Reasons to get excited about KDE in 2018 | Hacker News Reader

Reasons to get excited about KDE in 2018

dot.kde.org

22 pointsjrepinc10 comments

Is 'Wayland only' result of valid reasoning? Is Wayland successfully replacing X11 on Linux? I am not using Linux for some time now so I am not sure.

It's not "Wayland only", it's just that properly writing new display server-specific features for X11 is very hard compared to Wayland and probably not really worth the added maintenance cost.

Check out https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/01/kwinx11-is-fe...

I don't know about the other distros, but it's now the default on Ubuntu, which is one of the most popular.

Default on Fedora Gnome since 25.

There are no reasons to get excited by KDE in 2018 because there isn't a single stable distro that supports it running (maybe opensuse, I did not try that). Mint KDE was amazing, but out of the dozen or so others I've tried, none has been stable and some haven't even installed. Hardware is an 2013 old retina laptop so all the drivers exist and are mature. Big distros like Kubuntu and KDE Plasma were the worst here, almost unusable after install. Fedora simply didn't install. As a long time KDE user, I've decided it's finally time to throw in the towel and switch. Clearly, no one cares enough to actually make a stable system out of this amazing desktop environment.

> maybe opensuse, I did not try that

Yes, openSUSE, you should try that.

openSUSE has a massive test suite, called openQA, with which they automatically test their builds. And among other things, they also maintain two builds with the latest KDE commits on top of their more stable version openSUSE Leap and one on top of their rolling release openSUSE Tumbleweed (those builds are called Argon and Krypton respectively).

So, they have integration testing all the way through, prior to an official KDE release already. This also means that they can essentially always ship the latest KDE Plasma LTS on openSUSE Leap without any problems.

And, KDE gives back for all of that effort and then schedules LTS releases to be relatively close to openSUSE Leap releases.

So, openSUSE is that distro that you're looking for, which takes this amazing desktop environment and makes a stable system out of it. Like, honestly it's hard to remember the last crash that I had (when I was not dicking around with random KWin scripts, that is).

The aforementioned Manjaro, I've also heard good things of, in that it at least does not treat KDE as a second-class citizen, but it's still miles away from all that extra effort that openSUSE puts in.

The KDE world is still haunted by the KDE 4 trauma. Also it takes just 15 minutes to install standard Ubuntu and surf the Internet with Firefox. That's a fair price to pay for a crappy UI in which almost every task is more efficent to perform in a terminal.

Definitely a thing to remember... Never mark a revision of successful software final when it's just alpha... ;)

Google Manjaro, you can thank me later :)

Did kde sandbox the file preview thing yet?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com