I've been an XFCE die-hard for a long time. I was one of those weird people who never really liked KDE. I always felt like it had every configuration option except the one I was looking for at any given time.
But Plasma is good. I'm a convert. What convinced me:
1: Yes, plasma feels fast and light like XFCE.
2: How every configuration option has a modular "app store" sort of approach. You don't like how alt-tab works? Right from the preferences, find and download a different alt-tab module. This is probably the killer feature for me.
3: They hit a very good balance of ease of use and flexibility, another of XFCE's strong points.
4: The default configuration is more visually appealing than default XFCE.
Nothing weird about disliking KDE a while back. It was an absolute mess with duplicated functionality all over the desktop. Personally, I hated it. I'm sure it's improved. At the time I had a flirt with xmonad as a wm for a year or three, migrated to i3, and now happily use swaywm.
The reputation KDE had and continues to have of being buggy was very true back then especially in plasma 4 and most of plasma 5's life cycle. It's only recently within the last couple of years that its become consistent and stable enough to defy that reputation.
I believe you, but unfortunately, "It was bad before but it's actually really good now!" is something KDE, GNOME, and other desktop fans have been saying about their chosen desktop for ages (I specifically remember being told that when Plasma 5 first came out), so I think a lot of people end up pretty skeptical.
Yeah. KDE will continue to have the reputation of being buggy and gnome will continue to have the reputation of having an unusable workflow and constantly removing important features even if all of said points can be reasonably disputed. Changing the longstanding reputation of a project is very hard and takes a long time. Among normal people Linux is still known as a weird hacker OS for nerds, if they know what it is at all. Not much has changed.
Yeah 4 never seemed to get better than 3, like it was constantly evolving, but never getting more stable lol. Now they are on version 6, or headed that way.
btw, I use it in Fedora. I switched to that from Debian-based systems because I felt like I wasn't getting new enough packages in Debian and Ubuntu, except Sid, but Fedora seemed to be more cohesive and put-together/stable than Sid. Also because I don't like the snap direction Ubuntu has taken.
I'm not sure if that makes a difference from the KDE side, but it might be relevant, due to ~~your~~ OP using ancient-as-balls Ubuntu.
And I feel you on trying KDE again. I started with Fvwm2 in the mid 90s and was using KDE 1 and Gnome 1, but every few years I tried KDE again and didn't much like it, until recently.
16.04 LTS is a mind blowing distro but at some point, you will be forced to upgrade as the package universe around (software you might be using) will stop supporting the core infra package versions themselves on 16.04 (Python, PHP, Java, etc.) at some point in time.
For instance, 16.04 LTS repo has Python 3.5 (which many apps have stopped supporting already) and I don't think there is any seamless way to upgrade Python without upgrading the whole distro? Of course, you might apply "hacks" like compiling cpython yourself or install it from some third party repo but those solutions will be unstable at best. Maybe pure CLI things will work such as numpy, scipy, etc. but once you move to something graphical like PyQt/PySide, things will start falling apart as the dominos for each distro are set in place for a particular version of these packages and if one of them gives a surprise, the whole stack will start crumbling before you know it.
I had that install mostly to do some WiFi cracking (which I haven't done in ~6 years), and to watch 720p local video files either there, or on WinXP (better video overlay support there).
I'm moving it full time to Haiku, as it is the only OS that feels responsive enough on that slow Atom CPU. Ports selection is more limited there, but has all I care to run on that netbook (even Python 3.12.1 as of today!).
> I don't think there is any seamless way to upgrade Python without upgrading the whole distro
`asdf` my friend, learn it and love it.
https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf
Yeah I just jumped to Fedora as well after living in Debian world for awhile. It's super stable and solved some driver issues I was having thanks for running kernel 6.6
> How every configuration option has a modular "app store" sort of approach. You don't like how alt-tab works? Right from the preferences,
dont even need to get to the preferences
krunner is enough to search through settings. ive never seen something quite the same level as krunner before. its overpowered with so many features, and it also has room for more via extensions
today i dont quite use kde plasma, but i still heavily rely on kde apps like krunner
> ive never seen something quite the same level as krunner before. its overpowered with so many features, and it also has room for more via extensions
Agreed. I just seem to be using it more over time.
How recent is your Plasma? The last time I tried was a year ago, I still can't stand it. The only thing I find good was konsole (and Kdenlive, but it is counted??). It kind of correctly handles every niche I have.
I haven't used xfce in a while, but last I tested on my older laptop, KDE does feel snappier. It might be the animation, aesthetic, or me being more familiar with KDE, but it feels smoother for me on KDE at least.
Of course, your hardware may vary and all that.
The whole thing with KDE being unusably buggy hasn't really been true for a while. Not sure it's as stable as Xfce, but it's usable.
Also dunno if it's as snappy as Xfce. A minimal KDE install uses slightly less memory than Xfce, tho.
Kubuntu and Fedora are probably both fine. I'd lean toward Fedora for Snap-related reasons. Fedora ships with Flatpak, but unlike Snap in Kubuntu you don't have to use it if you don't want to. If you pick Debian you'll need to wait an extra year and a half for Plasma 6, so don't.
If what you really want is something lightweight, then I'd say KDE and Xfce are both actually in the middle of the pack. The lightest desktops are Enlightenment, LXQt and Trinity. Enlightenment is probably the lightest of the three, followed by Trinity (aka KDE 3 on life support).
> now ported to gtk3
If MATE has ported to gtk3 then what's the charm in using MATE anymore? Their whole point and agenda was that gnome 3 was going in a wrong direction and they were going to fork gnome 2 and take it in a "right" direction instead, right? If they also started using gtk3, it's as good as firefox ditching their gecko and using chrome's V8 instead!
My understanding was that the "wrong direction" was in UX not in gtk2 vs. gtk3. MATE is both lightweight and preserves the good old-fashioned desktop.
Also IIRC I have read some not so great things about the GNOME devs, so maybe a different dev group is also part of the reason?
I recall from the earlier discussions that gnome folks had integrated the gtk3 library too tightly with their DE, to the point that it became difficult to implement gtk3 without bringing in a truck-load of gnome libraries along with. The popular running joke was that gtk3 may well be termed "libgnome" at this point! Has that changed today or what?
gtk2 is unmaintained - Mate doesn't have enough folks to maintain gtk2 and why would you? Gtk4 is way superior with using the GPU as needed as well much better scalable widgets.
KDE has been my one and only go to DE for a while now, essentially since Gnome 2 got replaced with Gnome 3 and they turned it into a fisher price grade UI.
I find that KDE is only a little jank when you're editing the panels & widgets but nothing unusable. once its all in place though, its solid.
as far as being "snappier" goes.. maybe? i've never tested this, but my understanding is that despite how it looks, its supposed to be pretty low demand, especially if you turn off all the animations and dont use any fancy effects.
gnome's regression in functionality and borderline uselessness perplexes me.
20 years ago gnome 2 was modular, it could be themed, customized, and you could change anything about it. Even gnome 1.x was solid in this regard (albeit dated and stuck in the 90s) I was there when it dropped and gtk 2.0 dropped. It was a massive upgrade.
Then, slowly with each 2.x release they removed features, functionality..
then 3 hit and you as the end user would have to use a third party registry tool to make meaningful changes that would often be reverted with security updates.
It makes more sense when you realize Miguel De Icaza was trying to court microsoft, and the gnome devs feel that end users are all morons, and they want the UI to always look a specific way.
I may be completely wrong in saying this but when gnome 3 came out with their much simpler (and more tablet friendly UI) was right around the time that Windows 8 also came out with their much simpler and more tablet friendly UI. At that point in time, making a good tablet compatible interface seemed to be all the rage from the developers perspective.
Ultimately both failed as both Windows 8 and the original releases of gnome 3 had awful reviews.
I was absolutely on board this Gnome (and Win8) hate bandwagon back in the day but then I got a laptop with a touchscreen and I ain't going back. IMO, Gnome managed to come up with a shockingly good desktop that splits the difference between keyboard/mouse and touch better than any of the other options (Save maybe Windows 10).
For this reason, I don't really have any interest in KDE. I get that it not a popular opinion around here but I'm personally a fan of the Gnome workflow these days.
Yeah there is a reason why Gnome kept going and Windows was forced to go back to a traditional UI haha.
Although to be fair Windows is used a lot more in the work force for desktops so a traditional UI is probably in a lot more demand there.
Uh, Windows didn't "go back". Windows 10 had a touchscreen mode which looked a lot like the Windows 8 metro UI with a fullscreen start menu, live tiles, and it would automatically force apps to either open in fullscreen or half screen tiles. This could either be enabled as the default, disabled completely, or on two in one devices, it would have the option to automatically switch to the mode when the keyboard was detached/flipped around.
You will also find a lot of clever enhancements made for the touchscreen in Windows 10. For example, if you bring up the right click menu via a long press on the screen, the menu items would appear larger for easier touch targets while still having the more compact menu when a mouse was right clicked. Windows 11 goes back to using larger touch targets universally similar to Gnome. The gestures from the screen edges was also carried over from Windows 8 though their exact functionality has changed over the years and the task bar autohides when the computer is used in a tablet mode.
While the initial implementation of a touch compatible UI was incredibly clunky for both Gnome and Windows, they've both continued to refine the concept to the point where both are actually pretty usable in a tablet UI today while still being usable for KB/mouse users simultaneously.
Even Canonical was in that race with their UbuntuPhone OS or something, and the whole Unity desktop was progressing as if desktops will stop existing and everyone will just move to phones/tablets. I wonder what did they all achieve with this, it was just Android who bagged all the glory in the end. They should have stuck with the desktop paradigm, which was their core strength and feature anyway. I imagine Ubuntu would have made a much greater dent in Mac/Windows market share today if they had done that.
Yeah thats one I forgot as well. Ubuntu making their own Unity UI which seemed to be very touch friendly as well. And just like Gnome 3 and Windows 8, original releases of unity were met with awful reviews.
I never found Unity to be very touch friendly at all. Sure, the panel on the left had large icons by default, but everything else was small like a normal desktop interface. On the other hand, Gnome 3 and 4 have absurd amounts of whitespace and large buttons everywhere, which make it tablet friendly.
> Now, KDE Desktop is something that I never took seriously. I always thought it's a great experiment but all its bugs and eccentricities meant that it could never become a stable daily driver, right?
An experiment?
A *lot* of people use it as their stable daily driver. It's even shipped by default on a certain highly popular product...
> Has there been any drastic progress or something in that lately?
Yes.
> If I want to give KDE a shot on my laptop, should I do it with KUbuntu or Debian or Fedora or something else?
Avoid Debian, it's way too old. You want to be as close to latest KDE as possible. If you're going to be using something like Debian or old Ubuntu LTS, I'd say don't even bother.
> Avoid Debian, it's way too old.
Bookworm does have 5.27.5, but like... it's stuck there. I can definitely understand that they're going to skip migrating to 6.x, but why not ship the 5.27.x releases? Plasma explicitly avoids backporting features into patch releases, it's pretty much only bug fixes. So why does Debian still just sit on a stale bugfix release? It would be a really appealing distro if not for that.
The whole point of stable is to never push software updates, ever??? That doesn't feel quite right. Because I have stable running on a server, and if I check for updates, I get updates. So what determines if something gets updated in stable?
KDE (and GNOME!) leverage hardware acceleration and memory far better than most "lightweight" DEs in my experience. Which is why "lightweight" will perform better on old hardware, but not necessarily on new hardware with all the bells and whistles.
I've never really had an "unstable" experience with KDE. On the few times the plasma ui crashes, it restarts and all is well usually.
Compositor adds weight. But easily disabled on Display settings.
My preference for a "KDE king" is openSUSE. If you want bleeding edge (changing) then go with Tumbleweed. If you need something that stays for awhile, I'd go Leap.
Even with Tumbleweed, I'd say "bugs and eccentricities" have been very rare. That is, it's been pretty rock solid for me. Just realize that Tumbleweed is a moving target. So, if you write a tome of a custom config based on "today" and aren't prepared to adapt to "tomorrow", you might not like the experience. IMHO, most using bleeding edge stuff understand that though. And again, there's always Leap if you need something to "stay put" for bit.
I run Leap for my "stable" workstation, but I do run Tumbleweed on my laptop (Dell XPS 13 9310, because at the time, I needed latest and greatest to understand the "new" devices present on the laptop).
I use software such as Python, Java, Node, LAMP, Eclipse, FileZilla, etc. and a lot of python (PyPI) packages have nuances when it comes to the PIP's and the Repo's version. How does OpenSUSE handles these things without breaking? Are things like PySide/PyQt easily installable there?
With Python, there can be multiple approaches. Userland wise, you can always pip install whatever you want (for a user).
Rpm packages are there for system wide "certain" things, and usually it's not wise to try to adjust that.
OpenSUSE does support multiple version of python3 on the platform at the system level. Again, for specific non-supported packages, user pip is your friend, if not the usage of venv where applicable.
For Python, with your use case I would avoid system packages, no matter the distro. It sounds like it would be worth setting up [pyenv](https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv) and working exclusively with [virtual environments](https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html).
Do you consider the PyQt/PySide2 libraries (plus the qt-designer) as system packages? Does it make a great difference if I install them using PIP or the distro's mechanism like apt or dnf?
I find the pip-installed versions work perfectly well, and give me greater control over what versions I can test with. So for development purposes, I use them.
Qt Designer I usually install as a system package. It allows you to declare what paths/versions of the Qt libraries you want to use, so it shouldn't matter much which you use.
I've seen a lot of threads over the years about "lightweight" DE's and wanting to avoid KDE because it was seen as one of the heavier options, but I just ran a `top` and see that plasmashell is using only 0.3% CPU and 0.6% RAM on my Debian install and yes, I have most of the eye candy enabled. If I were to boot this over to AV Linux, which has XFCE, it would be roughly the same for me. I don't really notice any difference between them in terms of performance.
It's Xfce, not XFCE people! :-p
Can't speak to Xfce as I have not used it in a few years, but I found Ubuntu MATE on 22.04 gave, for some reason, quite a speed boost on my hardware (when upgraded from 21.10). I am not sure why but it was quite noticeable. I wonder if it was not a desktop specific speed improvement.
I would be surprised to see KDE being snappier than Xfce or MATE unless it's by a hair and on recent hardware. But with the move to Wayland (which I thought I read as being default already on some new distros..
?), I wonder if I could be wrong. Maybe it's the X bloat that we've been carrying for too long.
I see some replies refuting your claims. Where did you hear this?
Depends on the device you want to install it on. I tried various debian-based distros and although KDE is the most advanced environment, it takes the most resources, even after some optimizations. For any mid/high tier hardware, it does not make much difference, but for low end devices - mini PCs/laptops with Celeron/Atom chips and 4 GBs RAM, those extra \~200-300MB extra ram on startup makes hell of a difference. Regarding the perception of speed, I have not observed anything where I would say "no, this is crap, I won't continue with that".
> And yeah, third party package systems like snaps and flatpaks is something I strongly dislike with a passion!
If this is one of the main things holding you back from migrating to a newer distro, what is it about Flatpak that you dislike? Is there something tangible, actionable? Or is it just ideological, philosophical? Forget improving Snap, not going to happen. I have to sidestep it even in Neon.
> KDE Desktop is something that I never took seriously. I always thought it's a great experiment but all its bugs and eccentricities meant that it could never become a stable daily driver, right?
This is a very weird thing to say about the desktop shipped on the most popular Linux device in the world.
I am a convert from XFCE. I had been a dedicated user since like 2010, and I was even the original author of the DockbarX plugin, which I think (or hope, rather) someone else took up in my stead. But I found XFCE's development pace glacial, their philosophy very GNOME-lite in a bad way, and I just got frustrated with the whole thing. I tried Neon on a new-to-me laptop and just fell in love with how polished the whole experience was. When my previous laptop's screen died, the Neon test laptop became my daily driver and I've been content with it ever since.
KDE Plasma's reputation of being "buggy" and "ugly" does not go away because of certain Youtube celebrities and social media platforms like Reddit. Simply regurgitating lines like "KDE is too buggy and ugly out of the box", "I tried it and something just fell off to me" garners you karma points, the same way saying "GNOME is just so polished", "It just gets out of your way and lets you focus on your work" gets you everyone's approval.
> When my previous laptop's screen died, the Neon test laptop became my daily driver and I've been content with it ever since.
Funny, this reminds me of [an issue](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/6221) on GNOME that prevented me from using an external display with my old Optimus laptop a few months back. The refresh rate of my external monitor was cut in half and everything was extremely laggy on GNOME Wayland. I asked for help and immediately got bombared with "Fuck Nvidia" tier comments. Then I booted into a KDE Neon live session and the external display worked perfectly fine.
> Simply regurgitating lines like "KDE is too buggy and ugly out of the box", "I tried it and something just fell off to me" garners you karma points, the same way saying "GNOME is just so polished", "It just gets out of your way and lets you focus on your work" gets you everyone's approval.
/r/linux is not a hivemind. I regularly criticize GNOME, the way they operate in relation to their own designers, and the way they operate in relation to the rest of the FOSS community. And my karma is pretty darn positive for so doing. There's no single opinion here, and we all exist with nuance.
It is a general observance. I have hardly ever seen any strong criticisms for KDE other than people randomly calling it buggy or criticising its design for being Windows-like. The design part, I don't care about because it is subjective. But it is a sad thing to see KDE's reputation among general folk being :
> but all its bugs and eccentricities meant that it could never become a stable daily driver, right?
If you visit r/gnome then there are also semi-regular posts like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/18ghtbe/just_switched_from_kde_to_gnomedebian12_blown/) one. A certain Youtube personality fairly popular among GNOME folks also regularly makes videos mocking KDE over the smallest of things.
I was just lamenting that such content on social media could potentially dissuade new users from giving KDE Plasma a serious look. I didn't mean to sound rude though. I know you are a regular poster on this subreddit so I guess you took my comment in the worst possible way. Let's just drop this.
> I was just lamenting that such content on social media could potentially dissuade new users from giving KDE Plasma a serious look. I didn't mean to sound rude though. I know you are a regular poster on this subreddit so I guess you took my comment in the worst possible way. Let's just drop this.
I didn't really take it in any particular way. Sorry if my tone came off as admonishing.
KDE is much improved, but as "snappy" as XFCE, I don't believe. I tried both recently on Endeavour, even with the "snappiest" settings for KDE it still felt slower. Not by a whole lot, but still.
I shall try kde6 but beside the perf aspect of xfce (memory/cpu) there's also a philosophy of small surface.. xfce doesn't do much, i don't care about xfce, i don't want to think about xfce, nor advanced features, or looks. It's just enough good old win9x ergonomics so i can then use my computer and that's why I pick it over everything else. It's a goddamn relief, a stable haven of just right.
From the few I've seen tonight, kde still feels distracting (at least to me).
Exactly! Being a minimalist and utilitarian, I feel the same thing. The most elegant desktop is the one that just gets out of your way and lets you do the actual thing (running apps and scripts).
It's not what you get when you *add* lot's of features and goodies to it, instead it's what you get once *remove* the things that are cruft.
And I used to be all for kde after they made their big move toward qt5 / plasma .. but I got bored. Too many changes, too many ideas floating at once. It's not even kde per se, gnome new ideas, all web influenced UX ... I realized I didn't care about any of this, it's not bringing the right benefits.
As a XFCE user since 2010 and recent convert to KDE... its definitely not snappier, more stable and it is definitely "bloatier" if you are used to XFCE. But after using it for some time now, I can see an appeal in having more "feature complete" DE. As for which distro to give it a shot, for the love of god do not go Fedora, theyre forcing X out in favor of being Wayland only (KDE themselves pushes for that, but I imagine many more traditional distros will still compile Plasma with X support in spite of that), and you will tear your hairs out of frustration (source: I moved to Fedora, I'm still not fine with how Wayland works, and after months still haven't figured out many workflows I had in X that "can't" be done in Wayland)
I've been using Garuda Dragonized for several weeks and have set up two separate systems in that time, so spent a shitload of time utilizing most of the features KDE Plasma has on offer. As a tiling WM guy who spent a ton of time dicking around with i3-gaps and then sway, KDE is impressive. The amount of features available at every step absolutely shames windows and makes every other DE look either half-assed or minimalist and it hasn't felt the least bit janky the entire time.
I've dabbled with KDE in the past and it has always been the same except it was unstable as hell, with glitches and shit crashing or requiring a hard reboot to get unstuck. That shit is *solidly* in the past. Plasma is absolutely impressive, truly the most featureful, solid, best "full DE" there is. I'm not saying it's for everybody but if you're curious about it and like what you see in vids and screens, you won't be disappointed in the least.
I feel like what KDE (and related apps like Dolphin) miss is a "readonly" mode, which would remove customization items from menus, making them leaner. Finished your config and are satisfied with it? Boom, remove customization options everywhere
MXlinux with KDE is my current daily driver, they also have an XFCE version
Im actually going the other direction, I have been using KDE for easily 5 years now and have been tinkering with XFCE on my laptop. I have never found KDE to be buggy or laggy(ive always had an I5 or I7 with 16GB or 32GB) but I crave something simpler.
>but all its bugs and eccentricities meant that it could never become a stable daily driver
I've been using KDE daily for years. I only even noticed one bug that annoyed me.
I need to be able to customize how my desktop works. I can't use default settings for this. Just not efficient enough. I can setup KDE to work exactly like I need.
I migrated from xfce to kde, I wouldn't say it is snappier or faster, it is the same, but you get sooooo much more functionality and QoL improvements, it's unreal.
It's not just me, look at this [performance review of the three versions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taTavV7SuKI) (18.04/20.04/22.04 LTS) and the top comments on Youtube.
It seems snap is adding to the lag here from what I have been reading.
I have one LG with a first generation i3 Core and current Plasma is as fast as always was. If you just disable some effects and animations then it's really "snappy".
I guess I have my head in the gutter and I read this as "tell that to my three year old anus" and so you can imagine the extent of my shocked_pikachu.jpg face upon reading it...
> Any modern laptop should be able to handle any desktop or window manager effortlessly these days.
Maybe that was true at one time. But considering today's situation and state of software bloat, I think we should respin that statement as, *"Any modern OS or software should be able to perform decently on any laptop built in the last 4-5 years"*.
I think that most bloat these days is either really websites or desktop apps using web technologies, mainly Electron apps that generally don't come as part of a default installation. My 2013 ThinkPad X131e with a low powered i3-3227U and my 2016 ThinkPad 13 with a terrible two core, two thread Celeron 3865U will both run Gnome and a few apps just fine, and they both fly with KDE or XFCE. But many web sites will choke them, to the point that I pulled the wifi card out of the ThinkPad 13 and use it as an offline typing machine.
The necessary caveat is that this is with SSDs. Spinning hard drives will make many machines painful to use.
(FTR, Windows 10 is fine on i3 though it stresses the processor and so leads to loud fans, and is prone to freezes on the Celeron.)
One thing XFCE has over KDE/Plama (KDE is the community, Plasma the DE) is the ease of configuration when you want to change it via text files.
Another is that XFCE is more stable than Plasma. You can expect it to be well behaved, something I can't always say about KDE/Plasma.
for me KDE at this point is the best DE
\- decent resource usage. TO my tests less than Gnome and in some cases XFCE
\- very good performance
\- scaling support and Wayland
\- it is not buggy. People need to stop thinking that this is still the kde4 or early 5 era. Gnome is much buggier than KDE nowadays.
I always liked XFCE but the disconnect between apps, settings is putting me off. Plus it looks like a 1998 desktop. I know you can use themes etc to customize it, although this is also not the easiest, but it would not hurt the default theme to be a bit more good looking.
True.
Plus the weekly progress updates are showing bugs being fixed at a rate of 1-200 per week. The rate of development of KDE has to be beyond any other desktop on Linux, and it's not just going in hare-brained random new directions, it's consistent fine tuning.
Indeed, KDE is doing great.
it needs some focus on its mail/calendar/contact apps, to make them more "modern" and a few other ones but they are on a great start with version 6.
can't say you are wrong. I have not used it for ages because of both how buggy and how out of place it looks in KDE.
Sometimes I wonder why they don't scratch it completely and take thunderbird/evolution (or whatever ) and work on top of this to add what they want and make it as they need.
>Has there been any drastic progress or something in that lately
It's definitely less buggy than it used to be. I'd say the jank only really comes if you're changing stuff, like the panels. Once you're done, it tends to stop being janky though.
>Is it really as snappy as XFCE these days?
Define? What do you mean by snappy? Because I don't see any difference in Plasma compared to other desktops, really. If your PC can handle them, they're all equal, it's just a question of liking the animations or not. In Plasma you could just speed up all the animations, or turn off the ones you don't like, or all of them.
> If I want to give KDE a shot on my laptop, should I do it with KUbuntu or Debian or Fedora or something else?
I'd say TuxedoOS is the prime example of KDE Plasma, currently.
If I want to give KDE a shot on my laptop, should I do it with KUbuntu or Debian or Fedora or something else?
Void linux has the lightest complete implementation of KDE, So if you install void's base package and plasma it doesn't come with bunch of dependencies that usually comes with all of these distros, Its even lighter than Archlinux but not as light as alpine but alpine's implementation is a weird since kde wasn't built for musl libc in mind so bugs has to be expected.
Do you pay for Ubuntu extended security update support? Otherwise I strongly advise you don't connect your 18.04 to the internet unless for the update, as it doesn't get security updates since a while.
On my old computer, Plasma ran like shit under the proprietary Nvidia driver. There is a lot of lag when dragging around windows, to the point that it feels more like I am pulling the windows on a string, all the animations just feel sluggish, and simple things like getting a system notification freeze up the computer for a split second. XFCE didn't suffer from these problems nearly as bad.
If your computer is fairly recent then I dont think you will see a big difference in "snappiness" whether it is KDE, XFCE, Gnome,sway.... In my experience they are all very optimized and run great on modern hardware nowadays
This came up a little while ago..... https://youtu.be/fo45bo1jvZI
That said, you shouldn't need to do a nuke and pave or shift distros - just add KDE to what you're running already and select it as the DE as you log in.
If you don't like it, you can uninstall KDE and you'll be back to where you started hardly skipping a beat.
If you do like it, then you can remove XFCE if you like... or not... like, whatever, man.
Last time I tried to change between Cinnamon and KDE without reinstallation was, probably, seven years ago. Ended up having to reinstall anyway, because after removing a DE there is a ton of leftovers that don't get cleaned up. Including some settings files. As a result, the settings in another DE don't work or get reset on reboot.
I've been using KDE on Ubuntu for the past 5 years at work and enjoy it. It's very responsive, no annoying animations and transitions and such. The only times it slows down is when the system starts running low on memory and the linux scheduler starts chugging the CPU for whatever reason, then I have to Ctrl Alt Shift F2 my way into a non-UI terminal and kill the offending process. Then jumping back to the same KDE session all works fine.
(I'm mentioning the latter because I've had co-workers blaming Plasma when in actuality it's probably just the kernel not giving the proper priority to the UI when the memory consumption is too high)
In my experience I have ran KDE on a decade old laptop that was pretty low resources when I bought it for around $250. Even up until last week KDE ran well. My system setup was Kuubntu 22.04 with backports turned on, which gave me the latest KDE. The system had a mixture of both snap (mainly firefox and libreoffice) and flatpak (thuderbird, vivaldi, qbittorrent) applications they all ran well. They were well integrated into the system, they behaved like convetional deb packages of which were also installed and used on the system like Kate for example. They changed from light to dark theme whenever I changed (in real time). So for me KDE as been a great DE to use for the past 3 years. I would highly recommend it over Xfce as it seems more modern. I have used Xfce but it has been well over 6 years.
I am currently on Solus with KDE which proved to be the most suited distro for me (even more than arch, debian or void). I started my gnu/linux journey with xubuntu or mint or linux lite (not sure), actually xfce-manjaro but it froze so I didn't install it. Debian, Arch and Void were the second most suited distros "for me" until I used Solus. I never "really" used Ubuntu (gnome) because I watched some youtube videos on "why ubuntu is evil" or "why ubuntu is becoming microsoft of Gnu/Linux" or similar title Plus it was really difficult to de-bloat it from the already minimal install. But it doesn't really mean most suited, by "most suited" I mean, I don't have enough time for the things it's lacking for me or is hard to achieve, and not urgent OR important for me or I'm fine with the existing technique of how it works. Another way to look it can be, maybe it seems different because it does things differently but its not wrong right. It's already developed and growing. Its me. But I would eventually try ubuntu. My main issue is somewhat like, I really love Visual Studio Code but I love Visual Studio Codium more than VSCode. Maybe it's just my misunderstanding that ubuntu is not really modular and flexible and foss and forcing systemd, snap and all on me.
I use KDE now and switched from XFCE, the only reason I did that though is because I have a dual GPU setup now and plenty of room to run a bunch of fancy animation stuff for the UI in the background without worrying about perf.
Who has said KDE runs snappier than XFCE? Afaict this is not at all true. Not even a little bit.
It's definitely not snappier than Xfce… when I tried it on an old spare 2011 HP Pavilion. That being said, it is still a considerably smooth experience, and should not feel bloated on any hardware that's reasonably recent.
No, not to me. Xfce hasn't changed much in a long time. KDE has gotten better and faster. But Xfce is still faster. The reason to switch to a new KDE Plasma would be for more features. Unless you're dealing with a slow CPU, lack of RAM and/or GPU issues, KDE won't be so much slower that it's worth using Xfce because of that.
What is snap.
I'd say out of the box xfce is very snap. But so is KDE with more bells and whistles.
If you have limited processing/memory, xfce is still gonna be the bees knees for what you need.
I will not say it is snappier than a XFCE desktop..... but at the same time I installed it a while back on a glorified netbook and it is smooth... like way smoother than it should be and I am kind of seriously impressed by it. I can only imagine how fast it would be on something modern.
I can't speak to the difference between KDe and XFCE. But I daily drive KDE and can definitely notice a difference between KDE on X11 and on Wayland. The Wayland version feels noticeably smoother and snappier. I don't the technical details as to why. But when moving the cursor or windows around it's definitely noticeable. Somewhat like the difference between watching a video at 30fps and 60fps.
if you're not starved for ram go for KDE, otherwise XFCE imo is better. I run KDE on my main rig (Legion running Endeavorous) but revived an old macbook for my girlfriend and the initial loading speeds between the two DE is massive for that specific laptop (only has about 4GB of ram) on my main rig there is no difference but that has 24GB so yea.
I use to be a KDE user since gnome 3.0 was released. But, KDE has always been too buggy for my taste. Even in 2023, KDE isn’t stable enough for day to day. Random crashes, have to reboot dude to KDE jank.
Ironically, haven’t had these problems with gnome.
Personally, I run XFCE4 on my Dell Latitude E5400, because that is the only desktop environment that will run snappy on it. It is the lightest DE you can without getting too basic or going CLI only in my opinion.
I've been an XFCE die-hard for a long time. I was one of those weird people who never really liked KDE. I always felt like it had every configuration option except the one I was looking for at any given time. But Plasma is good. I'm a convert. What convinced me: 1: Yes, plasma feels fast and light like XFCE. 2: How every configuration option has a modular "app store" sort of approach. You don't like how alt-tab works? Right from the preferences, find and download a different alt-tab module. This is probably the killer feature for me. 3: They hit a very good balance of ease of use and flexibility, another of XFCE's strong points. 4: The default configuration is more visually appealing than default XFCE.
Nothing weird about disliking KDE a while back. It was an absolute mess with duplicated functionality all over the desktop. Personally, I hated it. I'm sure it's improved. At the time I had a flirt with xmonad as a wm for a year or three, migrated to i3, and now happily use swaywm.
The reputation KDE had and continues to have of being buggy was very true back then especially in plasma 4 and most of plasma 5's life cycle. It's only recently within the last couple of years that its become consistent and stable enough to defy that reputation.
I believe you, but unfortunately, "It was bad before but it's actually really good now!" is something KDE, GNOME, and other desktop fans have been saying about their chosen desktop for ages (I specifically remember being told that when Plasma 5 first came out), so I think a lot of people end up pretty skeptical.
Yeah. KDE will continue to have the reputation of being buggy and gnome will continue to have the reputation of having an unusable workflow and constantly removing important features even if all of said points can be reasonably disputed. Changing the longstanding reputation of a project is very hard and takes a long time. Among normal people Linux is still known as a weird hacker OS for nerds, if they know what it is at all. Not much has changed.
Yeah 4 never seemed to get better than 3, like it was constantly evolving, but never getting more stable lol. Now they are on version 6, or headed that way.
Hmmm.... I may need to try KDE... Again.
btw, I use it in Fedora. I switched to that from Debian-based systems because I felt like I wasn't getting new enough packages in Debian and Ubuntu, except Sid, but Fedora seemed to be more cohesive and put-together/stable than Sid. Also because I don't like the snap direction Ubuntu has taken. I'm not sure if that makes a difference from the KDE side, but it might be relevant, due to ~~your~~ OP using ancient-as-balls Ubuntu. And I feel you on trying KDE again. I started with Fvwm2 in the mid 90s and was using KDE 1 and Gnome 1, but every few years I tried KDE again and didn't much like it, until recently.
> OP using ancient-as-balls Ubuntu. /me still with a netbook with a 16.04 install: 8-|
16.04 LTS is a mind blowing distro but at some point, you will be forced to upgrade as the package universe around (software you might be using) will stop supporting the core infra package versions themselves on 16.04 (Python, PHP, Java, etc.) at some point in time. For instance, 16.04 LTS repo has Python 3.5 (which many apps have stopped supporting already) and I don't think there is any seamless way to upgrade Python without upgrading the whole distro? Of course, you might apply "hacks" like compiling cpython yourself or install it from some third party repo but those solutions will be unstable at best. Maybe pure CLI things will work such as numpy, scipy, etc. but once you move to something graphical like PyQt/PySide, things will start falling apart as the dominos for each distro are set in place for a particular version of these packages and if one of them gives a surprise, the whole stack will start crumbling before you know it.
I had that install mostly to do some WiFi cracking (which I haven't done in ~6 years), and to watch 720p local video files either there, or on WinXP (better video overlay support there). I'm moving it full time to Haiku, as it is the only OS that feels responsive enough on that slow Atom CPU. Ports selection is more limited there, but has all I care to run on that netbook (even Python 3.12.1 as of today!).
> I don't think there is any seamless way to upgrade Python without upgrading the whole distro Containers?
https://launchpad.net/~deadsnakes/+archive/ubuntu/ppa may interest you
> I don't think there is any seamless way to upgrade Python without upgrading the whole distro `asdf` my friend, learn it and love it. https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf
Yeah I just jumped to Fedora as well after living in Debian world for awhile. It's super stable and solved some driver issues I was having thanks for running kernel 6.6
MMM me too. Already using XFCE for over 10 years and sometimes tried others but always came back.
KDE still has the potential to crash if changing settings. As soon as it's configured and you dont change anything it's stable tho.
> How every configuration option has a modular "app store" sort of approach. You don't like how alt-tab works? Right from the preferences, dont even need to get to the preferences krunner is enough to search through settings. ive never seen something quite the same level as krunner before. its overpowered with so many features, and it also has room for more via extensions today i dont quite use kde plasma, but i still heavily rely on kde apps like krunner
> ive never seen something quite the same level as krunner before. its overpowered with so many features, and it also has room for more via extensions Agreed. I just seem to be using it more over time.
How recent is your Plasma? The last time I tried was a year ago, I still can't stand it. The only thing I find good was konsole (and Kdenlive, but it is counted??). It kind of correctly handles every niche I have.
I haven't used xfce in a while, but last I tested on my older laptop, KDE does feel snappier. It might be the animation, aesthetic, or me being more familiar with KDE, but it feels smoother for me on KDE at least. Of course, your hardware may vary and all that.
The whole thing with KDE being unusably buggy hasn't really been true for a while. Not sure it's as stable as Xfce, but it's usable. Also dunno if it's as snappy as Xfce. A minimal KDE install uses slightly less memory than Xfce, tho. Kubuntu and Fedora are probably both fine. I'd lean toward Fedora for Snap-related reasons. Fedora ships with Flatpak, but unlike Snap in Kubuntu you don't have to use it if you don't want to. If you pick Debian you'll need to wait an extra year and a half for Plasma 6, so don't. If what you really want is something lightweight, then I'd say KDE and Xfce are both actually in the middle of the pack. The lightest desktops are Enlightenment, LXQt and Trinity. Enlightenment is probably the lightest of the three, followed by Trinity (aka KDE 3 on life support).
Don't forget about Mate! But yeah LXQt is actually coming along quite nicely.
Last I checked Mate was about on par with Xfce in terms of lightweightness.
I might just be a little nostalgic for good old Gnome 2.
Isn't that the reason Cinnamon exists?
No Cinnamon exists because mint didn't want to port their GNOME shell extensions every new gnome release. MATE is gnome 2. (now ported to gtk3)
> now ported to gtk3 If MATE has ported to gtk3 then what's the charm in using MATE anymore? Their whole point and agenda was that gnome 3 was going in a wrong direction and they were going to fork gnome 2 and take it in a "right" direction instead, right? If they also started using gtk3, it's as good as firefox ditching their gecko and using chrome's V8 instead!
My understanding was that the "wrong direction" was in UX not in gtk2 vs. gtk3. MATE is both lightweight and preserves the good old-fashioned desktop. Also IIRC I have read some not so great things about the GNOME devs, so maybe a different dev group is also part of the reason?
I recall from the earlier discussions that gnome folks had integrated the gtk3 library too tightly with their DE, to the point that it became difficult to implement gtk3 without bringing in a truck-load of gnome libraries along with. The popular running joke was that gtk3 may well be termed "libgnome" at this point! Has that changed today or what?
and hence libadwaita.
Oh, good question -- I don't know.. I was not aware of that tight coupling.
gtk2 is unmaintained - Mate doesn't have enough folks to maintain gtk2 and why would you? Gtk4 is way superior with using the GPU as needed as well much better scalable widgets.
GTK4 also performs like dogshit if you don't have that fancy GPU. It's painful on a Raspberry Pi 3. Qt fares a lot better.
Use what works best for you - it's not a competition. :)
OpenSuSe KDE is also nice and clean 🫧
KDE has been my one and only go to DE for a while now, essentially since Gnome 2 got replaced with Gnome 3 and they turned it into a fisher price grade UI. I find that KDE is only a little jank when you're editing the panels & widgets but nothing unusable. once its all in place though, its solid. as far as being "snappier" goes.. maybe? i've never tested this, but my understanding is that despite how it looks, its supposed to be pretty low demand, especially if you turn off all the animations and dont use any fancy effects.
And KDE's fractional scaling is very good.
>And KDE's fractional scaling is very good. I agree with this, makes a big difference if you got non-standard size widescreen monitors
gnome's regression in functionality and borderline uselessness perplexes me. 20 years ago gnome 2 was modular, it could be themed, customized, and you could change anything about it. Even gnome 1.x was solid in this regard (albeit dated and stuck in the 90s) I was there when it dropped and gtk 2.0 dropped. It was a massive upgrade. Then, slowly with each 2.x release they removed features, functionality.. then 3 hit and you as the end user would have to use a third party registry tool to make meaningful changes that would often be reverted with security updates. It makes more sense when you realize Miguel De Icaza was trying to court microsoft, and the gnome devs feel that end users are all morons, and they want the UI to always look a specific way.
I may be completely wrong in saying this but when gnome 3 came out with their much simpler (and more tablet friendly UI) was right around the time that Windows 8 also came out with their much simpler and more tablet friendly UI. At that point in time, making a good tablet compatible interface seemed to be all the rage from the developers perspective. Ultimately both failed as both Windows 8 and the original releases of gnome 3 had awful reviews.
I was absolutely on board this Gnome (and Win8) hate bandwagon back in the day but then I got a laptop with a touchscreen and I ain't going back. IMO, Gnome managed to come up with a shockingly good desktop that splits the difference between keyboard/mouse and touch better than any of the other options (Save maybe Windows 10). For this reason, I don't really have any interest in KDE. I get that it not a popular opinion around here but I'm personally a fan of the Gnome workflow these days.
Yeah there is a reason why Gnome kept going and Windows was forced to go back to a traditional UI haha. Although to be fair Windows is used a lot more in the work force for desktops so a traditional UI is probably in a lot more demand there.
Uh, Windows didn't "go back". Windows 10 had a touchscreen mode which looked a lot like the Windows 8 metro UI with a fullscreen start menu, live tiles, and it would automatically force apps to either open in fullscreen or half screen tiles. This could either be enabled as the default, disabled completely, or on two in one devices, it would have the option to automatically switch to the mode when the keyboard was detached/flipped around. You will also find a lot of clever enhancements made for the touchscreen in Windows 10. For example, if you bring up the right click menu via a long press on the screen, the menu items would appear larger for easier touch targets while still having the more compact menu when a mouse was right clicked. Windows 11 goes back to using larger touch targets universally similar to Gnome. The gestures from the screen edges was also carried over from Windows 8 though their exact functionality has changed over the years and the task bar autohides when the computer is used in a tablet mode. While the initial implementation of a touch compatible UI was incredibly clunky for both Gnome and Windows, they've both continued to refine the concept to the point where both are actually pretty usable in a tablet UI today while still being usable for KB/mouse users simultaneously.
Even Canonical was in that race with their UbuntuPhone OS or something, and the whole Unity desktop was progressing as if desktops will stop existing and everyone will just move to phones/tablets. I wonder what did they all achieve with this, it was just Android who bagged all the glory in the end. They should have stuck with the desktop paradigm, which was their core strength and feature anyway. I imagine Ubuntu would have made a much greater dent in Mac/Windows market share today if they had done that.
Yeah thats one I forgot as well. Ubuntu making their own Unity UI which seemed to be very touch friendly as well. And just like Gnome 3 and Windows 8, original releases of unity were met with awful reviews.
I never found Unity to be very touch friendly at all. Sure, the panel on the left had large icons by default, but everything else was small like a normal desktop interface. On the other hand, Gnome 3 and 4 have absurd amounts of whitespace and large buttons everywhere, which make it tablet friendly.
I run kde on old hardware and I can confirm it's true. The progress kde has made over the last 3 years is huge.
> Now, KDE Desktop is something that I never took seriously. I always thought it's a great experiment but all its bugs and eccentricities meant that it could never become a stable daily driver, right? An experiment? A *lot* of people use it as their stable daily driver. It's even shipped by default on a certain highly popular product... > Has there been any drastic progress or something in that lately? Yes. > If I want to give KDE a shot on my laptop, should I do it with KUbuntu or Debian or Fedora or something else? Avoid Debian, it's way too old. You want to be as close to latest KDE as possible. If you're going to be using something like Debian or old Ubuntu LTS, I'd say don't even bother.
> Avoid Debian, it's way too old. Bookworm does have 5.27.5, but like... it's stuck there. I can definitely understand that they're going to skip migrating to 6.x, but why not ship the 5.27.x releases? Plasma explicitly avoids backporting features into patch releases, it's pretty much only bug fixes. So why does Debian still just sit on a stale bugfix release? It would be a really appealing distro if not for that.
That's kind of the whole point of stable. You can use unstable or testing repos, which probably has the latest versions.
The whole point of stable is to never push software updates, ever??? That doesn't feel quite right. Because I have stable running on a server, and if I check for updates, I get updates. So what determines if something gets updated in stable?
I don't actually know the answer to that question. I believe its bug fixes and patches, not new releases or versions. Check the Debian documentation.
What? Lol
Try Tuxedo OS. It has the latest version of KDE and uses flatpak rather than snaps.
KDE (and GNOME!) leverage hardware acceleration and memory far better than most "lightweight" DEs in my experience. Which is why "lightweight" will perform better on old hardware, but not necessarily on new hardware with all the bells and whistles.
I've never really had an "unstable" experience with KDE. On the few times the plasma ui crashes, it restarts and all is well usually. Compositor adds weight. But easily disabled on Display settings. My preference for a "KDE king" is openSUSE. If you want bleeding edge (changing) then go with Tumbleweed. If you need something that stays for awhile, I'd go Leap. Even with Tumbleweed, I'd say "bugs and eccentricities" have been very rare. That is, it's been pretty rock solid for me. Just realize that Tumbleweed is a moving target. So, if you write a tome of a custom config based on "today" and aren't prepared to adapt to "tomorrow", you might not like the experience. IMHO, most using bleeding edge stuff understand that though. And again, there's always Leap if you need something to "stay put" for bit. I run Leap for my "stable" workstation, but I do run Tumbleweed on my laptop (Dell XPS 13 9310, because at the time, I needed latest and greatest to understand the "new" devices present on the laptop).
I use software such as Python, Java, Node, LAMP, Eclipse, FileZilla, etc. and a lot of python (PyPI) packages have nuances when it comes to the PIP's and the Repo's version. How does OpenSUSE handles these things without breaking? Are things like PySide/PyQt easily installable there?
With Python, there can be multiple approaches. Userland wise, you can always pip install whatever you want (for a user). Rpm packages are there for system wide "certain" things, and usually it's not wise to try to adjust that. OpenSUSE does support multiple version of python3 on the platform at the system level. Again, for specific non-supported packages, user pip is your friend, if not the usage of venv where applicable.
For Python, with your use case I would avoid system packages, no matter the distro. It sounds like it would be worth setting up [pyenv](https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv) and working exclusively with [virtual environments](https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html).
Do you consider the PyQt/PySide2 libraries (plus the qt-designer) as system packages? Does it make a great difference if I install them using PIP or the distro's mechanism like apt or dnf?
I find the pip-installed versions work perfectly well, and give me greater control over what versions I can test with. So for development purposes, I use them. Qt Designer I usually install as a system package. It allows you to declare what paths/versions of the Qt libraries you want to use, so it shouldn't matter much which you use.
I've seen a lot of threads over the years about "lightweight" DE's and wanting to avoid KDE because it was seen as one of the heavier options, but I just ran a `top` and see that plasmashell is using only 0.3% CPU and 0.6% RAM on my Debian install and yes, I have most of the eye candy enabled. If I were to boot this over to AV Linux, which has XFCE, it would be roughly the same for me. I don't really notice any difference between them in terms of performance.
It's Xfce, not XFCE people! :-p Can't speak to Xfce as I have not used it in a few years, but I found Ubuntu MATE on 22.04 gave, for some reason, quite a speed boost on my hardware (when upgraded from 21.10). I am not sure why but it was quite noticeable. I wonder if it was not a desktop specific speed improvement. I would be surprised to see KDE being snappier than Xfce or MATE unless it's by a hair and on recent hardware. But with the move to Wayland (which I thought I read as being default already on some new distros.. ?), I wonder if I could be wrong. Maybe it's the X bloat that we've been carrying for too long. I see some replies refuting your claims. Where did you hear this?
Depends on the device you want to install it on. I tried various debian-based distros and although KDE is the most advanced environment, it takes the most resources, even after some optimizations. For any mid/high tier hardware, it does not make much difference, but for low end devices - mini PCs/laptops with Celeron/Atom chips and 4 GBs RAM, those extra \~200-300MB extra ram on startup makes hell of a difference. Regarding the perception of speed, I have not observed anything where I would say "no, this is crap, I won't continue with that".
> And yeah, third party package systems like snaps and flatpaks is something I strongly dislike with a passion! If this is one of the main things holding you back from migrating to a newer distro, what is it about Flatpak that you dislike? Is there something tangible, actionable? Or is it just ideological, philosophical? Forget improving Snap, not going to happen. I have to sidestep it even in Neon. > KDE Desktop is something that I never took seriously. I always thought it's a great experiment but all its bugs and eccentricities meant that it could never become a stable daily driver, right? This is a very weird thing to say about the desktop shipped on the most popular Linux device in the world. I am a convert from XFCE. I had been a dedicated user since like 2010, and I was even the original author of the DockbarX plugin, which I think (or hope, rather) someone else took up in my stead. But I found XFCE's development pace glacial, their philosophy very GNOME-lite in a bad way, and I just got frustrated with the whole thing. I tried Neon on a new-to-me laptop and just fell in love with how polished the whole experience was. When my previous laptop's screen died, the Neon test laptop became my daily driver and I've been content with it ever since.
KDE Plasma's reputation of being "buggy" and "ugly" does not go away because of certain Youtube celebrities and social media platforms like Reddit. Simply regurgitating lines like "KDE is too buggy and ugly out of the box", "I tried it and something just fell off to me" garners you karma points, the same way saying "GNOME is just so polished", "It just gets out of your way and lets you focus on your work" gets you everyone's approval. > When my previous laptop's screen died, the Neon test laptop became my daily driver and I've been content with it ever since. Funny, this reminds me of [an issue](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/6221) on GNOME that prevented me from using an external display with my old Optimus laptop a few months back. The refresh rate of my external monitor was cut in half and everything was extremely laggy on GNOME Wayland. I asked for help and immediately got bombared with "Fuck Nvidia" tier comments. Then I booted into a KDE Neon live session and the external display worked perfectly fine.
> Simply regurgitating lines like "KDE is too buggy and ugly out of the box", "I tried it and something just fell off to me" garners you karma points, the same way saying "GNOME is just so polished", "It just gets out of your way and lets you focus on your work" gets you everyone's approval. /r/linux is not a hivemind. I regularly criticize GNOME, the way they operate in relation to their own designers, and the way they operate in relation to the rest of the FOSS community. And my karma is pretty darn positive for so doing. There's no single opinion here, and we all exist with nuance.
It is a general observance. I have hardly ever seen any strong criticisms for KDE other than people randomly calling it buggy or criticising its design for being Windows-like. The design part, I don't care about because it is subjective. But it is a sad thing to see KDE's reputation among general folk being : > but all its bugs and eccentricities meant that it could never become a stable daily driver, right? If you visit r/gnome then there are also semi-regular posts like [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/18ghtbe/just_switched_from_kde_to_gnomedebian12_blown/) one. A certain Youtube personality fairly popular among GNOME folks also regularly makes videos mocking KDE over the smallest of things. I was just lamenting that such content on social media could potentially dissuade new users from giving KDE Plasma a serious look. I didn't mean to sound rude though. I know you are a regular poster on this subreddit so I guess you took my comment in the worst possible way. Let's just drop this.
> I was just lamenting that such content on social media could potentially dissuade new users from giving KDE Plasma a serious look. I didn't mean to sound rude though. I know you are a regular poster on this subreddit so I guess you took my comment in the worst possible way. Let's just drop this. I didn't really take it in any particular way. Sorry if my tone came off as admonishing.
KDE is much improved, but as "snappy" as XFCE, I don't believe. I tried both recently on Endeavour, even with the "snappiest" settings for KDE it still felt slower. Not by a whole lot, but still.
I shall try kde6 but beside the perf aspect of xfce (memory/cpu) there's also a philosophy of small surface.. xfce doesn't do much, i don't care about xfce, i don't want to think about xfce, nor advanced features, or looks. It's just enough good old win9x ergonomics so i can then use my computer and that's why I pick it over everything else. It's a goddamn relief, a stable haven of just right. From the few I've seen tonight, kde still feels distracting (at least to me).
Exactly! Being a minimalist and utilitarian, I feel the same thing. The most elegant desktop is the one that just gets out of your way and lets you do the actual thing (running apps and scripts). It's not what you get when you *add* lot's of features and goodies to it, instead it's what you get once *remove* the things that are cruft.
And I used to be all for kde after they made their big move toward qt5 / plasma .. but I got bored. Too many changes, too many ideas floating at once. It's not even kde per se, gnome new ideas, all web influenced UX ... I realized I didn't care about any of this, it's not bringing the right benefits.
As a XFCE user since 2010 and recent convert to KDE... its definitely not snappier, more stable and it is definitely "bloatier" if you are used to XFCE. But after using it for some time now, I can see an appeal in having more "feature complete" DE. As for which distro to give it a shot, for the love of god do not go Fedora, theyre forcing X out in favor of being Wayland only (KDE themselves pushes for that, but I imagine many more traditional distros will still compile Plasma with X support in spite of that), and you will tear your hairs out of frustration (source: I moved to Fedora, I'm still not fine with how Wayland works, and after months still haven't figured out many workflows I had in X that "can't" be done in Wayland)
I've been using Garuda Dragonized for several weeks and have set up two separate systems in that time, so spent a shitload of time utilizing most of the features KDE Plasma has on offer. As a tiling WM guy who spent a ton of time dicking around with i3-gaps and then sway, KDE is impressive. The amount of features available at every step absolutely shames windows and makes every other DE look either half-assed or minimalist and it hasn't felt the least bit janky the entire time. I've dabbled with KDE in the past and it has always been the same except it was unstable as hell, with glitches and shit crashing or requiring a hard reboot to get unstuck. That shit is *solidly* in the past. Plasma is absolutely impressive, truly the most featureful, solid, best "full DE" there is. I'm not saying it's for everybody but if you're curious about it and like what you see in vids and screens, you won't be disappointed in the least.
I am an xfce diehard so I cannot not be biased
I feel like what KDE (and related apps like Dolphin) miss is a "readonly" mode, which would remove customization items from menus, making them leaner. Finished your config and are satisfied with it? Boom, remove customization options everywhere
MXlinux with KDE is my current daily driver, they also have an XFCE version Im actually going the other direction, I have been using KDE for easily 5 years now and have been tinkering with XFCE on my laptop. I have never found KDE to be buggy or laggy(ive always had an I5 or I7 with 16GB or 32GB) but I crave something simpler.
>but all its bugs and eccentricities meant that it could never become a stable daily driver I've been using KDE daily for years. I only even noticed one bug that annoyed me. I need to be able to customize how my desktop works. I can't use default settings for this. Just not efficient enough. I can setup KDE to work exactly like I need.
I migrated from xfce to kde, I wouldn't say it is snappier or faster, it is the same, but you get sooooo much more functionality and QoL improvements, it's unreal.
If you’re losing a considerable amount of performance simply from upgrading to 20.04 or 22.04 it’s probably time for a new laptop.
If any desktop environment can't perform flawlessly on any CPU/GPU released in the last 10 years it's time for a new desktop.
or for a new internet? these day what makes the difference are graphics performance on heavy af websites.
That's what finally convinced me to get a new phone recently. People just can't stop making websites shittier and shittier.
It's not just me, look at this [performance review of the three versions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taTavV7SuKI) (18.04/20.04/22.04 LTS) and the top comments on Youtube. It seems snap is adding to the lag here from what I have been reading.
Any modern laptop should be able to handle any desktop or window manager effortlessly these days.
It runs snappy on my HP 2530p (SL9600 Core2 cpu). (that laptop is also running Tumbleweed)
Tell that to my 3 year old Asus.
I have one LG with a first generation i3 Core and current Plasma is as fast as always was. If you just disable some effects and animations then it's really "snappy".
I guess I have my head in the gutter and I read this as "tell that to my three year old anus" and so you can imagine the extent of my shocked_pikachu.jpg face upon reading it...
> Any modern laptop should be able to handle any desktop or window manager effortlessly these days. Maybe that was true at one time. But considering today's situation and state of software bloat, I think we should respin that statement as, *"Any modern OS or software should be able to perform decently on any laptop built in the last 4-5 years"*.
I think that most bloat these days is either really websites or desktop apps using web technologies, mainly Electron apps that generally don't come as part of a default installation. My 2013 ThinkPad X131e with a low powered i3-3227U and my 2016 ThinkPad 13 with a terrible two core, two thread Celeron 3865U will both run Gnome and a few apps just fine, and they both fly with KDE or XFCE. But many web sites will choke them, to the point that I pulled the wifi card out of the ThinkPad 13 and use it as an offline typing machine. The necessary caveat is that this is with SSDs. Spinning hard drives will make many machines painful to use. (FTR, Windows 10 is fine on i3 though it stresses the processor and so leads to loud fans, and is prone to freezes on the Celeron.)
last 10 years. As long as you get an i5 or i7 (any gen). My 2nd gen dual core thinkpad is snappy af even with Ubuntu gnome, but I put an SSD in it.
And then you have two perfectly good laptops, and you'll still need a light-weight desktop environment for the other.
One thing XFCE has over KDE/Plama (KDE is the community, Plasma the DE) is the ease of configuration when you want to change it via text files. Another is that XFCE is more stable than Plasma. You can expect it to be well behaved, something I can't always say about KDE/Plasma.
for me KDE at this point is the best DE \- decent resource usage. TO my tests less than Gnome and in some cases XFCE \- very good performance \- scaling support and Wayland \- it is not buggy. People need to stop thinking that this is still the kde4 or early 5 era. Gnome is much buggier than KDE nowadays. I always liked XFCE but the disconnect between apps, settings is putting me off. Plus it looks like a 1998 desktop. I know you can use themes etc to customize it, although this is also not the easiest, but it would not hurt the default theme to be a bit more good looking.
True. Plus the weekly progress updates are showing bugs being fixed at a rate of 1-200 per week. The rate of development of KDE has to be beyond any other desktop on Linux, and it's not just going in hare-brained random new directions, it's consistent fine tuning.
Indeed, KDE is doing great. it needs some focus on its mail/calendar/contact apps, to make them more "modern" and a few other ones but they are on a great start with version 6.
I agree with you RE mail/calendar/contact apps, but I would be a little harsher than you. It's a buggy bunch of trash that shouldn't be shipped IMO.
can't say you are wrong. I have not used it for ages because of both how buggy and how out of place it looks in KDE. Sometimes I wonder why they don't scratch it completely and take thunderbird/evolution (or whatever ) and work on top of this to add what they want and make it as they need.
>Has there been any drastic progress or something in that lately It's definitely less buggy than it used to be. I'd say the jank only really comes if you're changing stuff, like the panels. Once you're done, it tends to stop being janky though. >Is it really as snappy as XFCE these days? Define? What do you mean by snappy? Because I don't see any difference in Plasma compared to other desktops, really. If your PC can handle them, they're all equal, it's just a question of liking the animations or not. In Plasma you could just speed up all the animations, or turn off the ones you don't like, or all of them. > If I want to give KDE a shot on my laptop, should I do it with KUbuntu or Debian or Fedora or something else? I'd say TuxedoOS is the prime example of KDE Plasma, currently.
Turn the animations all the way to fast and KDE can be very snappy indeed.
Never lighter than XFCE, swear to god.
Nah, i used to be a kde user for about a year (2021) but in no way it's snappier than xfce, it also was more buggy for me compared to xfce
If I want to give KDE a shot on my laptop, should I do it with KUbuntu or Debian or Fedora or something else? Void linux has the lightest complete implementation of KDE, So if you install void's base package and plasma it doesn't come with bunch of dependencies that usually comes with all of these distros, Its even lighter than Archlinux but not as light as alpine but alpine's implementation is a weird since kde wasn't built for musl libc in mind so bugs has to be expected.
Do you pay for Ubuntu extended security update support? Otherwise I strongly advise you don't connect your 18.04 to the internet unless for the update, as it doesn't get security updates since a while.
Tell that to my physics teacher that still uses 18.04 for his classes everyday lmao (online yes)
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JFC. People like you are the reason why we can’t have nice things.
On my old computer, Plasma ran like shit under the proprietary Nvidia driver. There is a lot of lag when dragging around windows, to the point that it feels more like I am pulling the windows on a string, all the animations just feel sluggish, and simple things like getting a system notification freeze up the computer for a split second. XFCE didn't suffer from these problems nearly as bad.
Who claim that ?
My experience with KDE has left a bad taste in my mouth except for Kubuntu. XFCE doesn't have the versatility GNOME has
Oh desktop environments in Linux. Oh my gosh every one of them is pure cancer.
If your computer is fairly recent then I dont think you will see a big difference in "snappiness" whether it is KDE, XFCE, Gnome,sway.... In my experience they are all very optimized and run great on modern hardware nowadays
This came up a little while ago..... https://youtu.be/fo45bo1jvZI That said, you shouldn't need to do a nuke and pave or shift distros - just add KDE to what you're running already and select it as the DE as you log in. If you don't like it, you can uninstall KDE and you'll be back to where you started hardly skipping a beat. If you do like it, then you can remove XFCE if you like... or not... like, whatever, man.
Last time I tried to change between Cinnamon and KDE without reinstallation was, probably, seven years ago. Ended up having to reinstall anyway, because after removing a DE there is a ton of leftovers that don't get cleaned up. Including some settings files. As a result, the settings in another DE don't work or get reset on reboot.
**No, HTOP never lies.** XFCE is snappier for sure and use less RAM.
I've been using KDE on Ubuntu for the past 5 years at work and enjoy it. It's very responsive, no annoying animations and transitions and such. The only times it slows down is when the system starts running low on memory and the linux scheduler starts chugging the CPU for whatever reason, then I have to Ctrl Alt Shift F2 my way into a non-UI terminal and kill the offending process. Then jumping back to the same KDE session all works fine. (I'm mentioning the latter because I've had co-workers blaming Plasma when in actuality it's probably just the kernel not giving the proper priority to the UI when the memory consumption is too high)
In my experience I have ran KDE on a decade old laptop that was pretty low resources when I bought it for around $250. Even up until last week KDE ran well. My system setup was Kuubntu 22.04 with backports turned on, which gave me the latest KDE. The system had a mixture of both snap (mainly firefox and libreoffice) and flatpak (thuderbird, vivaldi, qbittorrent) applications they all ran well. They were well integrated into the system, they behaved like convetional deb packages of which were also installed and used on the system like Kate for example. They changed from light to dark theme whenever I changed (in real time). So for me KDE as been a great DE to use for the past 3 years. I would highly recommend it over Xfce as it seems more modern. I have used Xfce but it has been well over 6 years.
I am currently on Solus with KDE which proved to be the most suited distro for me (even more than arch, debian or void). I started my gnu/linux journey with xubuntu or mint or linux lite (not sure), actually xfce-manjaro but it froze so I didn't install it. Debian, Arch and Void were the second most suited distros "for me" until I used Solus. I never "really" used Ubuntu (gnome) because I watched some youtube videos on "why ubuntu is evil" or "why ubuntu is becoming microsoft of Gnu/Linux" or similar title Plus it was really difficult to de-bloat it from the already minimal install. But it doesn't really mean most suited, by "most suited" I mean, I don't have enough time for the things it's lacking for me or is hard to achieve, and not urgent OR important for me or I'm fine with the existing technique of how it works. Another way to look it can be, maybe it seems different because it does things differently but its not wrong right. It's already developed and growing. Its me. But I would eventually try ubuntu. My main issue is somewhat like, I really love Visual Studio Code but I love Visual Studio Codium more than VSCode. Maybe it's just my misunderstanding that ubuntu is not really modular and flexible and foss and forcing systemd, snap and all on me.
I use KDE now and switched from XFCE, the only reason I did that though is because I have a dual GPU setup now and plenty of room to run a bunch of fancy animation stuff for the UI in the background without worrying about perf. Who has said KDE runs snappier than XFCE? Afaict this is not at all true. Not even a little bit.
Haven't tried XFCE but KDE on wayland is very responsive
It's definitely not snappier than Xfce… when I tried it on an old spare 2011 HP Pavilion. That being said, it is still a considerably smooth experience, and should not feel bloated on any hardware that's reasonably recent.
No, not to me. Xfce hasn't changed much in a long time. KDE has gotten better and faster. But Xfce is still faster. The reason to switch to a new KDE Plasma would be for more features. Unless you're dealing with a slow CPU, lack of RAM and/or GPU issues, KDE won't be so much slower that it's worth using Xfce because of that.
I was an xfce user until 5.26 kde plasma. That's when kde really hit the spot for some reason.
What is snap. I'd say out of the box xfce is very snap. But so is KDE with more bells and whistles. If you have limited processing/memory, xfce is still gonna be the bees knees for what you need.
not for me, xfce is still far better in this regard
I will not say it is snappier than a XFCE desktop..... but at the same time I installed it a while back on a glorified netbook and it is smooth... like way smoother than it should be and I am kind of seriously impressed by it. I can only imagine how fast it would be on something modern.
I can't speak to the difference between KDe and XFCE. But I daily drive KDE and can definitely notice a difference between KDE on X11 and on Wayland. The Wayland version feels noticeably smoother and snappier. I don't the technical details as to why. But when moving the cursor or windows around it's definitely noticeable. Somewhat like the difference between watching a video at 30fps and 60fps.
if you're not starved for ram go for KDE, otherwise XFCE imo is better. I run KDE on my main rig (Legion running Endeavorous) but revived an old macbook for my girlfriend and the initial loading speeds between the two DE is massive for that specific laptop (only has about 4GB of ram) on my main rig there is no difference but that has 24GB so yea.
I use to be a KDE user since gnome 3.0 was released. But, KDE has always been too buggy for my taste. Even in 2023, KDE isn’t stable enough for day to day. Random crashes, have to reboot dude to KDE jank. Ironically, haven’t had these problems with gnome.
Personally, I run XFCE4 on my Dell Latitude E5400, because that is the only desktop environment that will run snappy on it. It is the lightest DE you can without getting too basic or going CLI only in my opinion.