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.
> For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.
It has. I believe this is a consequence of the 4.x debacle 18 years ago. KDE was doing great in the 3.x release, capturing a lot of users, and then everything went sideways with 4.x.
They recovered: by the later releases of 4.x most of the problems were fixed and 4.x was entirely livable. The KDE developers learned a hard lesson and have been very conservative since then. Since the release of Plasma (5.x) in 2014, KDE hasn't self-inflicted any great regressions or misfeatures, and now there is 10+ years of "polish."
It is very nice.
I too have used the "Window Rules" mentioned in the blog post. Very useful for game development where you want certain windows to appear at precise locations on different displays every time, day after day, for years. KDE just gives you features like this, whereas this is considered unnecessary elsewhere.
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.
>looks nicer, more professional, and more consistent than the latest macOS
Just look at the first screenshot, everything is misaligned, no visual consistency. The second screenshot is even worse. It's really not better than macOS but still better than modern Windows and GNOME.
> For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.
Yes, and this process continues. There are still parts of the environment that need attention or cleanup, but by reading Nate's weekly blog posts [0], you can see that they chip away at cleaning this stuff up week after week after week. And it is all headed in the right direction vs. not (looking at you, Liquid Glass).
My suspicion is that mobile vs desktop is to the most part a divide that aligns with a divide between consumer and producer. And treating customers as consumers allows you to turn general purpose computers into narrow purpose ones, where you can milk the customer for every little thing that allows them to do what they want. While this sucks from the perspective of the user, it is very much a way to grow a revenue when you are selling an Operating System as part of your products.
I don't say you can't produce things on smart phones, it is just a more restricted environment with things dumbed down, partly for reasons of target demographic, partly for reasons of screen size.
And thus the rise of mobile incentivizes companies ever so slightly to make the desktop more like their mobile counterpart.
In this space open source operating systems (or desktop environments) can be totally uncompromising. They don't need to nudge you into spending money/attention in places that are not in your interest. They don't bolt everything down and pretend to know better than you. In short, they treat you like an adult (producer) and not like a child (consumer).
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 really like KDE but it doesn't look nicer than the latest macOS by most tastes.
I categorize KDE as the DE for people who enjoy using Windows more than macOS. Part of that involves just settings and functionality being more discoverable... which involves just throwing way more spurious stuff on the screen. And that makes it look less clean almost definitionally!
But well. More usable for me when I want to find how to do something I do once every 3 months without having to memorize the keyboard command for it (looking at you, macOS finder dialog when I want to open a hidden folder)
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)
I can't say I agree, rather than polish what they have been doing have been mostly usability and design regressions for me. Like take recent changes the monitor settings dialog for example:
- It used to start with a reasonable size and layout, now it wants to start maximized for some reason and the part of the layout reserved for the monitor arrangement changes size depending on the connected/enabled monitors which pushes other controls around.
- Changing the monitor layout now requires an additional click to enter an edit mode for no reason instead of being able to drag the monitors around directly.
Meanwhile the it still doesn't remember settings when you disable and re-enable monitors and KWin/KDE itself still has tons of issues dealing with multiple monitors like moving windows around or opening windows on a turned off (but enabled in KDE) monitor instead of the one you are interacting with. And of course you can't script the whole mess with xrandr because KDE doesn't adjust the desktop in response to changes that don't go through its settings.
Other areas have seen similar pointless changes that are at best things I need to manually undo or worse live it until I resort to manually patching things to work like they used to. Honestly considering more and more to move to a different DE after over a decade of using KDE.
Not my experience with recent Plasma. Tried to migrate to it last month, but small bugs here and there ruined my experience and I went back to Gnome. For example, there was this weird annoyance where moving the cursor to the top left edge of the screen and setting it to open the Overview, my cursor would "bounce" on the edge and the Overview would glitch in and out quickly. There were a lot of these rough edges.
I love KDE too. I think macOS was never meant to be like that though. macOS is about opinionated design, where there's one way to do things and you have to go with the designers workflow philosophy or get frustrated. Gnome is a clear example too. The developers are always fighting users that want new configuration options.
KDE is all about configurability. Changing things to the way you want them to be. It's got lots and lots of options.
I was on macOS was daily driver for a long time. When I moved to it I was pretty aligned with Apple's workflow ideas and Linux desktops were messy crap (KDE 3 and 4 for example). But Apple changed their design over time and started rubbing me the wrong way more and more. Eventually I rediscovered KDE (5) and it was amazing to have my computer work the way I want it again.
This was an inevitable outcome. KDE is developed for being used. MacOS is developed for being consumed.
KDE is nice looking to me. MacOS previously had a huge advantage because of fonts rendering. It's probably still a bit better in this regard, but the difference shouldn't be that noticable today.
I still think macosx has a higher degree of well-thought-out consistency. Just the ability to use readline/emacs keybindings throughout every textfield boosts productivity enormously. Yes, I'm sure you can enable this via kde/qt settings, but I'm fairly certain this conflicts with the PC-like keybindings, and there is no way to shift all qt/kde apps to use super as the primary command modifier throughout the entire environment.
That's just one detail, but it shows a consistent eye towards the user that feels missing from kde. It feels like they aimed for "floss version of windows usability" and stopped there.
I'm not a fan of Liquid Glass at all, but I just tried KDE again and it's certainly not there yet. Breeze has a ton of weird design decisions, rounded corners in things like list selections that don't work, and even basic understanding for padding and fonts still seems lacking in KDE.
That being said, KDE is very usable. I just wouldn't claim that it looks more professional than MacOS. I'd love for that to be the case but it just isn't.
To be fair, "more consistent" if you only use KDE apps. Once you start adding other Linux apps, you end up with a motley crue of GTK 3, GTK 4, QT 5, QT 6, Electron apps with some dark, some light and everywhere in between. Consistency doesn't exist on any OS.
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.
I absolutely love the new macOS look. I am not certain why everyone is dogging on it so much. Tahoe may end up being my favorite macOS in the last decade.
sorry, but while it definitely looks better than it did in the 90s, it's neither a professional level design nor better than mac os. and you don't need to be a designer to see it.
those misleading hype statements are the reason why stuff like "this is the year of the linux desktop!" is a meme because anybody outside of your nerd/tech bubble will just look at you like you're insane.
I feel like naming everything with a “K”, like how some families name all their kids with names that start with the same letter, is the real genius of KDE. Who doesn’t 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.
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.
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.
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. It’s just about perfect 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’ve 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. It’s the single best desktop I’ve ever used.
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.
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 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 "exposé" 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 avoided KDE after first experiencing several bad dates with Gnome. Skipped straight to xfce or a tiling wm. Years later, decided to try KDE again because someone made an arch linux joke about it. I don't remember the joke, but it screamed "I use arch btw". That's when I realized KDE and I had something going on.
In fact, my Gnome-fearing worldview was reinforced just last month by my construction of samba/s3/sftp windows NTFS-LFS FUSE netshare vpn on my Proxmox server to solve this issue of multiple desktop environments for the last and final time. Compatibility with everything? No issue.
I achieved a monumental 2kb/s transfer speed, slower than the modem speeds I experienced in my childhood on dial-up. My 2kb/s supercomputer environment was remarkably consistent across all protocols. Thanks to the Gnome community, I was glad to hear that the speeds I was getting were apparently a major improvement since the last release.
Surprisingly, nobody has provided me with any file access architecture memes from the thriving Arch Linux PDP-11 community. Needless to say, having the choice of a desktop environment is great. And KDE is just happy I showed up with a cool ride.
I love KDE, I wish it was the more common and popular Linux desktop over Gnome. It's really usable and efficient, works great.
If it wasn't for Mac laptops insane battery life, performance, quality of build and trackpad, and amazing wake/sleep handling. I'd be on a Linux laptop using KDE.
I moved from Gnome to KDE around 2 years ago. I just got tired of Gnome extensions breaking all the time, Gnome not being customizable, no support for AppIndicators, etc.
In my opinion, Gnome's UI feels more visually polished than KDE, but that polish doesn't matter when functionality takes a back seat to it.
One extremely minor complaint I have about KDE is that I wish they'd rename "Dolphin" to something like "KFiles".
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?
[+] [-] sirwhinesalot|6 months ago|reply
For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.
[+] [-] GuB-42|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] distances|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] topspin|6 months ago|reply
It has. I believe this is a consequence of the 4.x debacle 18 years ago. KDE was doing great in the 3.x release, capturing a lot of users, and then everything went sideways with 4.x.
They recovered: by the later releases of 4.x most of the problems were fixed and 4.x was entirely livable. The KDE developers learned a hard lesson and have been very conservative since then. Since the release of Plasma (5.x) in 2014, KDE hasn't self-inflicted any great regressions or misfeatures, and now there is 10+ years of "polish."
It is very nice.
I too have used the "Window Rules" mentioned in the blog post. Very useful for game development where you want certain windows to appear at precise locations on different displays every time, day after day, for years. KDE just gives you features like this, whereas this is considered unnecessary elsewhere.
[+] [-] everdrive|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sunaookami|6 months ago|reply
Just look at the first screenshot, everything is misaligned, no visual consistency. The second screenshot is even worse. It's really not better than macOS but still better than modern Windows and GNOME.
[+] [-] MegaDeKay|6 months ago|reply
Yes, and this process continues. There are still parts of the environment that need attention or cleanup, but by reading Nate's weekly blog posts [0], you can see that they chip away at cleaning this stuff up week after week after week. And it is all headed in the right direction vs. not (looking at you, Liquid Glass).
[0] https://blogs.kde.org/categories/this-week-in-plasma/
[+] [-] atoav|6 months ago|reply
I don't say you can't produce things on smart phones, it is just a more restricted environment with things dumbed down, partly for reasons of target demographic, partly for reasons of screen size.
And thus the rise of mobile incentivizes companies ever so slightly to make the desktop more like their mobile counterpart.
In this space open source operating systems (or desktop environments) can be totally uncompromising. They don't need to nudge you into spending money/attention in places that are not in your interest. They don't bolt everything down and pretend to know better than you. In short, they treat you like an adult (producer) and not like a child (consumer).
And that is refreshing.
[+] [-] betap|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ActionHank|6 months ago|reply
Super solid, <3 for the KDE team and product.
[+] [-] rtpg|6 months ago|reply
I categorize KDE as the DE for people who enjoy using Windows more than macOS. Part of that involves just settings and functionality being more discoverable... which involves just throwing way more spurious stuff on the screen. And that makes it look less clean almost definitionally!
But well. More usable for me when I want to find how to do something I do once every 3 months without having to memorize the keyboard command for it (looking at you, macOS finder dialog when I want to open a hidden folder)
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|6 months ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] account42|6 months ago|reply
- It used to start with a reasonable size and layout, now it wants to start maximized for some reason and the part of the layout reserved for the monitor arrangement changes size depending on the connected/enabled monitors which pushes other controls around.
- Changing the monitor layout now requires an additional click to enter an edit mode for no reason instead of being able to drag the monitors around directly.
Meanwhile the it still doesn't remember settings when you disable and re-enable monitors and KWin/KDE itself still has tons of issues dealing with multiple monitors like moving windows around or opening windows on a turned off (but enabled in KDE) monitor instead of the one you are interacting with. And of course you can't script the whole mess with xrandr because KDE doesn't adjust the desktop in response to changes that don't go through its settings.
Other areas have seen similar pointless changes that are at best things I need to manually undo or worse live it until I resort to manually patching things to work like they used to. Honestly considering more and more to move to a different DE after over a decade of using KDE.
[+] [-] haolez|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wkat4242|6 months ago|reply
KDE is all about configurability. Changing things to the way you want them to be. It's got lots and lots of options.
I was on macOS was daily driver for a long time. When I moved to it I was pretty aligned with Apple's workflow ideas and Linux desktops were messy crap (KDE 3 and 4 for example). But Apple changed their design over time and started rubbing me the wrong way more and more. Eventually I rediscovered KDE (5) and it was amazing to have my computer work the way I want it again.
[+] [-] dandanua|6 months ago|reply
KDE is nice looking to me. MacOS previously had a huge advantage because of fonts rendering. It's probably still a bit better in this regard, but the difference shouldn't be that noticable today.
[+] [-] MangoToupe|6 months ago|reply
That's just one detail, but it shows a consistent eye towards the user that feels missing from kde. It feels like they aimed for "floss version of windows usability" and stopped there.
[+] [-] earthnail|6 months ago|reply
It feels exactly like the KDE website itself: https://kde.org/
That being said, KDE is very usable. I just wouldn't claim that it looks more professional than MacOS. I'd love for that to be the case but it just isn't.
[+] [-] mmgutz|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mrbluecoat|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hirvi74|6 months ago|reply
What is so unprofessional about the new macOS?
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] malthaus|6 months ago|reply
those misleading hype statements are the reason why stuff like "this is the year of the linux desktop!" is a meme because anybody outside of your nerd/tech bubble will just look at you like you're insane.
[+] [-] whatevaa|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kylebenzle|6 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] mikevm|6 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] DyslexicAtheist|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] notmyjob|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ahoka|6 months ago|reply
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thiagokokada/blog/main/pos...
[+] [-] kevinfiol|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] BoxOfRain|6 months ago|reply
One minor thing I love is how the old-school wobbly windows, desktop cube etc are still something you can toggle easily.
[+] [-] mcdonje|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ThePyCoder|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] christophilus|6 months ago|reply
These days, I daily drive Niri and love it. I love the workflow of a scrolling WM. I love that I can configure it via a single text file in the standard configuration directory, I love how lightweight it is. It’s just about perfect for me.
[+] [-] whafro|6 months ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] Chance-Device|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] brokegrammer|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] flkiwi|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adamkf|6 months ago|reply
(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 "exposé" 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.
[+] [-] _davide_|6 months ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] t_mann|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wiether|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vid|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] abhishekpathak|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sylens|6 months ago|reply
Now it is definitely my preferred Linux desktop environment as well.
[+] [-] smittywerben|6 months ago|reply
In fact, my Gnome-fearing worldview was reinforced just last month by my construction of samba/s3/sftp windows NTFS-LFS FUSE netshare vpn on my Proxmox server to solve this issue of multiple desktop environments for the last and final time. Compatibility with everything? No issue.
I achieved a monumental 2kb/s transfer speed, slower than the modem speeds I experienced in my childhood on dial-up. My 2kb/s supercomputer environment was remarkably consistent across all protocols. Thanks to the Gnome community, I was glad to hear that the speeds I was getting were apparently a major improvement since the last release.
Surprisingly, nobody has provided me with any file access architecture memes from the thriving Arch Linux PDP-11 community. Needless to say, having the choice of a desktop environment is great. And KDE is just happy I showed up with a cool ride.
edit: less neg
[+] [-] didibus|6 months ago|reply
If it wasn't for Mac laptops insane battery life, performance, quality of build and trackpad, and amazing wake/sleep handling. I'd be on a Linux laptop using KDE.
[+] [-] __aru|6 months ago|reply
In my opinion, Gnome's UI feels more visually polished than KDE, but that polish doesn't matter when functionality takes a back seat to it.
One extremely minor complaint I have about KDE is that I wish they'd rename "Dolphin" to something like "KFiles".
[+] [-] blenderob|6 months ago|reply