I'm one of those weirdos who loves KDE. KDE was the first DE I used back in 2007 when I first installed / had help installing Slackware on my computer by a friend. Once he installed it for me, I tried doing it by myself without his help and succeeded. The only thing I'll never truly care for with KDE is the browser it comes with, it's like another IE type of browser, and it gets confusing cause KDE will open websides in more than just Konqueror but another weird browser-like thing. There's also like two different file managers... I really do hope they kill off the weirdness. But KDE allows me to refine my desktop to feel like either Windows, Mac, Linux or a mixture. I can decide what my panels look like, where they go and how they behave.
It was Gnome 2 that gave me this power. When KDE 3.5 died and KDE 4 came out (around Vista times) it felt so sluggish and unstable and I ditched KDE for Gnome. Then Gnome became buggy and a lot less customizable. It still is, plugins and all. I really enjoy that KDE never took my freedom to configure my DE however I see fit, without having to install plugins. In that respect I'll always love KDE more. To be completely fair I still find myself using Gnome sometimes, it's not as awful as it once was, but KDE makes more sense to me. I just wish I could map the damn windows key to open the "applications" menu (one of those random things I wish KDE would just let me do), er I mean the "meta" key.
Besides SuSE, one of the best KDE friendly distributions was Mandrake, which had the goals of targeting Pentium and desktop users, but they eventually went under.
Also KDE suffered from Qt licensing and C++ use, which many GNU/Linux users weren't found of.
The license issue was eventually sorted out, but the C vs C++ arguments still carry on I would say.
Sure, those are not trivial issues from a developer perspective, but distributions mainly aim to expand their user base among ordinary users, and from a user perspective KDE is great and it remains mildly inexplicable that it's not the default among more distributions.
PS. Mandrake was my 2nd Linux distro ever, back in its heyday almost 2 decades back. Still remember Drakeconf with fondness!
I never got used to krunner probably cause I didn't yet have a Mac everytime I tried it. I might have to give it a shot again. I feel like redoing my OS on my laptop so I may run a newer copy of Kubuntu and try again. Thanks for the heads up. Did you map it to a similar key combination or just used whatever the default key bindings were?
That was one of the weirdest choices of the KDE4 transition, when KDE people looked drunk on power as they rewrote critical bits of the system with abandon. Dolphin appeared and was supposed to be the new blessed filemanager (for no good reason except that "it's all Qt4"), but the old one never went away (because it was much more powerful and less buggy already, unsurprisingly). A typical Linux-desktop migration, in other words.
> KDE will open websides in more than just Konqueror but another weird browser-like thing
As far as I know that's still very much Konqueror, it's just that menus might be a bit different when it's embedded in the filemanager.
I was watching this youtube video [0] about KDE neon and loved the customizations that the person had made. I tried out a KDE distro in a VM and made the required changes : use an app icon based task manager, set 4 virtual desktops over 2 rows and set the same desktop wallpaper shown in the video [1] and it looks incredible. It's been at least 4 years since I last used KDE and was blown away by how stable and lightweight it has become (I hear it uses less resources than even Gnome). And there's also the infinite customization options and it looks good out of the box.
Now I'm considering switching to Fedora KDE as my daily driver. For people who use Fedora KDE as their daily driver : what's your experience with this distro? Anything that people new to this Fedora spin need to be aware of? Any thoughts on the security track record of Fedora KDE?
Rock solid, fast, no graphical glitching (Intel GPU), sane default app choices (except why have Dragon Player instead of mpv), excellent installer, no, scratch that, the best installer, dnf is nice and has delta based updates which I never had with Ubuntu, no unnecessary bloat, in fact the resource usage is on par with Ubuntu 16.04. Only issue I've had is that f2fs isn't working normally but this also affects other distros with a similar kernel/userland. Otherwise it's been a net gain.
I switched to Fedora KDE for my main machine purely because of the Unity announcement, no intention to use the GNOME garbage, even though I will keep using Ubuntu 16.04 on other machines as long as the support continues until a few years.
I used the Fedora KDE "spin" for years and it's really fantastic. In fact I'm still running it on my previous laptop which I keep around at home for odd jobs and occasionally use for work when I can't be bothered to dig my new laptop out of my bag.
The new machine has a 4K screen and as with many people I'm occasionally hooked up to 1080P external monitors. I found that Gnome handled mixed DPI setups slightly better so I'm using that these days but KDE is very polished and well worth a try. Once KDE sort out the mixed DPI situation I may even switch back.
> I found that Gnome handled mixed DPI setups slightly better
Came here just to second this. This is especially true when using Wayland. Gnome is better here, especially if you have the luxury to
* enable experimental fractional scaling of Gnome 3.26;
* restrict yourself to properly ported GTK3-Applications.
The situation with other applications is not as bright. While eg. Libreoffice looks good at first sight (crisp fonts under Wayland and fractional scaling enabled), Dialog boxes are not resizable and become unusable, as important information is missing.
KDE seems to have won a lot of ground since the pre-plasma days. All I hear about it is how good it is. As a guy who can't be arsed to change the desktop environment for his installs, I hope it becomes standard on more distros. Not that I'm unhappy with gnome, but it's silly that it's the defacto default for most of them.
OpenSUSE is the best distro for most people but like KDE it has been Nuked by the community over a decade ago. It has a super stable desktop in Leap, a rolling release and a professional server, but people still hold on to Ubuntu, Arch and Redhat? OpenSUSE does great in all three areas.
I've been using Fedora for something like five years, and I love it. It just works.
Recently I've been experiencing some weird issues with Gnome (performance wise, low fps, I guess the whole shell megathread problem) so I decided to try the KDE spin - whom a lot of people often disregarded as a "second class citizen" - and I must say I am positively surprised.
Everything is smooth and no big issues, great hidpi support and very snappy!
It’s ok but I don’t know that I’d recommend it specifically over anything.
Literally the only reason I use Linux still is that Firefox and Chrome have too many bugs and issues on FreeBSD, otherwise I’d run FreeBSD on my desktop too as I do on my server and one of my two laptops.
My other laptop is currently running macOS but I almost haven’t used it since I put macOS on it, partly because the mouse stops working after a while but also because I’ve just been busy with a lot of other stuff so I haven’t had time to sit down with macOS since installing it on said laptop some weeks ago. Time flies by way too fast.
I can not stop myself from asking this question when I see FreeBSD and laptop mentioned together: have you ever gotten suspend/resume working? I long for FreeBSD like an exile from the gardens of Eden, but I need suspend/resume with X to work, and couldn't freaking do it in more than one year time I used it...
Yes I think so but it broke again. However I don’t use suspend/resume either way so I don’t mind though I used to use it so I guess I just got used to it not being available.
I bailed on KDE overnight at KDE 4.1. You couldn't have an NFS mounted home dir, as they had made mysql a requirement for Akonadi, without which kmail and everything else failed to work.
Suddenly KDE was no longer 'enterprise' ready, as no enterprise I've ever worked for has offered anything but NFS for home directories.
Occasionally I come across a coworker who uses konsole, as they like the tabs. But I've never seen it in use widely again.
Gnome has many many extensions, some of which are actually quite useful like, governors / frequency changing, visual display of caps lock, and such. IIRC these plugins/extensions are called plasmoids under KDE, right? Are those 2 plugins I described available ? I never seem to find them when I play around with KDE.
If you ever try KDE again, when searching through the default plasmoids, you will see a Get new widgets button through which you can download new plasmoids.
This is probably a silly question, but what advantage(s) does this have over installing plain Fedora and installing KDE manually? (Beyond convenience?)
I guess your installation will be smaller and you will have to process fewer updates. Which is not insignificant, I guess.
I never really got on with it myself. No distro seems to ship it as their default desktop any more, only as respins. Gnome seems to have pretty much won the desktop environment wars.
Netrunner uses it as a default. Also openSUSE and Slackware seems to showcase it as a default, though in openSUSE you can pick Gnome too, but I don't remember if Slackware lets you pick Gnome (I'm sure there's some way to get it regardless) or what. There's also Kubuntu, which is technically a distro even if it is "just a spin of" Ubuntu.
Also, aside from myself I've seen our system admin at my job using it, and I think at least one or two more coworkers. Also Tyler[0] uses KDE ;)
One thing I didn't like about KDE was that it presents you with a lot of configurability, but it's configurability I never cared about in the first place.
Giving the user every option he/she possibly could want is not necessarily good design. Tbh it seems like a cheap cop-out from making design decisions in the first place. Leaving the user with a lot of noise.
Do you also complain about vim or Emacs having literally hundreds of configuration options?
The point is, flexibility is not by itself a sign of bad design (or avoiding design decisions). Good design is choosing sane defaults for the average user, and providing discoverable and understandable configuration options for the power user.
I'm not saying that good design is directly correlated to the number of configuration options. Some configuration options are genuinely indicative of bad underlying design, and can be removed once a better design is in place. But when you remove configuration options for the sake of removing configuration options, you obtain Gnome 3.
Configurability is the Number 1 reason to run Linux on the Desktop. KDE's number one selling point is Integration. There is no better integrated desktop in the world and that message is lost to 99% of people. I find that I use two desktops the last 5 years. KDE or i3 (tiled desktop) but my applications are always KDE even with i3.
I think that KDE has had so much FUD thrown at it that people just have a negative view of it right away. Sure 4.0 was stated as a Beta and every distro put it out (When KDE stated it wasn't ready for that) and everyone Nuked KDE till about 4.7.
Let me give you an example, I hate working in Windows because I can't change the keyboard shortcuts of the Magnifier application so Windows forces me to use the Win+ +/- key and that is bad because I have to use two hands to press it.
My point is that maybe default options are good for a large majority but what about the rest? Should I not use computers because adding accessibility features like options for font sizes, color schemes, zoom applications or the great zoom options in KWin because some other people feel intimidated because the options popup has too many options?
People that are intimidated by buttons should use Gnome, they will remove everything that is possible from the options dialog.
> Tbh it seems like a cheap cop-out from making design decisions in the first place
The defaults seem very sensible in my experience. Having the freedom to customise it further doesn't seem like a bad thing but perhaps I'm just old-skool.
It was Gnome 2 that gave me this power. When KDE 3.5 died and KDE 4 came out (around Vista times) it felt so sluggish and unstable and I ditched KDE for Gnome. Then Gnome became buggy and a lot less customizable. It still is, plugins and all. I really enjoy that KDE never took my freedom to configure my DE however I see fit, without having to install plugins. In that respect I'll always love KDE more. To be completely fair I still find myself using Gnome sometimes, it's not as awful as it once was, but KDE makes more sense to me. I just wish I could map the damn windows key to open the "applications" menu (one of those random things I wish KDE would just let me do), er I mean the "meta" key.