I'm very thankful to KDE - everything works, haven't seen regressions in ages. One DE aspect that hasn't kept up with the current trends is config backup/restore. I've got ansible scripts that bring a fresh F35 vm to maybe 90% of my existing golden-config setup, including data, but there are some corners which can't be blunted - mostly around multi-monitor setup. Still the best DE for me by far.
That said, I always remove `kf5-akonadi`, `calligra` and disable baloond (wish it could be removed but it's too deeply integrate).
Also thankful. For so many years I used Gnome and KDE apps exclusively because I wanted a uniform look. Only now, after many years of tolerating web-based UIs, and switching to i3 am I appreciating the KDE ecosystem. Generally every time I’m comparing apps the KDE one wins out. Dolphin (taken from a suggestion on HN) is the best file explorer that I’ve used. Okular is almost as good as Preview. If they had a signature annotation like Preview, I’d like it better. KTorrrent is great. I can’t believe I spent so long using the overly simplified Gnome apps.
I love KDE and you can pry it from my cold dead hands.
That said, KDE+Wayland have not been stable for me across a variety of distros and hardware configs (responses are anywhere between "impossible" to poiting at another piece of software in the stack). Akonadi self-destructs every other week and is unrecoverable (only on Debian stable has is been 99% stable for me). Kmail devs have taken out a few features (such as letting you configure the reply button to reply to all by default) with neckbearded argumentation. Both these are a pity: I believe KDE PIM software is a hair shy from being the best and most versatile PIM software on Earth.
It's the best DE+apps I have ever used, but completely perfect it is of course not.
Baloo can be configured to not index file contents, which only a bad distro would default it to.
You'd have a comparable number of bug fixes for any such big DE. It's just that KDE communicates on this. And if you look closer, the stuff being listed is often niche, not blocking or affects relatively new features. There are not a lot of regressions. I blindly update KDE these days, and use a rolling release distro to benefit from the improvements quickly.
At that size of a project everything will have bugs. With the current way we develop software it's unavoidable. If they're not stopping you from doing what you want to, then "everything works" is true.
I've tried to use KDE/Plasma for a very long time, but everything just feels... wrong.
I really dislike the layout of all their apps and menus, the sizes of icons and buttons are weird, I dislike the fonts they use, and generally just everything seems "out of place".
Having said that, I know you can customize the desktop and that's exactly what I've tried to do, but that has always resulted in such an unstable desktop that it's been nearly unusable, even after spending weeks on trying to fix things.
An easier solution - for me - has been to just use GNOME and install 2 or 3 extensions and use the GNOME Tweaks tool to set things up the way I like them. Recently though, I've switched to Debian and decided to try out the Cinnamon desktop and it's been almost perfect from the start.
I feel the exact opposite. After I dropped macOS (I hate the direction they're going into) KDE was a breath of fresh air. It finally gives me configuration options back and the Breeze theme is already there most of the way. Not overly wasteful in terms of space like macOS and not even close to being as restrictive as that. KDE is amazing <3
In contrast I really hate what gnome is doing. Opinionated software is not something I want on my desktop. The huge (touch first?) window title bars, hamburger menus, limited configuration options etc, they're all wrong for me. I'll never use it.
But this is the great thing about FOSS. There's something for everyone.
Same. I always really like/liked the Windows UX, up through and including Vista/7. MacOS had a lot of nice ideas, but ultimately I just want my computer to feel like "Windows but better". KDE is exactly that for me.
Also, everything in KDE (at least in the Fedora KDE distribution) amazingly "just works".
KDE has been an astounding revelation for me in how good FOSS can be, and I feel like no matter how much I donate, they deserve more than I am giving them.
I agree on GNOME, but the thing is that while KDE/Plasma allows me to change these things easily, doing so has always caused some issues down the line that have been a major headache. GNOME is a bit stiffer for sure, but using things like the extensions, themes and GNOME Tweak tool; you can fix all of the weird GNOME developer choices and get GNOME acting like a "proper desktop", without any issues down the line. But again, Cinnamon is my choice these days.
I did try to spice up thing with copious extensions and tweaks. But the problem is that you'll need to be on a fixed version then (no rolling OS) because every update breaks some extensions and it can take a while for them to be updated. It became a buggy mess. The tweak tool is better supported but even there if you have an issue the community is very happy to point out you're on your own.
That too, yes. It was never like this. Though it's still less bad than Windows which makes you jump through hoops to avoid logging in with a Windows account.
I'm a KDE user for a few years and I feel the exact opposite.
Anyway, do you use the GTK file picker? Or have you swapped it out, somehow? That's my biggest problem with gnome. I'm frustrated every time it pops up. It has a long list of bugs that have been ignored for 5+ years. The biggest issue being that it only offers list view, no thumbnail view. So, doing anything with media files is extremely irritating. But, for some reason, so many projects still use it.
My biggest pet peeve with Gnome is the attitude of the devs towards bug reports or criticism ("you're holding it wrong")[1] vs the KDE devs that acknowledge the bugs and work to fix them and add features the community is screaming for (after the infamous LTT video, KDE guys fixed the UX issue Linus complained).
And don't get me started on the infamous Gnome filepicker. How are the thumbnails going? To which the response from the community has always been: "this isn't a problem since that's not how Gnome users are supposed to use Gnome" lol. Ok Gnome, you do you, just count me and everyone I know out.
I find it a shame that such a toxic and user hostile project has become the default Linux DE on most distros today, while KDE keeps getting sidelined because people refuse to try it since they had a bad experience with it 10 years ago and seem to hold a grudge.
I'm happy Valve chose KDE for the Steam Deck, though it is the most sane choice for it though.
Yeah I agree. I don't pay much attention, but I've seen a couple of occasions recently of some small issue, like a website thing being resolved in a couple of hours. No drama. Hope it continues.
After a decade and a half, things might be moving on that front, if you're on GNOME.
With the whole portal system desktop Linux has been adopting, GNOME will eventually use a Nautilus-lite widget, with thumbnails. There's a lot of Nautilus-related changes coming in GNOME 43 but I haven't heard any official news about it yet, so fingers crossed.
That's good news for me as a KDE user who obviously run GTk apps and gets exposed to the GTK file picker too often. KDE made a very good job making GTK look good in Plasma with the Brise theme, the file picker is almost the only annoying thing (with the header bar that a bit too big, but that's not a big issue).
I just open files from the terminal or CTRL+L paste the path most of the time though, which works fine on the GTK file picker too, but the terminal cannot be a solution for everybody.
I've been using Debian / KDE as my primary desktop & laptop environment since late last century, and it's been mostly a dream. The 4->5 transition involved some frustration, certainly, but it was relatively short-lived. Compared to forays into Unity & Gnome the experience was, even during those dark days, consistently better.
Sizes of icons, buttons, fonts, window borders, etc etc are all customisable, so it's weird that was a sticking point for you.
As I said, I've tried to customize things, so how it looks is not a "sticking point". The issue is that once you start to really customize things, the desktop becomes unstable. For example, remove one application and all of the sudden the desktop might no longer work as it depends on so many things. I also don't feel like I should have to customize and work on the desktop for a few days just to make it usable. GNOME works fine once you use the GNOME Tweak tool, install a custom skin and a few extensions, it's just a few clicks done in 15 minutes. But again, my current desktop of choice is Cinnamon.
Aha, fair enough. Your original complaint was around how things 'felt wrong', and mentioned layout of apps, menus, icon sizes, buttons, fonts etc -- all things that are pretty easy to tweak using the System Settings.
It sounds like what you actually struggled with is breaking your environment by doing odd things with the distribution, which is an entirely different problem.
If you remove packages and ignore the warnings from your distro, you should expect unpredictable results. If you remove packages that don't incur a warning from your package manager, and the result is a broken system, then you should file a bug report with your distro.
I see you recently switched to Debian, but you didn't indicate whether you tried KDE on that distro. I've been on Debian GNU/Linux + KDE since last century, so I can confirm that this combination 'works fine here'.
> you can customize the desktop and that's exactly what I've tried to do, but that has always resulted in such an unstable desktop
Unstable is a strange word here. When you said you "customized", do you mean you installed new themes and/or changed fonts/layout via system settings? Or did you run third party scripts / various rando commands listed on forums?
I'm assuming he means "tried to modify the kde theme at all." I've run various distros (mostly arch now pushes bridge of glasses up nose) and incredibly regularly it's an absolute nightmare to set up. Like just using "get new stuff" to install a few themes and apply them will ask you which specific filename you want (I have no idea, there is nothing to help me know on screen). Then sometimes I have to restart plasma for the changes to take effect. Then compositing breaks and I have to change the compositor backend to make the process restart so my window previews work again.
I have worked through all of this and much more and my kde setup is baller now on all of my machines. But I basically always launch gnome, because it is a significantly more polished system.
This carries through to the mobile Linux experience as well.
Ah, I know what you mean - and yes I ignore themes/fonts/etc that require you to choose between files, and I don't download random DE hacks from forums or third party locations. My workflow is typically: Settings, [Themes/Styles/Fonts/Whatever], Install New [Thing], sort by highest rated, search for what I want, download a few, try them each out, stick with one and move on to next customization. It simply doesn't produce _instability_ for me (and I've done this maybe a dozen times over the past 10+ years, some time in the KDE 4 days) - though certainly, depending on the skills of the theme developer, some aspects may be janky. I think cursor changes require a restart (probably an X thing, and maybe no longer an issue on Wayland), but most of the rest are instant.
To each their own. The lack of customizability in Gnome drives me nuts.
Cinnamon feels like the best alternative to me as well, but it didn't work out of the box with my multi-monitor setup when I tried it a few years back.
I think it has become better over the years but as long as I can remember KDE has always had the "Designed but programmers that don't care about design" feel to it.
Years ago, with early KDE5, the KDE Visual Design Group was formed with one guy devoting a year for improving the KDE design with a democratic process. It was amazing to witness how quickly and efficiently the community iterated through ideas and nailed the details. I truly think KDE5 is a super clean, sleek, modern desktop environment mostly because of this effort. I always liked KDE, but the difference now to the previous version 4 is vast.
I'm exactly the same. I even force myself every few months to give KDE an honest shot, but i'm so comfortable with gnome+gtk with dashtopanel+popshell anything else is jarring and borderline uncomfortable. I always come back.
Me too. I think there is a lot of deep thought in KDE, but it's too open to customization. I don't mean settings, I mean visual changes, and that leads to it looking like an unpleasant jumbly mess out of the box, and I'm skeptical that further customization will make that better. And they got a lot of important consistency things wrong that Gnome mostly addresses, like selectable text (almost) everywhere.
Linux desktops in general horribly suffer from constantly reproducing desktops from a moment in the 1990s, where you have an anime background and some bright text on a dark background and you post it and everyone goes "ooh" and "ahhh" and "how did you do that." One glaring sign of this is design is called "art" rather than design. And you have a kind of mostly compatible Office suite (like a dog chasing after a car), one month you can do awesome actions in the file manager or have a live background but next month that's broken, and every month a new music player, as if any majority of people use local music and documents anymore. What an embarassing waste of time.
It's sad because great ideas abound, like KDE's semantic desktop (which is basically a decentralized version of what Microsoft is building toward), Unity's 3d desktop (which failed when all that neato stuff meant nothing), scriptable desktops, distributed desktops, all kinds of glorious ideas. However it turns out the infinite monkeys creating desktops get distracted easily.
They should start by deeply adopting ideas like design tokens. Here's another idea: give every widget and pane a unique identifer with version, and link them to the web using Linked Data, so at least the world of confusion support forums could feature some coherence, you could embed support in the widgets themselves. That would be a 2022 desktop.
Having used KDE 2, 3, skipped 4, and now 5, it's the most polished desktop environment I can think of. OSX is too weird and Windows is a hodgepodge of "GUI trend of the day". Not that either of those matter, since they're not FLOSS.
I tried the KDE spin of Fedora recently but it was just too buggy:
- Right click menus didn't open in the right place when using a second monitor
- Basic applications like terminal and Dolphin often took more than a second to launch when they should have been instant
- I didn't really like Dolphin and wanted to go back to Nemo. There was a nice setting option to use a different file manager -- great! Except Nemo couldn't launch any programs for some reason. (Double click and then... nothing)
I searched for fixes for all these issues but got nowhere. I posted a bug report for the right click problem and somebody said it was a known problem with qt upstream that was therefore unfixable.
I think KDE has a ton of really cool design decisions and ideas and I love the customizability, but ultimately these bugs were too much and I went to Fedora Cinnamon.
I prefer KDE to Gnome because it feels snappier and seems to prioritize functionality over aesthetics - and the aesthetics can be tweaked to look a lot nicer than the default.
btw since I use arch I get all the latest updates quite quickly, which is very nice
I recently switched, from using Gnome for the most of my life, to KDE when I upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04. I think the thing that pushed me to the other side was an article shared here on HN about Gnome File Manager and the broken toilet. It's been wonderful for the most part. I hadn't realised how restrictive Gnome's hamburger menus, full screen app launcher..etc., were until I switched.
As fate may have it, I have the version with an wierd Qt bug that doesn't let me install any extension or theme directly from the desktop. I have to download from the web, unzip into specific location..etc., after trying it a couple of times, I have settled on the default Breeze theme. It seems to work fine.
I like! The long-standing open bugs
(also in proprietary applications) are often a symptom of risk-aversion, which to me is a smell of
some kind of rigidness in the code.
It's above all the lack of available dev time I think. I don't think it says much about KDE's codebase. One needs to be aware of and get interested at one of these issues enough to take some time to look into it, most probably in there free time, and submit a fix.
LTT has certainly helped to force devs to "think" about the usability of the software with regards to "unwashed masses" to put it bluntly. the workflow that an expert is "expected" to know and easily get used to won't cut it for "normies" and that needs improvement.
stuff like flatpak has helped greatly to achieve that. Remember, earlier one used to have OS specific binaries, many would only offer token .deb and call it a day. otherwise you had to compile stuff...
the steam deck has exposed new people to linux who expect their systems to not break as much...
me personally have been running kde neon since 5.12 i think. once had to reinstall it. otherwise its smooth sailing on my dell latitude E7440 laptop.
minor quirks, like having to "open in konsole" an appimage instead of just double clicking it and expecting it to work has to be improved. or missing package in krdc in wayland session which i found out a few weeks ago. stuff like HP printer does detect on one machine but printer fails to print. "rendering completed" which on scouring the internet tells me to install HPLIP and even then i got nothing.
i think i can get the printer working, maybe. but it would take "time to research and look for fixes", exactly the kind of stuff that could be fixed by usability tests for example.
i dont think the "normies" should have to go and scour the internet for drivers and then spend hours learning HOW TO INSTALL drivers without breaking the system, why can't we have nice things?
take a look at this. Okular supports various document formats. suppose by default, OXPS isnt supported that one has to download its plugin. Instead of auto downloading the package after asking me "you are trying to open this .oxps in okular which needs a plugin, should i download and install it?" it says "no plugin found" or something to that end. correct information but not helpful. what am i supposed to do next?
i am not dissing on any work done by these great people, on the contrary i actively look for bugs and report on all major FOSS software that i daily drive but i have "experience" now, the next person does not.
drivers is a pain point. I installed neon last month on a PC that needed to use those cheap wifi dongles. they do provide a linux installer but apparently that broke the system so i am forced to install windows 7 on that machine because it isn't going to be under my supervision
> LTT has certainly helped to force devs to "think" about the usability of the software with regards to "unwashed masses" to put it bluntly. the workflow that an expert is "expected" to know and easily get used to won't cut it for "normies" and that needs improvement.
What's LTT? I don't think you mean Linus tech tips?
But I don't think every DE should necessarily appeal to everyone. That's the mistake that macOS makes. I like my OS and DE to be technical and configurable.
To pull it a bit more into the extreme end: many people love i3 but it will never be for "normies".
Not a fan of flatpak either by the way but I'm not even using KDE on Linux (I use it on FreeBSD) so I'm not bothered by it.
> i dont think the "normies" should have to go and scour the internet for drivers and then spend hours learning HOW TO INSTALL drivers without breaking the system, why can't we have nice things?
Installing drivers has nothing to do with the Desktop Environment :) But the OS underneath.
I would not think he has had such an impact on devs, though. On the KDE side, it's just that they've been caring about usability for a while and this video is relevant.
Oh it is, I didn't really think he would be relevant to Linux. I never watch him, he's way too much of a showman for me to have any kind of interest in him (and all the product placement is way too obvious and annoying). I'm sure he overinflated any issues for maximum "entertainment".
Still, I don't really understand why "Linux for the Mainstream" is such a thing people are hung up about. It will never be mainstream until someone dumps billions of bucks on it to promote it and bundle it with hardware, plain and simple. Just the step of installing another OS is enough to kill it for 95% of users. Even if it was fully automatic.
And in the process they'll probably dumb it down beyond recognition so it will be unusable for the people who love it currently. Similar to macOS which has become more and more aimed at the rich consumer that just spends time mucking about on facebook instead of actual "pro" users.
I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with Linux aiming for the small subset of users it has now. Why does it have to be huge? The bigger the less tailored to specific needs.
> I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with Linux aiming for the small subset of users it has now. Why does it have to be huge? The bigger the less tailored to specific needs.
I'd like to see Linux go more mainstream, because it's free software, and I believe free software is one necessary part of being in control of our computing, and would like everyone to be in control of their computing. It could be anything other than Linux, but that's the most promising path.
In this view, good feedback on about to be able to fit mainstream needs is good to take, and I believe it does not necessarily implies worse usability for today's Linux users like you or me. But I agree that having to install it is a barrier and money needs to be spent promoting it. UX wise, it's already quite good.
Now about LTT, I think this particular video is fine. About the whole channel, it's mostly entertaining, mostly geared toward gaming, there is no point to try liking it if you don't already. There are good things here and there but there are so many other interesting things to watch or do. SponsorBlock does a very good job of skipping annoyances like product placement on this channel though, I wouldn't bother occasionally watch LTT's videos by curiosity without it.
Frankly, read through their guidelines. And that's not even all, regular design decisions are publicly made on the bug tracking system and the mailing lists. A lot of care is given on this aspect. There are hints on it on Nate's blog too.
That's not a matter of personal opinion to be sorry about (?!) at this point. It's just plain wrong.
That these decisions are good at all, or lacking, is another thing, and that you don't like these decisions is also another thing. On this last thing, it's your taste, nobody can argue with this.
Now that everything seems out of place is probably a matter of habits too. But KDE does not "click" for everybody, and it's fine, as much as I would like it to spread more. Specific constructive feedback from the many people like you, for who KDE does not click, might help a lot.
How is this any good? The left (sidebar?) part and the right part (content?) are not aligned, the right part has all its controls placed without any concern about the looks. This is literally "okay we need the user to chose color at first, so we are going to put color picker at the top-center because it is hella important and then we a re going to place two rows of buttons at the bottom, because we need this preview window in the middle".
>Specific constructive feedback from the many people like you, for who KDE does not click, might help a lot.
I've tried. All I got was "go use macOS or Gnome then".
KDE may have great guidelines, but... it's not for me for sure. I loved all those buttons and customisations back when I was 20. Right now I what an opinionated (?) UI, that I don't need to customise but still get what I need (80% of what I need is fine) for less than 1% of my time.
General OS should have a UI that is simple and clean enough for my grandmother to understand and use. Without guidelines.
Gnome, as much as I don't like it's table-like spaced UI, does a better job right now.
I was answering to your statement that they don't put any thought on visual design. These guidelines are part of their thoughts about this. These guidelines are not for your grandmother to read, unless she is a KDE developer. Gnome also has human interface guidelines [1]. They also put a lot of thoughts in their UIs.
Now, maybe this particular screen could use some improvements (though I don't see how in the screenshot you link the right part is not aligned with the left part, there's a visible horizontal line materializing this alignment by the way), and many others too. I don't think this one is that bad. Anyway, you don't need to visit this screen and tweaks the settings in it if you don't need this kind of customization. The defaults are descent. Gnome probably does not even have settings for this (and that's fine). That does not take anything out of your feedback, that's the kind of stuff KDE developers need.
Overall my point is, you don't like design choices of KDE, or that they haven't managed to simplify everything / fix visual bugs yet, I can't argue with this. I understand your stance on the fact UIs should be opinionated and choose for you. That's a different philosophy that I car hear. Just, do not state they haven't put thoughts on this, because that's false.
> Just, do not state they haven't put thoughts on this, because that's false.
Okay, I can agree on that. I'll just have to agree that we (KDE devs and I) do not share the same views or philosophy regarding what should a modern UI be like.
That's not how it works. Every program that evolves also creates bugs all the time because of bad implementations, bad formulation, bad problem scoping, bad integration. If your project creates more bugs every week than it can possibly fix you can have these weekly bug fixing newsletter forever and at the same time accumulate more bugs than you ever had.
Look closer. Most of the fixes mentioned in this weekly update are small and niche stuff you don't encounter too often.
And nobody is claiming all the bugs are fixed. Quite the contrary. There is a huge effort on fixing bugs, but this desktop is overall quite stable. You can try it by yourself, but don't do this if you are happy with your current setup.
I haven't used KDE since the Plasma transition, when it got buggy, and according to most users' reports, stayed buggy for quite a while
I also jumped off the kde train after the 3->4 transition/train wreck. However, about a year ago I gave it another try, basically on a whim, and I was really impressed. Impressed enough that I haven't switched back to XFCE since.
I stopped when it became a dependency mess. Kwallet this, avahi that and disabling things broke other things. It became too much of a burden. I love the UI better than any DE but I stick to something like openbox or enlightenment these days.
I hated the whole Akonadi thing, where it used to spawn on login an whole MySQL instance to store mail and other metadata. These days with 64 GB of RAM it's not a problem, but I remember it was such a heavy piece of machinery for very little benefit.
It wasn't just the resource usage but the "attack surface" and the comfort of knowing what is running and being able to turn things off because you don't want them. Linux was always all about that control but the philosophy seems to have been lost in favor of mimmicking Macos and Windows
Akonadi used to be annoying, especially the baloo file indexer.
Nowadays, you can just turn off indexing with one checkbox. And it works quite well anyway. It got a lot better. I don't bother disabling it anymore. It does not even cross my mind. A few years ago it was mandatory. Probably also because I was using spinning drives.
KDE verions from 4.0 to 4.4 or so were very unstable. KDE 4.5 and later were rock solid.
First versions of KDE 5 were very lacking. It's now back to rock solid and much more visually pleasing and enjoyable to use than KDE 4. The Oxygen theme was very visually "heavy", its grey was quite depressing and overall did not look well. I would just get rid of it and switch to the Fusion theme. KDE 3 with its Plastik theme looked a bit more dated than Oxygen, but was way better. KDE 5's Breeze theme is perfect.
That said, I always remove `kf5-akonadi`, `calligra` and disable baloond (wish it could be removed but it's too deeply integrate).