Desktop environment, and OS in general is just something you eventually find one you like, and there's no need to change. It's GNOME for me, it just works in a way that doesn't get on my way and that's all it needs to be
This guy has a preference that differs from mine! Get him! /s
Yeah idk, I tried Pop with GNOME and just wasn't feeling it. Switched to Mint Cinnamon and it's a little more intuitive for me. I'm just a general user, gonna game if/when costs come down enough to build a desktop to replace my 2015 laptop. By then, I'm sure another distro will be a better fit for me. There are options for a reason.
cannot recommend pop with their new cosmic DE, it's quite bad. looks nice at first, but the more you dive in, the more it lacks basic stuff and you start noticing soo many little bugs and annoyances. had it on my laptop for a while, eventually just installed gnome. it started crashing frequently and suddenly i could no longer start steam, so i just installed ultramarine since it has been playing nice on my desktop. and it has just worked since.
mint/cinnamon was definitely the best i found until i checked out kde neon. mint still has a better package ecosystem but in neon everything feels slickly designed.
neon is the full kde distribution i guess, you can install standalone as its own os. plasma is just the desktop manager shell, can possibly be installed on top of other distributions. (im probably not using the correct terms.)
Oh, that makes sense. I have EndeavourOS with KDE as my desktop environment, but I'm still learning what's plasma vs. kwin vs. sddm vs. x11...
Like I get one's the graphical shell, one's the window manager, one's the desktop manager, and one's the compositor, but what each one does and how their responsibilities differ is still kinda foggy to me.
It makes sense that neon is the distro, though. That makes sense because I saw it listed as an option when I chose Endeavour.
DEs from one distro to another can feel different too, idk what it is about Manjaro but it feels so much more responsive than KDE's own distro. So I think it's worth trying our different distros even with the same desktop environment
true, like cinnamon is perfect on mint, but for example fedora cinnamon feels very wrong. it's been a while since i tried it, but it definitely wasn't as stable, and i had to change a lot of stuff from dconf editor, like for example the location bar in the file manager always defaulted to text mode even if you switched it to link mode
Same, and the OS is Ubuntu for me. I use my computer to get stuff done, not for distrohopping (though that's also a perfectly valid usecase if you find it fun 👍)
Yeah. I was also at Ubuntu after couple years of distro hopping, until they made a change I didn't like so I just hopped to Debian and been there past 3 releases
I like gnome on my older gaming desktop. It's a 2080 ti so when i installed plasma was not super stable on nvidia but I wouldn't change it, arc menu + dash panel and I'm all set. I prefer kde on the laptop though. All the extra bells and whistles feel more useful on a laptop (no mouse).
That's funny, because I started using GNOME on my laptop because it seemed to fit the workflow on it better. Eventually I swapped to GNOME on desktop too
I love Gnome. People love to hate it, but it's workflow is SO good.
I think people just get annoyed that they can't force it to be whatever they want it to be. Which is fine, that's why other options exist!
But if you really go to the content-focused, workspace + keyboard shortcut flow Gnome is incredibly efficient, consistent, and stable.
Unpopular opinion #2: I love libadwaita and GTK4. Basically, I enjoy when devs are opinionated about things and build what they want to see in the world.
The adaptive part of libadwaita is really exciting for different form factors!
KDE is my favorite, but I'm excited to try Cosmic once it's a little farther along.
I also love Cinnamon, not because it looks great, or has a ton of customizablity, but because it is so stable. It's been the best #JustWorks DE in my experience.
Those are the only two I use regularly. Xfce is nice once you get it customized, but it's kind of a pain to get configured. I don't have much use for sophisticated tiling, so tiling window managers are just curiosities to me. I've played with i3, Sway, Hyprland, and a few others over the years.
I wish I had a use case for them, but alas, all my day to day needs are handled just fine with basic Window snapping, tmux, kitty tabs, and occasionally using a second virtual desktop.
the first DE I used on Linux was cinnamon and I was like “wow, this is great, everything makes sense to me out of the box”
And then I tried Gnome and was incredibly put off by it, like “why the hell is this over here, this layout is strange to me. Why are all these unconventional features on by default, this is very annoying.”
And then I tried KDE and I was like “wow, this is great and everything makes sense to me out of the box, also there’s all these features and options, I don’t know what they do, but i don’t have to interact with them if I don’t want to.”
KDE and GNOME each have their shortcomings. KDE has never been completely stable for me but it’s so much better than it used to be. GNOME is the best at what it’s good at and the worst at everything else. There’s no grey area with gnome.
Cosmic looks super promising. I need to play with it.
I just install the Fedora spin of COSMIC. So far, I have to say that I'm impressed by it. It's pretty lightweight and nimble on low-end hardware while still having just enough customizing to be satisfying. The DE is also pretty easy and simple to use. It also appears to be very stable and tolerant during use.
If you got time, I would tell you to just try it. It has quickly gone from "I'm not very sure about this choice." to "Hey, I kinda like this."
I've been using KDE since ver 2.something.
I like the idea of tiling window managers.
But I'm old.
I'm set in my ways.
I don't want to get used to new things.
KDE was wild a feral in the early days of plasma. It was heavier than GNOME. It was unstable. It was a nice visual refresh but functionally terrible. It’s really pulled away from that thankfully.
Red Hat has invested so much in GNOME they will probably never want to hear about changing to KDE Plasma. And Suse will follow Red Hat (which never made sense to me).
I've been using Linux for twenty years. I didn't use KDE until they declared Plasma 5 ready for primetime. (I hated Plasma 4, and didn't like the look and feel of KDE 3.5 at all)
Since hopping on with Plasma 5 I have absolutely no interest in anything else. I love KDE Plasma and it just keeps getting better.
I tried Cosmic for a week. It looked nice but I returned to LXQt because I want:
To display time in ISO 8601 without also messing with locales
To customize my file manager columns
To use Emacs in a terminal emulator
To not have my windows scattered to the four winds every time I lock my screen because the fancy window tiling feature is half-baked
To have the X window manager back. I'm sure some people with use cases besides mine that are compatible only with Wayland, but I simply don't see the need nor do I wish to be a guinea pig submitting bug reports when so many guinea pigs before me had years of their lives sacrificed polishing X.
Also, the performance of programs like the default Cosmic file manager was much slower then comparable alternatives like pcmanfm-qt which I know run fast even on 2005 Compaq laptop hardware.
Yeah, that's fine that's what you use. I don't have a pig in this fight. But I'm using Wayland because that's what Fedora has adopted for a good while now. I do have to say, it's been a seamless transition. Everything just works. My dual monitor setup, running Kinonite, has never been so easy and trouble free as it is with Wayland. The single monitor box I have with a low power mini desktop with 8Gbit of shared memory, runs Wayland without a hitch.
The thing is, everything has its time under the sun. Whether its X11 or you and me. The guy that has been maintaining X11 doesn't want to do it anymore. And it appears no one else wants to do it either. So X11 will fade away and Wayland will have it's time now. And someday Wayland will also be replaced. And people will mourn it's passing just like X11.
I just want a conventional desktop paradigm that feels relatively integrated. For almost a decade I used Cinnamon until I found myself really wanting Wayland. For the past 5 years or so, I have used GNOME. It's clean, and with a few tweaks it meets my needs.
I know this is a joke, but before I discovered GNU-Linux I used XP and didn't hate it. I was usable. Microsoft hadn't yet completely stripped away user autonomy.
The next laptop I bought came preinstalled with Windows Vista (AKA Windows Millenium version 2). It was so frustrating I decided to investigate alternatives. I even considered going Macintosh. But I was at a bookstore and saw one of those Linux magazines with a free disc from which I could install Linux. I think it was Ubuntu on the disc (before Unity). I was hooked. I use Trisquel now.
I mean, everyone liked XP and most everyone tried to keep using it years after Microsoft wanted us to stop. Everyone hated vista.
But modern gnome is excellent. My joke was trying to point out that hating it while liking the old version seems like a uniquely old man thing to do, just hating change for being change
while liking the old version seems like a uniquely old man thing to do, just hating change for being change
Gnome 3 was a huge paradigm shift. Most people who noped out of Gnome afterwards disliked very specific things about it, not just hating change for being change. This is a really dismissive and kind of insulting take.
Plasma is great. But it's missing an important feature. Apps, such as backup or sync, cannot navigate to network shares, to use as a backup target. Dolphin sees the shares ok, but its important to backup. Windows lets apps select network targets. Plasma should too.
Dolphin shows you places that are not in your file system, such as network shares or your phone‘s media directory. Those are fake files, illusions of Satan, temptations designed to stray you from the path of God. Avoid anything that is not opened with open and not read with read system calls, for doing so is a sin before eyes of God (fopen and fread are permitted). Mount your network shares using sudo mount -t cifs.
hear me out. what do you do when the network share server is not always available? like because your system is a laptop, or because you are doing maintenance on your server and its off.
what I do is suffer the consequences of many software that does not handle it well, and freeze for a minute (or worse) when it tries to open the mounted share even when it shouldn't even try. multiple KDE apps are guilty of that, including dolphin and kate, but to some extent almost everything else too.
but that is not ideal.
It's a shame Dolphin gets it wrong. I hope that bug has been reported. And I'd love to find a way for non IT users to mount the share as a workaround to the missing functionality. But that's missing too.
Dolphin does mount it ...somewhere. Supposedly. I expect only KDE developers know where exactly.
You can get the same functionality using Gnome file manager and gio command, and you get your network share properly mounted in a file system, but then you won't be using KDE.
Nice. Kup actually lets me see the Network. But then complains if I select a samba share. There is a popular bug report about this.
I prefer sync backup to access documents directly, instead of kups scrambled backup files.
I've been using kde for years and really enjoyed the fact that it was simple and worked out of the box.
Recently I heard about niri, I had a look and thought it was cool. I set it up with a desktop environment around it and in less than 1 hour I had a working de. I've been using it a couple weeks now on my work computer and I have to say that I'm really enjoying it, I feel it makes many operations much simpler and moving around different windows is very easy.
I use two screens, and I really like that I can have the applications bar on both on them, which was one major gripe I had with plasma.
I use two screens, and I really like that I can have the applications bar on both on them, which was one major gripe I had with plasma.
Csn't you just add a new panel to your second display and add the applications applet?
In plasma 6.3 you can even clone your panel. Or am I misunderstanding?
I'm not sure, it is been a while when I tried last time, but I remember I could not do it. I believe I asked on the kde forums as well, eventually I just classed it as something not possible in plasma and stopped trying to fix it.
I don't have a second screen right now, but here is my desktop with the 3 default task widgets. Only icons on top, switcher to the right, text and icons on the bottom. All in their own panels.
Of course any panel could just be moved onto a second monitor. I remember this is possible since KDE 4 and stable since early KDE 5.
KDE's strength is its incredibly customizability. In the past this also lead to instability for unorthodox configurations, but the last few years it has also been very stable for me.
I've enjoyed KDE since Mandrake 6. The control you get to have as a user is amazing. Thought to be honest, I really change very little. But the Cube! I will die for that Cube.
But I have used probably every DE that runs on Linux one time or another. Each has its own charms and quirks. While my laptop lives comfortably with Fedora 43 Kinonite, the cheap mini desktop I'm using right now currently has COSMIC on it. And to be honest, as much as I like LXDE, dnfdragoria as it's package manager, someone at Fedora needs to take dnfdragoria out back and launch it into the sun. COMIC is far lighter feeling than I thought would be. I will live with it for a while I think.
I've heard this which made me assume it was like an option I can just enable, but every search has only come up with some baroque scripting or configuration guides, which seems like a lot more work than just using an actual tiling window manager.
E: Oh I get it now, you just install Krohnkite. This is a bit of an improvement, I will admit.
I’d place i3 and Sway deeper down the rabbit hole ...
I mean they are, but my mind and fingers have been so twisted by vim that I can't really interact with floating wms without feeling honestly pretty intense discomfort. I see people having fun with their cool Plasmas etc and I wish I could make the leap, but every time I try I just bristle at all the mouse use. The lack of control makes me feel like I'm trying to use a computer while wearing oven mittens.
My point is - why go backward? You already have your Sway1 based setup, configured just the way you like it, with the ability to switch various components in and out. What does a monolithic2 environment like KDE have to offer you?
Footnotes
Assuming it's Sway and not i3 because I assume you have already switched to Wayland. You switched to Wayland, right? You need to switch to Wayland. Why are you not switching to Wayland? ↩
, Yes, you can tweak KDE, but since all the various parts were created to fit together switching one will always result in awkward UX. ↩
I guess I hadn't thought of it that way. Maybe I already have the wm experience that works for me, and I can just load up KDE when friends come over and I want to provide a more approachable UI for them.
I made the switch from i3 to kde with https://github.com/tilorenz/compact_pager and keyboard shortcuts similar to tiling WMs. Check out my config for keyboard shortcuts for window management with curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jowodo/config/refs/heads/main/plasma/window-managment.kksrc | grep -v '=$'. You could even import them into your kde settings and they will be added. PS.: yes I use meta AND alt, because I also use windows (where alt is my mod key) and macos (where option is my mod key) at work.
Cinnamon situation currently on arch feels such that it might break at any time, and in fact has recently. :-( I have absolutely loved the simplicity of this DE, but the breakages lately are worrisome. I'm considering migrating from cinnamon to plasma, but the added cruft that comes with the Plasma DE does not impress me. There is some tension; I have contributed to KDE projects, and I prefer KDE apps over gnome/GTK.
How well does plasma wayland tolerate unresponsive apps? I need to be able to keep graphical apps in this state for possibly an hour at time, as I run them under a debugger.
I think due to Cinnamon being the DE for Mint, they might be feeling some issues with their transition to Wayland. I know I switched from Fedora Cinnamon to Fedora Budgie for a bit because things got frustrating when they started the switch. I'm using Fedora COMIC right now. It seems pretty decent.
i used cinnamon in 2016 (worst time i think), then i briefly used gnome in '23.
i've been using kde since '25 and i regret i have no desire to use anything else anymore.
want a tiling wm? - just install a plugin and customize kde within 5 minutes
want to build a mediabox with a simple ui for use with a remote on a tv? - just adjust the sizes and find one of a million widgets!
do you want the ms win98 look? - it's 3 clicks away!
i am sure other DE's may be better for my specific usecases. but the flexibility of kde gives me good enough results within a familiar environment. i can change my whole computer experience in a few clicks and revert whenever on the same de!
It's not that I "hate" Gnome, I still love Gnome 2 and Cinnamon by extension, but the workflow of Gnome 3 just sucks balls for me. I can tolerate the workflow of any other DE, but Gnome 3 is just right out.
Gnome 3 abruptly removed app icons from the desktop moved taskbar to the top of the screen, and broke Alt-Tab. That’s why prople hate Gnome and love KDE, because KDE did not break these features.
Me either. I use Plasma because I prefer the whole workflow but I’m fine with GNOME, it’s just a bit shit out of the box, which I think is part of the problem. It feels so much more modern and the settings menu is much better, plus all the GNOME apps feel lightyears ahead of the half-baked KDE stuff. I wish KDE would stop adding obscure features nobody uses and just work on the polish (though I think they’re doing a bit of that now with the new login screen and unified theming).
Tried COSMIC the other day. Wanted to connect my bluetooth keyboard. Was not working. No error. Opened up KDE system settings. Keyboard connected. Logged out and went into Plasma again.
I cut my teeth on openbox and fluxbox, and I hated KDE. But to be fair that was like, KDE3? It didn't look so good.
Xfce was good for a while, but then plasma was really the best Wayland option, so it made sense. It's good out of the box, ready and quick to customise.
But after a few years of that I've just last month got going with an Lxqt Wayland session with labwc compositor. This is the winner. No more reliance on plasma for me.
I've found hyprland itself is very stable, but what you run on top of it often compromises that. Using end 4 dots as a base on cachy has been a superb experience for me. Had a lot of issues with my completely custom hypr on tumbleweed (not tumbleweed's fault tho)
Yeah ofc it's stable by itself, but when you add hyprpm plugins, edit the configs to rely on them, create custom rules, and now steam is moving right as fast as my refresh rate
I just installed the Fedora spin with COSMIC this week. It's running very nicely on a low powered mini-desktop with 8Gbit of shared memory. It feels light enough and easy enough to use for newcomers to Linux. Plus it has just enough eye candy to satisfy those that want some customization by just point and clicking.
I'm going to be trying it out for a while I think. But my laptop will always be Kinonite.
since Plasma 6.5 I just daily drive it now. prior to that I was all about WM's be it Herbstluftwm, Sway, Niri, whatever but after awhile I just got tired of configuring them or dealing with quirks about each one and what have you. Plasma just does everything I need and I don't have to think about it. And you can even get it to tile now be it manual or dynamic. Plus you can theme the hell out of it. It just works. Plus Konsole has become my favourite terminal. just don't see a point in using other stuff anymore.
Been on Awesome WM since '08, but once dappled with KDE. Does it still have resource hungry processes that I have no use for (IIRC, Akonadi or daemons related to it were one of those problematic components)?
"Am I interested in other DEs?" and "Will I install them?" are two different questions though. Yeah, I had fun running i3 years back, but i3 isn't the new hotness anymore, and there's not a snowball's chance in hell of me feeling like I have the time to learn and configure another WM. Absent my suddenly striking it rich and having entirely too much free time, I sincerely doubt there will come another time where I feel like I have that sort of time and nothing I'd rather use it for than such a mundane and endless task.
Just switch to sway. As far as I know, the config should be compatible (if you swap the complex utils for Wayland ones). But I haven't tried it (I do use river and really like it though, so I do recommend sway).
I was really surprised how great the workflow of paperWM is. If you like a "scroller" with a working DE and don't want to configure niri: give it a try. I don't even want tilers anymore.
Started with Sway to ease the migration, but just this week - after a few months of Waylanding - I decided to try Hyprland to see what's all the hype (hyp?) is about. I didn't like it - it was pretty, yes, but it felt sluggish and the multi-monitor support has some deal-breaking issues.
So I looked at other alternatives, and found Niri. I fell in love. It has both eye-candy and performance, and the combination of tiling and sliding is pure genius.
It's kind of new (version 0.1.0 was released two years ago)
Is it easy to migrate from i3?
The mental model is a bit different, but I got used to it quite quickly. Configuration-wise, no matter which WM you pick the migration from X11 to Wayland will be the bulk of the work.
I thought I would hate KDE because of the Kalculator, Konsole and all the other K apps. "I want a solid DE, dammit. If I want jokes, I'll go to Hannah Montana Linux"
Then I realised I've been using KDE-Plasma for over a year.... And damn. Its good...
Desktop environment, and OS in general is just something you eventually find one you like, and there's no need to change. It's GNOME for me, it just works in a way that doesn't get on my way and that's all it needs to be
This guy has a preference that differs from mine! Get him! /s
Yeah idk, I tried Pop with GNOME and just wasn't feeling it. Switched to Mint Cinnamon and it's a little more intuitive for me. I'm just a general user, gonna game if/when costs come down enough to build a desktop to replace my 2015 laptop. By then, I'm sure another distro will be a better fit for me. There are options for a reason.
Do you have to run GNOME with PopOS? I was thinking of trying PopOS
cannot recommend pop with their new cosmic DE, it's quite bad. looks nice at first, but the more you dive in, the more it lacks basic stuff and you start noticing soo many little bugs and annoyances. had it on my laptop for a while, eventually just installed gnome. it started crashing frequently and suddenly i could no longer start steam, so i just installed ultramarine since it has been playing nice on my desktop. and it has just worked since.
Pop now uses cosmic
mint/cinnamon was definitely the best i found until i checked out kde neon. mint still has a better package ecosystem but in neon everything feels slickly designed.
What's the difference between plasma and neon
neon is the full kde distribution i guess, you can install standalone as its own os. plasma is just the desktop manager shell, can possibly be installed on top of other distributions. (im probably not using the correct terms.)
Oh, that makes sense. I have EndeavourOS with KDE as my desktop environment, but I'm still learning what's plasma vs. kwin vs. sddm vs. x11...
Like I get one's the graphical shell, one's the window manager, one's the desktop manager, and one's the compositor, but what each one does and how their responsibilities differ is still kinda foggy to me.
It makes sense that neon is the distro, though. That makes sense because I saw it listed as an option when I chose Endeavour.
And I absolutely hate Gnome. But thank god we have over a dozen DEs to choose from. One of the great things about Linux is user choice.
Exactly. You can install your beloved distro with just what software you want there, because it's your fucking device
Sicko
That gave me a good laugh. Gnome doesnt feel right to me at all man. To each his own.
But yea, sicko fr
No kink shaming! Bsdm is a valid way of life! (Or so I wa told)
Openbsdm or Freebsdm though?
DEs from one distro to another can feel different too, idk what it is about Manjaro but it feels so much more responsive than KDE's own distro. So I think it's worth trying our different distros even with the same desktop environment
true, like cinnamon is perfect on mint, but for example fedora cinnamon feels very wrong. it's been a while since i tried it, but it definitely wasn't as stable, and i had to change a lot of stuff from dconf editor, like for example the location bar in the file manager always defaulted to text mode even if you switched it to link mode
Same, and the OS is Ubuntu for me. I use my computer to get stuff done, not for distrohopping (though that's also a perfectly valid usecase if you find it fun 👍)
Yeah. I was also at Ubuntu after couple years of distro hopping, until they made a change I didn't like so I just hopped to Debian and been there past 3 releases
I like gnome on my older gaming desktop. It's a 2080 ti so when i installed plasma was not super stable on nvidia but I wouldn't change it, arc menu + dash panel and I'm all set. I prefer kde on the laptop though. All the extra bells and whistles feel more useful on a laptop (no mouse).
That's funny, because I started using GNOME on my laptop because it seemed to fit the workflow on it better. Eventually I swapped to GNOME on desktop too
I love Gnome. People love to hate it, but it's workflow is SO good.
I think people just get annoyed that they can't force it to be whatever they want it to be. Which is fine, that's why other options exist!
But if you really go to the content-focused, workspace + keyboard shortcut flow Gnome is incredibly efficient, consistent, and stable.
Unpopular opinion #2: I love libadwaita and GTK4. Basically, I enjoy when devs are opinionated about things and build what they want to see in the world.
The adaptive part of libadwaita is really exciting for different form factors!
KDE ftw
KDE is my favorite, but I'm excited to try Cosmic once it's a little farther along.
I also love Cinnamon, not because it looks great, or has a ton of customizablity, but because it is so stable. It's been the best #JustWorks DE in my experience.
Those are the only two I use regularly. Xfce is nice once you get it customized, but it's kind of a pain to get configured. I don't have much use for sophisticated tiling, so tiling window managers are just curiosities to me. I've played with i3, Sway, Hyprland, and a few others over the years.
I wish I had a use case for them, but alas, all my day to day needs are handled just fine with basic Window snapping, tmux, kitty tabs, and occasionally using a second virtual desktop.
I tried lots of DE's when distros started switching to GNOME 3.
Now I just run Xfce on everything.
I have only really used xfce. It's still fun to install Kali on devices but really I use xfce.
Just a user though, not a pro
the first DE I used on Linux was cinnamon and I was like “wow, this is great, everything makes sense to me out of the box”
And then I tried Gnome and was incredibly put off by it, like “why the hell is this over here, this layout is strange to me. Why are all these unconventional features on by default, this is very annoying.”
And then I tried KDE and I was like “wow, this is great and everything makes sense to me out of the box, also there’s all these features and options, I don’t know what they do, but i don’t have to interact with them if I don’t want to.”
KDE and GNOME each have their shortcomings. KDE has never been completely stable for me but it’s so much better than it used to be. GNOME is the best at what it’s good at and the worst at everything else. There’s no grey area with gnome.
Cosmic looks super promising. I need to play with it.
Do it. You know you want to...
I just install the Fedora spin of COSMIC. So far, I have to say that I'm impressed by it. It's pretty lightweight and nimble on low-end hardware while still having just enough customizing to be satisfying. The DE is also pretty easy and simple to use. It also appears to be very stable and tolerant during use.
If you got time, I would tell you to just try it. It has quickly gone from "I'm not very sure about this choice." to "Hey, I kinda like this."
I quite like KDE Plasma on my steam deck, but on my desktops I always use XFCE
Ironic given XFCE is supposed to be the light weight one and the steam deck is the portable device.
I like both of them, though. Plenty of customizations in both, not that I tinker around much any more.
I've been using KDE since ver 2.something.
I like the idea of tiling window managers.
But I'm old.
I'm set in my ways.
I don't want to get used to new things.
KDE was wild a feral in the early days of plasma. It was heavier than GNOME. It was unstable. It was a nice visual refresh but functionally terrible. It’s really pulled away from that thankfully.
KDE has tiling.
I've yet to see anything that compares to kde, and I just don't understand why so many distros default to gnome!
Never had a problem with XFCE, even doing some weird stuff with metrics in the task bar.
Though I do not tinker like I did when I was younger, nor do I know what Plasma has over XFCE that's not cosmetic in nature.
Red Hat has invested so much in GNOME they will probably never want to hear about changing to KDE Plasma. And Suse will follow Red Hat (which never made sense to me).
SuSE use KDE as the default, them and Manjaro are the only two bigguns that do, really
Not the Suse professional edition that I tested a couple of weeks ago. Only the community editions default to KDE.
Oh :(
Gnome is the most stable DE with all features included, it also has minimal amount of system options to still have all features.
XFCE misses a lot of features, such as printers. KDE has all bells and whistles but is less stable.
KDE is not unstable, even heavily tweaked
Because vanilla kde looks whack
https://distrosea.com/start/kdeneon-user-default/
?
I've been using Linux for twenty years. I didn't use KDE until they declared Plasma 5 ready for primetime. (I hated Plasma 4, and didn't like the look and feel of KDE 3.5 at all)
Since hopping on with Plasma 5 I have absolutely no interest in anything else. I love KDE Plasma and it just keeps getting better.
That's me in OP.
I'm waiting for Cosmic to mature
It has so many great ideas, all it needs is time and polish.
I tried Cosmic for a week. It looked nice but I returned to LXQt because I want:
Also, the performance of programs like the default Cosmic file manager was much slower then comparable alternatives like pcmanfm-qt which I know run fast even on 2005 Compaq laptop hardware.
Fair.
Still waiting for XFCE‘s Wayland support. Until then Plasma it is
I miss being on XFCE, I'll be so quick to go back when their wayland transition is done
Booooo Wayland
Get over it. We all have to.
x11 still running strong on my machine
Yeah, that's fine that's what you use. I don't have a pig in this fight. But I'm using Wayland because that's what Fedora has adopted for a good while now. I do have to say, it's been a seamless transition. Everything just works. My dual monitor setup, running Kinonite, has never been so easy and trouble free as it is with Wayland. The single monitor box I have with a low power mini desktop with 8Gbit of shared memory, runs Wayland without a hitch.
The thing is, everything has its time under the sun. Whether its X11 or you and me. The guy that has been maintaining X11 doesn't want to do it anymore. And it appears no one else wants to do it either. So X11 will fade away and Wayland will have it's time now. And someday Wayland will also be replaced. And people will mourn it's passing just like X11.
I just want a conventional desktop paradigm that feels relatively integrated. For almost a decade I used Cinnamon until I found myself really wanting Wayland. For the past 5 years or so, I have used GNOME. It's clean, and with a few tweaks it meets my needs.
to me, gnome seems to be just bad ui design for people with stockholm syndrome about it.
I'm interested in other DEs, i swear! I just don't use them, or like them!
How I feel about gnome
I like the ones that are forks of pre-ruined Gnome. MATE is my favorite of that type.
Mate is a solid fuckin choice. 10/10
Windows 10! Hell no I'm on windows 3.11 before they ruined everything!!
I know this is a joke, but before I discovered GNU-Linux I used XP and didn't hate it. I was usable. Microsoft hadn't yet completely stripped away user autonomy.
When did you stop using XP?
The next laptop I bought came preinstalled with Windows Vista (AKA Windows Millenium version 2). It was so frustrating I decided to investigate alternatives. I even considered going Macintosh. But I was at a bookstore and saw one of those Linux magazines with a free disc from which I could install Linux. I think it was Ubuntu on the disc (before Unity). I was hooked. I use Trisquel now.
I mean, everyone liked XP and most everyone tried to keep using it years after Microsoft wanted us to stop. Everyone hated vista.
But modern gnome is excellent. My joke was trying to point out that hating it while liking the old version seems like a uniquely old man thing to do, just hating change for being change
Gnome 3 got rid of desktop icons and the menu of Gnome 2, it was also a resource hog. Mate offers what I liked about Gnome 2. Sue me.
TIL I am not a one. I never chose XP; I didn't ever install that cartoonish bloatfest over win2k on my home pc.
Gnome 3 was a huge paradigm shift. Most people who noped out of Gnome afterwards disliked very specific things about it, not just hating change for being change. This is a really dismissive and kind of insulting take.
Plasma is great. But it's missing an important feature. Apps, such as backup or sync, cannot navigate to network shares, to use as a backup target. Dolphin sees the shares ok, but its important to backup. Windows lets apps select network targets. Plasma should too.
Dolphin shows you places that are not in your file system, such as network shares or your phone‘s media directory. Those are fake files, illusions of Satan, temptations designed to stray you from the path of God. Avoid anything that is not opened with
openand not read withreadsystem calls, for doing so is a sin before eyes of God (fopenandfreadare permitted). Mount your network shares usingsudo mount -t cifs.hear me out. what do you do when the network share server is not always available? like because your system is a laptop, or because you are doing maintenance on your server and its off.
what I do is suffer the consequences of many software that does not handle it well, and freeze for a minute (or worse) when it tries to open the mounted share even when it shouldn't even try. multiple KDE apps are guilty of that, including dolphin and kate, but to some extent almost everything else too.
but that is not ideal.
My answer is
killall -9It's a shame Dolphin gets it wrong. I hope that bug has been reported. And I'd love to find a way for non IT users to mount the share as a workaround to the missing functionality. But that's missing too.
Dolphin does mount it ...somewhere. Supposedly. I expect only KDE developers know where exactly. You can get the same functionality using Gnome file manager and
giocommand, and you get your network share properly mounted in a file system, but then you won't be using KDE.dolphin manages your connection with kio, but only those things can use the share that are aware of kio. so qt apps mostly.
I use Nixos, but my ssh mount and nfs and samba mount can be selected as backup path for kup.
Nice. Kup actually lets me see the Network. But then complains if I select a samba share. There is a popular bug report about this. I prefer sync backup to access documents directly, instead of kups scrambled backup files.
What do you use for backup?
Kup currently also does not satisfy my needs, but I am not sure what else I should use.
I've been using kde for years and really enjoyed the fact that it was simple and worked out of the box.
Recently I heard about niri, I had a look and thought it was cool. I set it up with a desktop environment around it and in less than 1 hour I had a working de. I've been using it a couple weeks now on my work computer and I have to say that I'm really enjoying it, I feel it makes many operations much simpler and moving around different windows is very easy.
I use two screens, and I really like that I can have the applications bar on both on them, which was one major gripe I had with plasma.
Csn't you just add a new panel to your second display and add the applications applet? In plasma 6.3 you can even clone your panel. Or am I misunderstanding?
No, the main bar can be only on one screen
I have 3 full task bars:
Nice, then I must be mistaken
You can easily do that on plasma. Just add a panel and add the widget you prefer (only icons, or icons and window titles)
I'm not sure, it is been a while when I tried last time, but I remember I could not do it. I believe I asked on the kde forums as well, eventually I just classed it as something not possible in plasma and stopped trying to fix it.
I don't have a second screen right now, but here is my desktop with the 3 default task widgets. Only icons on top, switcher to the right, text and icons on the bottom. All in their own panels. Of course any panel could just be moved onto a second monitor. I remember this is possible since KDE 4 and stable since early KDE 5.
KDE's strength is its incredibly customizability. In the past this also lead to instability for unorthodox configurations, but the last few years it has also been very stable for me.
Khe Khing Kabout KDE Kis Kits Kobsession Kwith Kits Knaming Kheme.
That's a pretty dumb reason, but that's what's been putting me off for so long. Oh well, I'm a konvert now...
They dropped that for new programs years ago.
At least I know what your least favorite fighting game franchise is.
Kreet Kriter? Kuper Kmash Kros? Gnortal Gnombat?
No. It's Kekken, of course.
I went from Gnome 2 to Mate, and switched to Plasma last year. Can't see myself moving away anytime soon XD
I've enjoyed KDE since Mandrake 6. The control you get to have as a user is amazing. Thought to be honest, I really change very little. But the Cube! I will die for that Cube.
But I have used probably every DE that runs on Linux one time or another. Each has its own charms and quirks. While my laptop lives comfortably with Fedora 43 Kinonite, the cheap mini desktop I'm using right now currently has COSMIC on it. And to be honest, as much as I like LXDE, dnfdragoria as it's package manager, someone at Fedora needs to take dnfdragoria out back and launch it into the sun. COMIC is far lighter feeling than I thought would be. I will live with it for a while I think.
Gnome has the cube now. I prefer gnome, so this was a wonderful surprise.
Reminds me of the old compiz days, beautiful stuff
KDE's absolutely excellent, but if you need every little kilobyte RAM, go Sway. Sway—It's Technically Graphical ™
Try danklinux.com for an easy Niri install. Thank me later.
Wait. It is like hyperland but with a control panel so you dont really miss anything like changing control mouse speed screen resolution etc.
This looks interesting. Today i use plasma and kanata to get a good environment that is close to tiling
I'm still stuck on i3 and sway. I hear there's a version of KDE that is tiling...? But I haven't found anything definitive on that.
I've heard this which made me assume it was like an option I can just enable, but every search has only come up with some baroque scripting or configuration guides, which seems like a lot more work than just using an actual tiling window manager.
E: Oh I get it now, you just install Krohnkite. This is a bit of an improvement, I will admit.
That's an odd statement. I'd place i3 and Sway deeper down the rabbit hole, being build-your-own1 as opposed to packaged deals like KDE.
Footnotes
in the sense of building a configuration - not in the sense of compiling code. ↩
I mean they are, but my mind and fingers have been so twisted by vim that I can't really interact with floating wms without feeling honestly pretty intense discomfort. I see people having fun with their cool Plasmas etc and I wish I could make the leap, but every time I try I just bristle at all the mouse use. The lack of control makes me feel like I'm trying to use a computer while wearing oven mittens.
My point is - why go backward? You already have your Sway1 based setup, configured just the way you like it, with the ability to switch various components in and out. What does a monolithic2 environment like KDE have to offer you?
Footnotes
Assuming it's Sway and not i3 because I assume you have already switched to Wayland. You switched to Wayland, right? You need to switch to Wayland. Why are you not switching to Wayland? ↩
, Yes, you can tweak KDE, but since all the various parts were created to fit together switching one will always result in awkward UX. ↩
I guess I hadn't thought of it that way. Maybe I already have the wm experience that works for me, and I can just load up KDE when friends come over and I want to provide a more approachable UI for them.
I made the switch from i3 to kde with https://github.com/tilorenz/compact_pager and keyboard shortcuts similar to tiling WMs. Check out my config for keyboard shortcuts for window management with
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jowodo/config/refs/heads/main/plasma/window-managment.kksrc | grep -v '=$'. You could even import them into your kde settings and they will be added. PS.: yes I use meta AND alt, because I also use windows (where alt is my mod key) and macos (where option is my mod key) at work.I'm happy with Cinnamon. Maybe OpenBox.
Cinnamon situation currently on arch feels such that it might break at any time, and in fact has recently. :-( I have absolutely loved the simplicity of this DE, but the breakages lately are worrisome. I'm considering migrating from cinnamon to plasma, but the added cruft that comes with the Plasma DE does not impress me. There is some tension; I have contributed to KDE projects, and I prefer KDE apps over gnome/GTK.
How well does plasma wayland tolerate unresponsive apps? I need to be able to keep graphical apps in this state for possibly an hour at time, as I run them under a debugger.
I think due to Cinnamon being the DE for Mint, they might be feeling some issues with their transition to Wayland. I know I switched from Fedora Cinnamon to Fedora Budgie for a bit because things got frustrating when they started the switch. I'm using Fedora COMIC right now. It seems pretty decent.
niri forever
i used cinnamon in 2016 (worst time i think), then i briefly used gnome in '23. i've been using kde since '25 and i regret i have no desire to use anything else anymore.
want a tiling wm? - just install a plugin and customize kde within 5 minutes
want to build a mediabox with a simple ui for use with a remote on a tv? - just adjust the sizes and find one of a million widgets!
do you want the ms win98 look? - it's 3 clicks away!
i am sure other DE's may be better for my specific usecases. but the flexibility of kde gives me good enough results within a familiar environment. i can change my whole computer experience in a few clicks and revert whenever on the same de!
i have tried kde and i cannot understand how so many people love it and hate gnome
It's not that I "hate" Gnome, I still love Gnome 2 and Cinnamon by extension, but the workflow of Gnome 3 just sucks balls for me. I can tolerate the workflow of any other DE, but Gnome 3 is just right out.
Gnome 3 abruptly removed app icons from the desktop moved taskbar to the top of the screen, and broke Alt-Tab. That’s why prople hate Gnome and love KDE, because KDE did not break these features.
Me either. I use Plasma because I prefer the whole workflow but I’m fine with GNOME, it’s just a bit shit out of the box, which I think is part of the problem. It feels so much more modern and the settings menu is much better, plus all the GNOME apps feel lightyears ahead of the half-baked KDE stuff. I wish KDE would stop adding obscure features nobody uses and just work on the polish (though I think they’re doing a bit of that now with the new login screen and unified theming).
I really like tiling window managers, but plasma is so much easier to deal with
Cinnamon > KDE
in what way?
change wallpaper
Tried COSMIC the other day. Wanted to connect my bluetooth keyboard. Was not working. No error. Opened up KDE system settings. Keyboard connected. Logged out and went into Plasma again.
I cut my teeth on openbox and fluxbox, and I hated KDE. But to be fair that was like, KDE3? It didn't look so good.
Xfce was good for a while, but then plasma was really the best Wayland option, so it made sense. It's good out of the box, ready and quick to customise.
But after a few years of that I've just last month got going with an Lxqt Wayland session with labwc compositor. This is the winner. No more reliance on plasma for me.
After using Hyprland for 2 years I can say it's my favorite am by far for fun and productivity, however it's not stable at all
I've found hyprland itself is very stable, but what you run on top of it often compromises that. Using end 4 dots as a base on cachy has been a superb experience for me. Had a lot of issues with my completely custom hypr on tumbleweed (not tumbleweed's fault tho)
Yeah ofc it's stable by itself, but when you add hyprpm plugins, edit the configs to rely on them, create custom rules, and now steam is moving right as fast as my refresh rate
I'm now on KDE. Before I have used XFCE, Gnome, Mate and Cinnamon.
People seem excited about Cosmic.
What does it make it so promising?
I just installed the Fedora spin with COSMIC this week. It's running very nicely on a low powered mini-desktop with 8Gbit of shared memory. It feels light enough and easy enough to use for newcomers to Linux. Plus it has just enough eye candy to satisfy those that want some customization by just point and clicking.
I'm going to be trying it out for a while I think. But my laptop will always be Kinonite.
Yes, no DE :)
It's weird watching people bitch or take sides on DE like it's a sporting event. Which is another thing I don't really get.
since Plasma 6.5 I just daily drive it now. prior to that I was all about WM's be it Herbstluftwm, Sway, Niri, whatever but after awhile I just got tired of configuring them or dealing with quirks about each one and what have you. Plasma just does everything I need and I don't have to think about it. And you can even get it to tile now be it manual or dynamic. Plus you can theme the hell out of it. It just works. Plus Konsole has become my favourite terminal. just don't see a point in using other stuff anymore.
We only need xfce, let's delete the others
I still miss Windowmaker. :(
Well, tiling window managers exist.
Been on Awesome WM since '08, but once dappled with KDE. Does it still have resource hungry processes that I have no use for (IIRC, Akonadi or daemons related to it were one of those problematic components)?
It does, but they are removable (and I think there is an option to just install the base KDE package by itself rather than the bundles)
It's the heaviest.
Did anyone only just realise the smoking man in the background
I know when I reload it wont be kde.
I like Gnome with Dash To Panel and ArcMenu. But KDE is nice too.
me irl, but Sawfish/Enlightenment.
"Am I interested in other DEs?" and "Will I install them?" are two different questions though. Yeah, I had fun running i3 years back, but i3 isn't the new hotness anymore, and there's not a snowball's chance in hell of me feeling like I have the time to learn and configure another WM. Absent my suddenly striking it rich and having entirely too much free time, I sincerely doubt there will come another time where I feel like I have that sort of time and nothing I'd rather use it for than such a mundane and endless task.
Just switch to sway. As far as I know, the config should be compatible (if you swap the complex utils for Wayland ones). But I haven't tried it (I do use river and really like it though, so I do recommend sway).
Edit: see this:https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide
Lxqt and i3 4lyfe
Using a Chromebook you gotta levy usage with processing ability.
I've been using KDE for years but right now I think Cosmic is neat
I was really surprised how great the workflow of paperWM is. If you like a "scroller" with a working DE and don't want to configure niri: give it a try. I don't even want tilers anymore.
I just install 1980s pong OS. Humans should have stopped at this, So much is simplit times for us yes.
Any i3 lad around?
Used to be, but then I moved to Wayland.
What do you use in there?
Started with Sway to ease the migration, but just this week - after a few months of Waylanding - I decided to try Hyprland to see what's all the hype (hyp?) is about. I didn't like it - it was pretty, yes, but it felt sluggish and the multi-monitor support has some deal-breaking issues.
So I looked at other alternatives, and found Niri. I fell in love. It has both eye-candy and performance, and the combination of tiling and sliding is pure genius.
Interesting!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeYx2exm04M
Niri? Never heard of it! Is it easy to migrate from i3?
It's kind of new (version 0.1.0 was released two years ago)
The mental model is a bit different, but I got used to it quite quickly. Configuration-wise, no matter which WM you pick the migration from X11 to Wayland will be the bulk of the work.
I saw it is Rust coded too 😌👌🏼
It's a shame about the licensing issues Qt had back in the day, because otherwise there was no reason GTK (and therefore GNOME) ever needed to exist.
I want LXDE/LXQt to work so badly but I spend more time unbreaking shit than actually using my computer if I try to use them :(
I thought I would hate KDE because of the Kalculator, Konsole and all the other K apps. "I want a solid DE, dammit. If I want jokes, I'll go to Hannah Montana Linux"
Then I realised I've been using KDE-Plasma for over a year.... And damn. Its good...