Kde Is Now My Favorite Desktop

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

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.

Don’t get me wrong, KDE is a nice desktop in many ways, but it would benefit considerably from attention of a professional UI designer.

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

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.

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.

Can you go into more detail on "weird Qt dependency hell"? Is this from a distro packager standpoint, or a user standpoint ?

> 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.

    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. 

Even KDE1 and KDE2 were very good for their time.

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.)

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).

Plasma dev here, also happy to answer questions!

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.

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.

Are you using the standard Steam OS desktop mode, or installed a different linux distro with KDE?

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.

I used to mostly use XFCE and moved to KDE as it supported high DPI screens better.

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.

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.

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.

Xfce was my long-term desktop until recently. I loved that it was lightweight, clean, and generally well thought-out.

It has become more memory-hungry since then, losing some of its early advantage. And with the move to Gtk 3, it has adopted UI patterns that constantly get in my way. (Client-side window decorations, for example.) I worked around those changes as best I could for several minor versions, but eventually gave up the fight and switched to KDE. Turns out Plasma slimmed down a bit while Xfce was gaining weight, and it lets me turn off the bells and whistles that I don't want.

I'm happy to once again have a desktop that I enjoy using. I do miss Xfce's Thunar, but KDE's Dolphin is mostly not bad.

labwc + Openbox theming

https://github.com/labwc/labwc

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.

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.

You lose the application integration I have with KDE when you use apps from the KDE suite or even QT apps.

XFCE for virtual machines or low powered hardware

I’ve happily used KDE for years, but recently I switched to XFCE. My only real pain point with KDE was that the screensaver often refused to resume after the monitor turned off due to inactivity. To unlock it, I had to open a framebuffer terminal and manually kill kscreenlocker_greet before KDE would accept my password again, after a delay of ~10 seconds.

XFCE isn’t as polished as KDE, and I do miss some features, like KDE’s excellent network applet that shows detailed statistics. But overall, the experience has been good, and I really appreciate how quickly I can unlock the screen after a pause.

I also enjoy the wide variety of themes. KDE has plenty of impressive dark themes, but very few light ones, and most of those fail to clearly differentiate the active window’s title bar from inactive ones. XFCE does much better here.

(Some people point out that XFCE doesn’t work with Wayland. That’s not an issue for me. My time with Wayland was highly frustrating, primarily due to the unreliability of keyboard layout customization. After months of struggling, I went back to Xorg and good old xmodmap.)

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.

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 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.

I used XFCE for more than a decade and it's my first choice when picking a DE. Two major issues tempted me to try KDE this year: the lack of Wayland support and the absolute asinine file picker/ chooser dialogue XFCE took from gnome, if I remember correctly. Having a file picker that marks the text of the file name, but when you start typing switches to the search bar drives me nuts. (Even when you just want to drop a downloaded file somewhere in a directory ... why would I want to search in these circumstances??)

I'm keeping an eye on XFCE and they plan to release Wayland support some time this autumn. Once this is somewhere near stable, I thin I will switch back again to XFCE.

I had fantastic results with lxqt some years on an HTPC. System used less resources and seemed more stable with Qt. Perhaps GTK is better these days, but at the time lxqt was a clear winner for that kind of scenario.

For a daily drive DE though, it may be too minimal?

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.

LXQt with kwin (for kwin's nice compositing effects.)

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 wouldn’t think of it as missing out on anything. You just become familiar with the ecosystem of mostly terminal utilities.

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 recently switched from XFCE to KDE on wayland and I'm very satisfied with the switch. KDE is more stable, more customizable and at least as fast as XFCE. I don't notice significant resource usage from KDE either.

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.

> 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 that’s easy enough on all of them.

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.

If they're that excited within a week, the come-down from dealing with occasional annoying bugs introduced with updates might leave a bruise.

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.

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?

Would you consider dual booting and spending more time with games that _do work_ on Linux?

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. =)

You may have to wait some time as Mint 19 (2018) actually removed KDE support.

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).

There's no need to commit to either, you can install both alongside each other and pick one each time you log in.

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...

> Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors.

But enough about Mac OS Tahoe!