you. Not to mention pushing ads and news and free to play games.
Maybe the margins or icons aren't what you'd prefer, but you're being intellectually dishonest pretending that there is any uniformity in their product let alone even a single iota of care or interest in the experience the user has with their product.
Um, Windows 11 still hasnāt moved all the necessary utilities and administrative panels over to the windowing toolkit Microsoft introduced in 2012, and MacOS 26(??) isā¦ hideous.
There's a hint of cat urine mixed in too.
There's two types of desktops: the ones people complain about, and the ones nobody uses.
I canāt stand those smug one-liners ā they flatten reality instead of reflecting it.
Reality is... often-times the best things are often unused. And if these things were hypothetically used... there'd be significantly less complaints than the status quo.
KDE the desktop is consistent. The problem is the applications aren't. It's completely possible to run a GNOME desktop without a single QT app, it's near impossible to use KDE without any GTK apps. And there are so, so many great libadwaita apps coming out these days. So on KDE you still end up with an inconsistent mash up of toolkits and styles.
didn't it clearly say in the final paragraphs that, with KDE the taskbar is a mess. I for I, will continue to recommend Sway. /s
I feel like naming everything with a āKā, like how some families name all their kids with names that start with the same letter, is the real genius of KDE. Who doesnāt like those kinds of families.
> Who doesnāt like those kinds of families.
You'll find those people also in these comments :) Can't please everyone, which is totally fair and expected.
I don't. It often feels cringeworthy, childish and unprofessional.
Add me to the list of people happy with KDE. I tried every desktop environment under the sun over the past fifteen years. I even wrote off KDE foolishly many years ago simply because I thought it looked gaudy.
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. (EDIT: Not to mention that so many of my GNOME extensions would break in between upgrades, or crash regularly, meanwhile KDE has been rock solid for me these past 9 months).
I still think GNOME is slightly prettier, but KDE is infinitely more usable for me.
KDE is my daily driver at home and work now, it really is fantastic!
One minor thing I love is how the old-school wobbly windows, desktop cube etc are still something you can toggle easily.
This is exactly also my story. Was a long term XFCE user (this was long before lxde became popular) because Gnome/KDE felt too heavy for my old computers. These days, KDE still has the silly loader window (no other DM has it) but oh boy the features you get once it is running are outstanding.
This is not only plasma, but all the applications are top-notch quality. Just to name a few: Krita, Kate, the office suite.
Just switched over from gnome. Overall, I'm happy.
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.
KDE won me over for the simple fact that it's highly configurable, and that configuration is all driven out of one UI tool. Gnome drove me nuts with molding it into the shape I wanted.
> Can do part of it in tweaks, which is a separate configuration app, but then some of it requires extensions.
I'm not sure why you think requiring extensions is a bad idea. I have tried out at least 20 GNOME extensions (and kept maybe a third), 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.
Certainly it would be a more refined experience if the core developers took care of every single possible customization users could want under the sun, but at some point it's more effective to outsource that to other developers. Either that or you end up with Apple-style highly uncustomizable experience designed by a UX designer, which is not what I want.
Extensions are a pragmatic choice.
Extensibility can be nice, but the experience has a lot of friction. If you want something that isn't bog standard, you need to get or make an extension.
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.
The problem is that the extension experience can be really bad. There is no extension API; instead Extensions have (almost) full access to GNOME Shell's code.
This makes them incredibly powerful and flexible... but also fragile. Extensions can crash GNOME Shell/mutter. On Wayland that means your entire session goes down with GNOME Shell. Extensions can interfere with each other, and if you are an extension developer, you may need to update (or at least check) your extension every 6 months (GNOMEs release cycle).
Extension lives in the same memory space as the shell, so itās up to the developer to restrict themselves to not touch internal API. Also, GNOME give you plenty of warning in the changelog (and the changes are usually small).
Supporting extensions is great, but it needs to be done properly. GNOME doesnāt provide a proper extension API which forces devs to muck with GNOME internals, which makes extensions much more flakey than they need to be and causes them to break every other GNOME release.
The last time I used Gnome as my primary desktop (that was still in the Gnome 3 days) extensions broke at every update. I was still using Arch Linux at the time, so it was annoying because every ~6 months a few of my extensions would be broken for 1~2 weeks.
AFAIK Gnome extensions still doesn't have a stable API, so this issue is still present today.
I've used gnome for 7 years in Fedora. Often certain extensions stopped working betweenv after Fedora big upgrades (i.e. from 32 to 33). The JavaScript engine that runs extensions had many memory leaks bugs so I had to kill the gnome-shell process on a TTY session.
After 7 years I was fed up and switched to KDE and never looked back
I also donāt like the branding and icons tbh but it brings a lot consistency in terms of overall experience.
When you say switched from gnome, is it on the same os?
Yes, debian. Although I had previously been using gnome on other distros, like ubuntu.
Yes, changing distros to change DEs is simply nonsensical behavior. If one's distro doesn't support multiple DEs then it's probably time to reconsider if taking reddit's advice on the ArchLinux-spin of the quarter is actually a good idea.
> ArchLinux-spin of the quarter
What's the point of this? People should just use the real Arch Linux.
I see these posts a lot, but this really does not match my experience. I find I run into many more bugs in kde than in gnome or other desktop environments. This bug made kde absolutely unusable for me: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=365255
(I think this bug is still present in X11, but I've moved on to Wayland.)
The other bug I run into constantly is that "expose" sometimes makes all the windows invisible. The only fix is logging out and logging in again. I've seen this across a number of different distros. Gnome is mostly boring and just works for me.
Haven't been a Linux daily driver in years, but I love that KDE continues to have such an impact.
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!
Out of curiosity, what prevents you from or motivates you not to use Linux as a daily driver?
I just find it ugly vs Gnome or Mac. Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors. Admittedly, this was maybe 5 years ago. Has that improved?
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. Itās just about perfect for me.
> Admittedly, this was maybe 5 years ago. Has that improved?
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.
BTW, not sure if you were involved with this at all but I really appreciate all the work that's gone into making the Kirigami/Qt Quick KDE programs feel less janky. It's still not perfect (don't know if it ever will be unless Qt releases their AoT QML compiler as open source) but it's gotten MUCH better since the early KDE 6 releases.
The screenshot in the OP article show already quite a few issues. It takes a trained eye to be able to articulate a lot of the issues. I feel like Gmome is designed by professional designers but KDE mostly by developers. I do share the sentiment that Gnome is often too rigid, but the design is coherent, consistent and aesthetically well articulated. I use Hyprland with mostly Gnome apps (have considered Niri too!)
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.
Honestly, I'm not too fond of the screenshots in the OP's article either. I'd say it looks all fairly slapdash and too busy.
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.
> 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.
What a great way to put it. I wish software developers of every product would feel that way.
And also thank you for all the hard work, to you and the team!
KDE Plasma 6 looks absolutely gorgeous on my Kubuntu laptop with highdpi OLED display, and that's coming from a mainly-Mac-user :)
(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)
I really dislike how people present KDE and Gnome as being "clones" of Windows and MacOS. GNOME specially is so distinct (be it for good and bad reasons) that it deserves to be considered it's own thing. I can't stand MacOS with all it's Macosisms that are ingrained since it's Macintosh days. GNOME being grown for PC usages has none of these issues. Window management is also a breeze and easy to pickup rather than a byzantine mess. The only thing they really share is a nice, sparse look & feel.
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.
> Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors.
But enough about Mac OS Tahoe!
Gnome has been the best looking desktop for about 5 years now, with OS X in second place. KDE and Windows (after 7) are so far below that they're a category of their own.
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.
GNOME is pretty, but itās not great when it comes to progressive disclosure ā what you see is what you get; thereās no depth in which power user features can be found.
macOS is nearly the opposite in this regard. I wouldnāt mind giving it a facelift but doing it GNOME style would mean it losing much of what has kept many users on it.
Do you have any examples where power features aren't accessible? The OP used a wifi applet as an example of exposing information. I'm not sure if this isn't as common as I think it is - but what's wrong with typing `ip` into a terminal (that's always open anyway)? It's desktop agnostic, works even without a desktop. And then there's no need for an entire applet dedicated just to wifi for the rare occasion you need to lookup your MAC address.
One small example is how holding down Option/Alt modifies behavior in various ways throughout macOS.
Often it functions as a ādo this for everythingā modifier. So for example, option-clicking the minimize traffic light minimizes all windows from the application the window belongs to, and option-clicking a disclosure triangle in a nested list expands or contracts all child nodes.
Thereās tons of little things like that which might sound silly but become significant time and sanity savers after making a habit of using them.
The way for power using gnome is through extensions. But once you got used to the gnome philosophy, you find that you donāt have to fiddle with the UI that much.
Please don't ever again suggest Apple to hire the GNOME team. That would be a very sad day.
Let them cook!
They already seem to vaguely echo gnome 3 look in macos. Huge titlebars with buttons, sidebar layouts in apps, transparent title bar, control center, etc., there's just a bunch of things that make you go 'huh'.
LetTim Cook!
Not sure if you're serious or missing an /s there ;)
I honestly think so, but I'm not surprised some losers here at HN down voted my comment.
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.
That is entirely a matter of taste and familiarity
Not sure why you're getting downvoted as this is a valid opinion to have. IMO my list is MacOS Sonoma, Windows 7, Gnome 30+. While I like the ideas behind KDE, XFCE and the like, they are terribly ugly by today's standards.
I would recommend checking out Cosmic by System76. It's getting a beta very soon but I've been using the alpha and straight their git main for months now and it's very stable.
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...
I'm actually super excited about this project. Out of curiosity, does the compositor they use have HDR support? It's one of the features I miss on Linux desktops.
No it has not. Despite the praises it is getting here it still looks like the programmer art, which fits with a certain crowd, but if you are (like me) into the Gnome/Mac type of look - its still gives Windows XP vibes.
Me too. I have used it in KDE 4 times when I was in high school, but it still seems to miss the design things. It is great for customization and functionality, but the design itself still seems off. This just is not looking good [0] and it is presented as a showcase here.
[0]https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thiagokokada/blog/main/pos...
>This just is not looking good [0] and it is presented as a showcase here.
I agree. 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.
Can you explain explicitly what problems you have with the design in this screenshot?
Ubuntu's Gnome is ugly imo, but stock Gnome on Arch is incredibly nice. Of course I really only use a terminal and a browser but still, Gnome + Ghosty + Firefox on Arch is just great.
One day, I'm going to try niri. I'm just too lazy to migrate my i3 setup right now :D
What's special about niri? Asking as a happy user of i3 for... I can't remember how long. It's one of the few pieces of software I don't have to think about, it just gets out of my way.
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.
It's a scrolling window manager, so almost a completely different paradigm (that I find superior) to normal tiling WMs. Ironically the entire scrolling WM craze started with the PaperWM Gnome extension. I still use it, it's great.
i3 is really hard to move on from. Everything is the app and configuration you want since it doesn't have traditional "desktop" suite of apps, so by design it is literally built for your exact wants and needs. Same goes for fluxbox/openbox setups imo
Here is my Debian 12 / KDE setup. With the "Inter" font, macOS icons (whitesur) and a little theming (klassy) I quite like it. Running this on a 5K Apple display and everything is crisp.
desktop: https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/debian12.png
code setup: https://s3.whalesalad.com/images/hn/vscode2025.png
> Admittedly, this was maybe 5 years ago.
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.
>I just find it ugly vs Gnome or Mac. Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors.
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.
That kind of thing is very difficult for visually oriented folks to filter out. Iām in that crowd. No matter how many times I see a poorly laid out dialog, it remains almost as abrasive as the first time I saw it. It can become a major distraction, especially as someone whoās capable of writing code.
I think there's some truth to this (utility is overall more important), but also some falsehood (looks matter too). Aesthetics affect your enthusiasm and therefore your productivity. This is why, for example, most people would rather work in a room with large glass windows overlooking a lake than in a room with a small window overlooking a factory even if they are functionally the same.
"I don't care about this bad thing" isn't really a very good response to someone's "this is kinda bad" post, is it?
Obviously a lot of people don't care as much - KDE is a popular desktop!
>"I don't care about this bad thing" isn't really a very good response to someone's "this is kinda bad" post, is it?
I don't think you read my comment properly because that's not what I said.
I agree with that. I really do not care about the inconsistencies - I did not even notice them until other people pointed them out. There are themes that look nice to me.
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.
Poor design can and does impact usability for a lot of users. If you care about the utility, you should care about e.g. wasted screen space with extraneous padding.
>you should care about e.g. wasted screen space with extraneous padding.
Where KDE is better than Gnome whose UI looks like its was designed for tablet use or 4K+ displays. So yeah, on that front I do care, which is why I prefer KDE.
I tend to prefer gnome's simplicity and its desktop metaphor, though I'm a niri guy now. But KDE is excellent. It's fast, pretty, customizable, and enjoyable to use. My gripe with it is that the sheer number of options and their constant presence in the UI does not play nicely with my gently spectrum brain. It's not even that I can't resist the urge to fiddle--I can, no problem--but that the presence of all the options causes anxiety. (There are also a few, to my eye, inelegant spacing quirks, but nothing I can't ignore.)
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.
I have to say "the computer UI you can use without imploding in a ball of emotional-intellectual panic" is probably the best front of the box quote I've run across in a while ;-)
KDE has been crazy good for me.
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.
KDE is truly incredible these days. I'm running Plasma 6 + Karousel[1] for scrolling window management and some custom kwin scripts for incredible maximalist experience. It does everything and does it beautifully https://i.postimg.cc/nznZwg44/Screenshot-20250918-213910.png
1 - https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel
Iāve been using KDE as my personal daily driver for a few years now. At work I have to use MacOS, and it feels like a serious downgrade. Just about everything is easier and more intuitive on KDE. Itās the single best desktop Iāve ever used.
> it feels like a serious downgrade
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 thatās easy enough on all of them.
The window management and dolphin for file management for one. KDE let's you easily pin windows on top, show on all desktops etc .. Dolphin gives you a nice multi tab, split pane file manager along with a terminal that follows you along.
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
Long time ago, that was actually very easy on Mac, via SIMBL (https://github.com/albertz/simbl) and Afloat (https://github.com/rwu823/afloat) and you could hack around using FScriptAnywhereSIMBL (https://github.com/albertz/FScriptAnywhereSIMBL) or Pyjector (https://github.com/albertz/Pyjector).
But that doesn't work anymore since a while (I guess due to SIP).
One thing I missed the most from KDE was changing the volume by mouse wheel on the sound volume icon in tray. And in general mouse wheel interactions on tray.
On windows you have to click the icon before you can interact with it. IIRC on Mac too.
> On windows you have to click the icon before you can interact with it
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).
KDE has a lot of really nice little things, like how you can mute specific apps with a single click just like muting browser tabs.
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.
If you use desktop environments more to their capacity, you'll start to appreciate more advanced features. Such as how apps can integrate with each other, etc.
> how apps can integrate with each other
Can you explain more about this?
Sure! One example is copy-paste, which doesn't always work as expected in Linux. Another is things in OS X, such as deep Spotlight integration with apps, and a unified scripting and automation language between apps.
You can also use links between most apps, documented here: https://github.com/bhagyas/app-urls
And drag and drop files and stuff onto and between apps, etc.
Yes it is too bad most Apple software has devolved into buggy messes or feels like a Playskool designed application and has extremely limited use.
The main reason it took me so long to use Linux as my main OS on desktop was because Gnome is the default DE on the Debian based distros I tried.
The day I discovered KDE is the day I switched to Linux as my main OS on desktop.
It works, it's functional, it's a bit _nerdy_... Exactly what I want in a DE.
Meanwhile, Gnome always felt like a low-cost version of MacOS.
I'm glad we have options so everyone can find what they are looking for!
I'm just mad at myself for not finding out about KDE before. It's 100% on me.
I have been using kde for 15+ years, except 4.0, which was painful, everything has been mostly a smooth experience.
> 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.
At least on the version currently on Debian, systemsettings has a "primary" radio on the screen configuration panel that let you change it to whatever monitor you want, on whatever order you want.
It selects the first screen just as a default.
Yes, but I assumed that disabling the TV would set the monitor as the primary desktop and added the taskbar to it, but it didn't. Now I may have done something wrong, but I was just reporting my experience.
If unplugging the display cable works though. It's most likely the TV pretending to be still on.
I have a LG TV C1 that behaves like that. While my computer monitors do not have this issue.
The TV even has a dual personality. It doesn't appear to report the same informations via EBID when powered off vs powered on.
I also have a MS Windows 10 connected to this same TV, and if I make the mistake of powering up or wake from sleep Windows before turning on the TV, then the NVIDIA GPU setup some broken resolution. And only a reboot fixes it.
So my guess is it's the TV presenting itself with different EBID when off vs powered on. And also somehow presenting itself as active on the HDMI line no matter if off or on. Changing the TV inputs also doesn't tell KDE that the display was turned off.
I haven't debugged any of it. These are just my observations.
It remembers the screens to try to keep your settings if you disconnect and reconnect external screens, but in this case that was not very helpful
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 should do that. If I unplug my external monitor the panel moves to the laptop, and it even turns it on if its been disabled.
Then it's likely that plasma just crashed :')
It didn't, because I could create the taskbar manually by clicking with the right click in the desktop.
I agree. Significatly better than Gnome. I don't know why so many distros use Gnome by default. The only thing I can think is that it looks a bit nicer. They definitely have better artists.
KDE has a ton of bugs that I don't like, but it's the DE that I always choose when using desktop Linux because it treats you like an adult. The ability to customize it is unparalleled unless you're building your own DE with a tiling window manager or something.
One killer feature is KDE Connect. Saves me from having to grab my phone when I need to copy an SMS OTP code. It's similar to Phone Link on Windows, minus the privacy violations.
KDE is not just more configurable, they pack incredible innovation, like KDE Connect. Not to mention their semantic desktop ideas, which have been watered down post Nepomuk, nearly 20 years later still ahead of its time. It's the best of open source and user choice to have this international and often quite different source of new ideas and abilities.
XFCE or LXDE anyone? Honest question - If you use XFCE or LXDE or similar minimalistic DEs, are you happy with the choice? or do you feel somethings are missing that are available in KDE, MATE and the likes?
XFCE is fine. I used to use it and there is a lot to like.
It lacks tiling, and I use some KDE apps very heavily (Kate, Dolphin) so KDE integrates a bit better.
I have thought of giving XFCE another go and I do not think there is anything critical I would miss if I had a tiling window manager (which would have some advantages over KDE's tiling, I think), but I have KDE configured in a way that works for me so not very motivated to do it.
I've been a consistent XFCE user for over a decade. I think of it the same way I think of my desk - I'm not proclaiming its the best in the world, all I can tell you is that its pretty stable, clean and utilitarian, and I'm consistently productive on top of it.
I'm concerned about the XFCE team's approach to Wayland, which is to say they are not making any commitments to make a stable release for it. I've already had to take my new Debian install back to X11 to get XFCE working. I know that Wayland is contentious and not developed with clear communication with many DE teams, but the drift here is concerning, and I am considering trying to find something XFCE-like with full Wayland support.
Is XFCE minimalistic? It feels to me like it's just a modern continuation of the desktops we had in the 90s and early 2000s. Instead of adding in a bunch of extra stuff and moving things around to keep people busy, they're just quietly making it a little better with every release.
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.
Back when the lightweight desktops were popping up, KDE was considered pretty memory heavy. Thing is, KDE hasn't really kept up with growing RAM sizes as well as Windows has. ;-) So unless you're trying to run a Linux desktop on a potato, I'd say KDE should now be considered pretty lightweight.
We also did a lot of intentional action to get the resource usage down in the Plasma 5 generation and timeframe.
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).
Yeah it legitimately trades blows with the lightweight desktops.
Thanks for this work. I switched from xfce when I realised that KDE was nearly as lightweight.
Even back in the day KDE pointed out that in real world use they were not as memory heavy because everything depended on the same toolkits that were shared. Meaning your startup memory use was higher, but once you launched the applications/tools you were going to use KDE used less. (this of course depended on which tools you ran, KDE assumed all KDE tools, run a non-kde application and it doesn't work)
XFCE for me, when my netbook was still alive.
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.
I've used kde for years, but earlier this year I decided to try xfce.
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 recommend that you try labwc. It's lean and supports Openbox themes.
I switched from X11 and LXDE to Sway and had a good experience. But Sway was my slippery slope to labwc.
https://github.com/labwc/labwc
I've used XFCE as my main DE for around 10 years, (I switched to MacOs a year ago), I think mostly depends on your workflow, for me the best thing was that it gets out your way, you have a simple menu to select apps, a taskbar, and that's about it. I tested Gnome and KDE a few times over the years and for me they are more bloated than what I needed for my workflow, but I agree they feel more cohesive and the aesthetics are nicer.
Desktop Environments always feel a bit clunky to me. A Window Manager like i3 or something is easier.
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 wouldnāt think of it as missing out on anything. You just become familiar with the ecosystem of mostly terminal utilities.
I've been using XFCE for the better part of two decades now (I still run into people upset about the changes XFCE made in 2003, i.e. 4.0), and I am perfectly satisfied. Though as the saying goes: what I don't know I don't know; so I may be missing out on a better experience, but at least I am content enough that I don't bother seeking it out.
Though, my monitors are also from 2010, so a lot of the visual problems people have with XFCE, I don't.
Me and probably a couple of other cave dwellers use Mate (someone must be, because it keeps getting maintained). It has a the Win 9x-era aesthetics and simplicity that I've not found anywhere else.
I use xfce because it is stable, simple and lightweight. Perhaps I don't know what I'm missing but I'm very happy with it.
I've used XFCE for a 2011 laptop, it was about as fast as LXDE but better polished. Windows was unusable there, and XFCE made the computer feel brand new. Only the modern websites that would still cause slowness, but the OS was great.
XFCE for virtual machines or low powered hardware
You lose the application integration I have with KDE when you use apps from the KDE suite or even QT apps.
labwc + Openbox theming
https://github.com/labwc/labwc
pixelation in fonts, apps sometimes just not working, input latency, unpleasant to look at, brightness controls, notifications, could probably write out an entire 2500 word essay.
LXQt with kwin (for kwin's nice compositing effects.)
I have a Rock64 that runs LxQT.
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 used to mostly use XFCE and moved to KDE as it supported high DPI screens better.
Yes, this is my only gripe with Xfce.
Everything is sooo small on my 16" notebook and when I zoom it gets blurry.
Not just the Plasma desktop, there is a lot of KDE software that works well even outside of the KDE desktop, and some of it is really excellent. I find Kate to be a criminally underrated editor for example. It never comes up in VSCode vs vim/... discussions, but I think it's an excellent VSCode replacement if you're looking for something more familiar. Currently my favorite editor hands down.
Author here. I was surprised that Kate supports LSP now. I will not stop using my neovim setup but I definitely found it good for quickly editing small amounts of text.
I've recently switched to a Windows 95-themed LXQT desktop (Chicago95) and have been having a pretty good experience. KDE is cool too. I used GNOME3 for years but tbh it's sorta just ok. Functional, polished, and slow.
FWIW, the few non-techie people in my life that I care enough to administer their notebooks and provide support all run KDE on Debian happily.
While I had some reservations about acceptance when I made the switch from Windows 7, it turned out that it was one of my better choices of my life, and resulted in much less work for me compared to what Windows caused for me previously. And GNOME just did not work out well for most of these people and the workflows they are used to.
KDE is going to take over the world. It already took over the browser world (yay konqueror), with the SteamDeck leading the way it's going to take over the consumer peripheral world as well.
KDE has been phenomenal since the days of KDE 3.5.x. I wish that I could use it more than I'm able to (limited selection of desktop environments at work etc.). The KDE 4.0 release has given the project an unfortunate lasting bad reputation that stuck around despite the fact that it was really just a single bad release that got fixed very quickly.
Author here. The last time I used KDE was during the 4.x days. I remember trying multiple versions, from the earlier 4.0/4.2 days until something like 4.14. Even so, I kept getting crashes and instability.
I remember the one that finally made me stop using KDE altogether and migrate to Gnome 3 at the time was one crash that I would get frequently with Dolphin while randomly browsing fils (that would stop once I removed all Dolphin configuration files but go back after a few weeks).
I haven't ever really used KDE, and I'm quite sure that it's still not my desktop, but as someone who was aware of the trouble around 4.0, the view I had of the project was that those problems were long gone, and that most people using it today were pretty happy with it.
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.)
Even KDE1 and KDE2 were very good for their time.
> The KDE 4.0 release has given the project an unfortunate lasting bad reputation...
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.
We all (not just KDE) learned that users don't read those. Worse, distro maintainers either don't read them or in their "we are on the latest" push will ignore them. KDE was pushed out to a lot of people who shouldn't have got it.
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.
> Worse, distro maintainers either don't read them or in their "we are on the latest" push will ignore them
Oh, this is so true. Ubuntu adopted Pulse Audio long before anyone (including Poettering) considered it stable. IIRC the readme even said something like "The sound system that breaks your audio"
I probably shouldn't complain though, since as a non-Ubuntu user, I get the benefits of all the Ubuntu users beta testing software for me.
> KDE was pushed out to a lot of people who shouldn't have got it.
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.
Uhh... No? https://kde.org/announcements/4/4.0/
This is one of the places I have found the relevant note [0].
It states the following:
Also, IIRC, KDE developers were openly saying that releases from 4.0 to 4.2 will be buggy, and things will stabilize in 4.2 and beyond.[0]: https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Is_KDE_4.1_for_you%3F
I returned to Linux when Microsoft started aggressively pushing Windows 11 and phasing out 10.
I admit I previously had only a vague idea about KDE's existence - mostly through my know-it-all friend claiming that the Windows Vista/7 look was inspired by it.
Anyway, I installed it as GNOME is not to my taste and indeed it was the Windows experience without the Windows issues, save for some weirdness like e.g. Open In Terminal taking its sweet time to actually open.
Initially I was missing HDR, but Plasma 6 supports it and both Chromium and Firefox (though the latter in developer edition only and behind a flag at that) appear to have shipped their implementations, though I haven't managed to get it to work yet - the important part is that there's no indefinite delivery timeline any more.
I've had Asahi installed on my M1 since I bought it, but only just switched to it as my main development workhorse (upgrading to Asahi Fedora remix 42).
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.
I wish Asahi worked on my M3. It is a great effort, and sadly, they don't have enough resources to focus on the newer chips yet.
KDE has always been like this since KDE 4 they have a consistent app UI so if you just install from the hundreds of KDE based apps you will feel like it was a hand crafted OS. KDE is more consistent than Windows is these days. On Windows you see several decades of UI in core system components.
I hadn't really kept up with the development of KDE until I got a Steam Deck and booted into desktop mode. Once there, I was quite surprised to find a really performant, attractive, easy-to-use desktop environment. My previous KDE experience was probably a decade prior to that and I didn't really enjoy it that much, so it was a refreshing experience.
Now it is definitely my preferred Linux desktop environment as well.
I've used Linux laptops for work since 2013. I finally switched to Linux on the desktop earlier this year, after getting a laptop and experiencing Windows 11.
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.
> The laptop isn't running Linux yet, I'm not confident the battery lifetime story is great.
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.
As an outsider, it is impressive to see the incremental, "chipping away at problems piecemeal" approach KDE has been taking since their Plasma release a decade ago. Slow, steady and intentional. To think that almost all of this is volunteer work makes it so much more heartwarming.
Love KDE. Can others share their experience of using the same desktop environment across distributions? Is there a difference? I have only used KDE on Fedora and it's great but getting the itch to try out something new. Void Linux maybe.
I run KDE on Void - both on my workstation and my ARM laptop. It runs perfectly on both. The only thing I've noticed that you'll 'lose' on Void is the 'Applications View' in System Monitor; that's only because it relies on systemd functionality that Void doesn't have because of runit.
I've tried KDE in Debian and NixOS, and the experience is exactly the same. In many ways the choice of distro is much less impactful than the choice of desktop environment.
I would have been a very satisfied Aeon user had it not been for battling gnome. If you look at my comment history, I have described the issues I have had. After about 7 months I used KDE on a friend's computer and switched the same day.
I think the best thing is that I don't have to install anything to make it work like I want, and as such there are no incompatible plugins that leaves me with a broken desktop functionality for a week or two every time there is a new release.
That is an annoyance, but the most annoying things are all the small things that just don't work. Focus issues. Multiple screen issues. Date format issues.
I've been using my steamdeck as my personal computer for more than a year now. It's desktop mode is a polished KDE experience that anyone could use.
Are you using the standard Steam OS desktop mode, or installed a different linux distro with KDE?
Really the main reason KDE wins for me is the flawless fractional scaling support that no other distro comes even close to.
I haven't run into many issues with KDE, and I really like some of the "built-in" KDE apps. For instance, KDE Connect is amazing, despite some bugs, it usually works very well. I also use KWrite and Konsole daily.
Try installing kio-audiocd and popping in an Audio CD. This is a one weird trick which will leave you amazed. :D
Edit: Why someone downvotes the most innovative CD ripping solution on the planet is beyond me. =)
I've been a happy KDE user for years, but I recently discovered that Gnome is surprisingly good on a tablet. KDE is usable, but feels about as touch-native as Windows does. Gnome is easily as good a tablet experience as an iPad.
There's only one fly in the ointment: Gnome's onscreen keyboard is both terrible and difficult to replace.
GNOME on touchscreens is in a weird place -- everything it needs to be perfect is right there. But there are a handful of pain points and weird bugs that make me think none of the developers are actually using it on a touch device. The OSK is the worst offender.
I still prefer it over KDE on my 2-in-1/convertible laptop, though. Despite the jank it also irons out a lot of the pain points that more traditional desktops have with touch, and is clearly made with it in mind, even when the execution is iffy.
Maybe of interest: One of our recently-elected community-wide goals is to improve the Input story, and we started a new on-screen keyboard project called Plasma Keyboard in context of that. It's a bit experimental and a very early effort, but maybe something promising for you to track in some way.
Much better than the Gnome OSK despite signs that it's early (I got some transparent flickering over the panel).
I'd like it to have more punctuation and special characters available as long presses on letters, and for it to have a terminal mode with arrows, tab, ctrl, etc....
This comment was typed on plasma-keyboard.
Thanks for the feedback!
We have an experiment for the "extended layout for tablet mode" bit parked somewhere, stay tuned.
I'll try it out. I have both Gnome and KDE on my tablet, but haven't taken much time to try to customize KDE to be a good tablet experience.
KDE has been my preferred desktop environment since I started playing with linux sometime in the KDE 3 days.
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)
Hi folks, author here. Happy to answer questions.
Plasma dev here, also happy to answer questions!
What recommended long-term-support stable version release channels are available for Plasma?
edit: According to AI, LTS is not provided. Was my AI answer accurate, and if so is there consideration of an initiative to implement an LTS channel?
Canonical provides commercial support for Plasma on Ubuntu last time I checked :)
After reading your reply, I plugged the exact question of my text into an LLM and it answered my question perfectly. Your answer was in the context of commercial support which wasn't in the question or answer.
Well they're also famous for having an LTS version of Ubuntu as well (and coined the term), which I assumed you probably know with an LTS interest. But sorry I couldn't satisfy you!
No questions, just some rough edges to report; infinite clipboard history would be nice, notifications search/sorting would be nice, notifications panel gets slow with hundreds of notifications (from IRC bots) when dragging the scrollbar, notifications panel icons could be removable or made smaller or just have one per app.
Not the person you asked, but maybe open Issues somewhere for that?
Hello. What Linux distributives in your opinion have KDE as a first class desktop? With priority support for KDE, testing, driver compatibility etc.?
This will be a purely personal answer, as we don't really maintain any official list of favorites.
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.
Thank you. After hearing about KDE Linux here on HN I'm now very interested in the project and its future.
Personally I've had an issue with KDE on Fedora several years ago, possibly due unstable Wayland, but I don't know real reason. Something in the graphic stack failed. So that was a reason for me asking about it.
What's the relation of KDE Linux with KDE Neon? The former was made by Blue System and the new one by Techpaladin or something like that?
KDE Neon was originally founded by devs who worked on Kubuntu previously, and some of that team has now moved on to KDE Linux.
The company stuff in the background doesn't really matter.
The team working on KDE Linux are motivated by addressing some structural challenges that always plagued KDE Neon from the concept of trying to graft more recent SW on top of the Ubuntu LTS base, plus some lessons learned from the SteamOS project's way of handling updates, and fully utilizing more recent Linux/systemd features.
It's sufficiently different that sticking with the Neon brand and swapping it out for that userbase would have been pretty disruptive, so they felt it was better to go with a distinct identity.
No questions, I just want to say thank you. Plasma is great and has sane defaults unlike Gnome.
Thanks!
Are error messages, e.g. when trying to connect wifi, as expressive and case-complete?
Honestly, this one I'm not sure about as I haven't worked on the connectivity UIs myself. I know we have backends to NetworkManager and ConnMan, and generally I would assume we pass through errors they generate and perhaps try to augment them, but I'm not personally aware of the SOTA on WiFi error reporting and how we stack up.
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.
Piggybacking on the context of your network role, is there an initiative to fix temporarily unavailable sshfs mounts freezing Plasma and Dolphin?
I really like KDE and use it as my daily driver, but I'm really peeved that the "close" button isn't at the very top right of a maximised window. Instead, I have to hit the top right (extremely easy) and then go a bit down and to the left to actually hit the button. For all its crap, Windows really got that right since 95.
Are you using a non-default theme or are you using custom KWin scripts (e.g. to enable "window gaps")? Both my laptop & desktop run near-default KDE and moving the mouse to the top-right + clicking always closes the maximized window.
Hm no, I just run the default. It's good to know I did something wrong, I'll look into it. Thank you!
I have been using KDE as my primary desktop for 15 years. I love it, it's intuitive, polished and simple.
I've used dwm forever, switched to kde and realized iād been maintaining my desktop more than using it. Drivers worked, screens behaved, no audio/mic hickups.
Why blur what's almost guaranteed to be RFC1918 private network info? My IP is 192.168.1.56, come and get me hackers.
I have been happy long time with the Moksha Desktop.
https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/
I was super happy with KDE, until I found that i3 has a better paradigm for what I want. I tried Gnome on Fedora for a while now on my laptop; i don't mind it but KDE beats it in usability.
During my college days (2000~2004) KDE (I think it was Fedora/RH 8) was hands down my favourite desktop. After that when I joined the corporate world, I lost touch with Linux. Few years ago (thanks to a ton of dark patterns in Windows), I moved back to Linux. This time I chose Linux Mint with Cinnamon / XFCE. When Linux Mint (officially) starts supporting KDE, I would love to try it again. Until then I am really rooting for YOU KDE developers, I have really fond memory of your tools (especially Konqueror browser/file manager it was way ahead of its times then!)
I realized I really like tiling better than floating windows and I like to manage them with keyboard mainly. Hyprland has been very good for that. Everything fits neatly, I can switch desktops and I don't have to move windows around
> By the way, the crop and blur from that screenshot above ....
I just want to mention that blurring secret information is not secure. Use black bars instead.
I have been a KDE user since KDE 1.x in Red Hat Linux 6.2, back in 2000, and used KDE almost exclusively for my Linux desktop since KDE 2.2. Right now using Plasma 6.4.5.
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.
I vaguely remember that the shift to gnome was because of fear around QT licensing.
I use KDE but I setup my desktop with two panelsā¦the default launcher panel on the bottom and I add an extra panel atop with the clock and icons for applications I use the most.
Could someone relate KDE to PopOS or Ubuntu for me?
I've been on Ubuntu and PopOS for the last 15 years.
Ubuntu and PopOS are linux distributions, KDE is a desktop environment that you can find/install in lots of distributions, such as kubuntu for example.
Iāve been afraid to switch from GNOME to KDE because of what Iāve heard about instability on Wayland as well as Qt being more unstable than GTK. Are these concerns overstated? Should I bite the bullet and switch? Iām on Debian but considering switching to Fedora.
Author here: using KDE6 with Wayland. Didn't note any instability, and it was the only desktop environment that I saw to handle HiDPI for X11 applications (except for Hyrpland, but this was clearly using a hack).
KDE is more stable than GNOME, because gnome-shell kills all apps when it dies due to GPU driver bugs or whatever. Qt/KDE has some more crash resilience going on. Not as good as Arcan, but I've never had my session go away since recent KDE6 versions.
https://arcan-fe.com/2017/12/24/crash-resilient-wayland-comp...
There's no need to commit to either, you can install both alongside each other and pick one each time you log in.
I like Xfce with Chicago95.
I miss good old KDE1/2 desktop :)
It would be hilariously fast nowadays and totally usable, all under like 64mb of RAM :)
Just incidental (KDE is indeed great), but in case anyone is wondering, you can see similar wifi information on macOS by holding option while clicking the icon in the menu bar.
Author here: yes, I knew about this, but the fact that I don't remember exactly which key I need to hold shows why I hate this approach from macOS where "advanced" features are hidden behind shortcuts.
> Even compared with macOS in my MacBook Pro M2 Pro (that is of course comparing Apples and Bananas),
Missed opportunity for "comparing apples and penguins!"
Funny thing is, I showed KDE to a Windows user a few months ago. She loved it, she stuck with windows for now due to "change and all".
But I am sure I could move her over to Linux once Windows does something real bad to her. She is no the fence now, but I do nor what to end up as permanent tech-support :)
FWKW, if I am ever forced into Wayland, right now I would use KDE.
KDE 3.5 was the best Linux Desktop by far. Then they messed up with 4.0. Good to know it's back at the top.
The Trinity Desktop Environment is still carrying the KDE 3.5 torch. The Q4OS Linux distribution (Debian based) provides it as a primary desktop.
switched to kde neon this year, sometimes I forget windows exists.
I have tried to use Linux for my gaming PC, but I always run into issues. The Finals refused to run, for example.
So, I gave up and just use Windows for gaming. Sigh.
Would you consider dual booting and spending more time with games that _do work_ on Linux?
I got Finals working on an i3 nvidia system basically by doing nothing more than installing Steam and then installing The Finals and playing through proton. What issues did you run into?
According to the game's Steam store page, it uses Easy Anti-Cheat, which generally does not work in Proton. Pretty common problem for people who want to play modern online games. I'm surprised you say it works for you.
There is a specific Proton EAC runtime you might have to install. Check under Library -> Tools.
EAC works fine if the game has it enabled for Linux, which The Finals does (I play it).
It works fine, I've been playing it on Fedora since The Finals was released.
Plasma 6 has come up a few times recently as pretty awesome. I havent touched it since Plasma 4 eons ago.
I'm pretty happy with budgie though. But I think I will have to give KDE a try some day.
I like KDE, but every time I use it as a daily driver, I again run into all of those little issues that make it frustrating over time. Little breakages, weird Qt dependency hell, the works. I came to Mint because Cinnamon really has been built with being bomb-proof as the highest priority. The details are sweated, and the feature set is lean, so they can really focus on quality.
Maybe it's because I'm such a latecomer, but I've truly enjoyed using KDE on a mostly-daily basis over the last ~9mo. I haven't extended it or really stretched (e.g. with multi-monitor setup), but I also haven't had to diag any issues or fix anything. Just left it vanilla and did other things.
KDE is a complicated piece of software and packaging it is hard sometimes, but I'm using KDE on Debian since Debian 4, and the team handled all process phenomenally.
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.
Some might say it feels dated, but for me Cinnamon gives more of an impression that the whole thing has been thought through. It has a better grip on various aspects of design like its use of whitespace, control alignment, and typography too.
Donāt get me wrong, KDE is a nice desktop in many ways, but it would benefit considerably from attention of a professional UI designer.
I can turn off other features and work around them but the most annoying yet harmless is the flicker when you switch to an inactive app. The title bar and the window contents change their color at different frames. It requires ditching Breeze and using other theme engines/decorations altogether.
I currently use niri but Plasma has always been my go-to/backup DE. I always have it installed in case someone else has to use my PC.
[1]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=433569
Last time I experimented with Linux desktop (maybe two years ago?) I had one silly annoyance with KDE on Fedora. I was running this on a laptop with a regular track pad. I was surprised to find out that tap to click was not enabled by default, I had to click the physical button to mimic a mouse click. Not a big deal I thought - I logged in, went to settings, and found a configuration to enable the behavior I wanted - great. However, this behavior was only enabled for my user. Every time I wanted to log in, the login screen would use the default behavior in KDE, since my user preferences weren't applied until I actually logged in, of course.
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).
I feel the same and the more I use the integrated apps the more I see the bad margins, thin fonts and general ux quirks. It's compact and the information density is high but it has so much noise that it just feels uncomfortable to use. I have the opposite problem with gnome. Just give me a modern version of the win2k gui or fluxbox. sic
The only reason I don't use KDE is because it takes too much RAM out of my PC (i work with 2gb ram)
I've been feeling guilty for not switching to KDE for years now, because I hate fiddling with desktops. I like the defaults to be boring, and basically to be Windows XP. KDE always struck me as annoying, but 1) MATE is bad and buggy, Caja most of all; and 2) as a Redhat and a Gnome hater, I really have no right to still be using it.
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.
IceWM hasn't changed in more than a decade. ;)
> For example, the network applet gives lots of information that in other operational systems are either not available or difficult to access.
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.
Author here: yes, I know about this, but the reason I don't remember the exactly button to press and I always alternate between then until I get what I want is why I hate this approach from macOS.
I agree, very happy KDE user, wish I was able to use it on my mac too(no, Asahi does work good enough for me).
Favorite? Or least unfavorite?
For a second I thought this was submitted by DHH and I was ready to grab some popcorn.
"After using KDE for about a week I can say that this is the first time that I really enjoy a desktop environment on Linux, after all those years."
Wow! (about) A whole week!
I admit that one week is not enough to see possible issues like reported by @netbiosterror in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45289071), but it is enough to enjoy the desktop experience and everything it offers.
If they're that excited within a week, the come-down from dealing with occasional annoying bugs introduced with updates might leave a bruise.
Author here: to be clear, I am using KDE back and forth since I bought a Steam Deck 3 years ago, and before that I used KDE daily during the 4.x days (so I am familiar with KDE bugs actually).
I am using it in my main machine now for almost 2 weeks, and this is the period of time that this blog post refers too.