KDE Plasma Voted Best Desktop Environment in Linux Journal Readers Choice Awards
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I like that KDE applications are at least somewhat consistent in their UX and in the way they organize basics. For example, the way settings and shortcuts are handled is identical across all apps. Kparts makes embedded viewers consistent and good across apps. Support for GTK theming reduces the visual annoyance of the rare GTK app. KWin works very well, has a broad selection of useful shortcuts and has been the most stable compositor I've ever used (AMD/open source).
On the other hand, KDEPIM/Akonadi seems like it is quite powerful, but for some reason I kinda didn't became comfortable with it. Not sure why, exactly. I used KMail and KOrganizer for quite a while, though. Decent tools, but some rough edges when it comes to first-time setup, e.g. the wizards could really use some polishing.
There is a surprising number of useful and powerful utilities in KDE.
So yeah, while the core concepts of KDE and Plasma are great, the development doesn't look as active as it once was and once great packages seem to degrade over time.
One of my favorite features of the past years is the Dolphin-Nextcloud integration. That way you can simply right-click a synced file and 'share with Nextcloud' it via link or other users, works great :-)
The other apps are generally excellent or good enough you don't notice them, which is exactly what I want from desktop.
you must joking right. KDE5 beginnings were terrible.
The problem with the KDE4 was that people were adopting it too early. I started to use it with the first alpha and saw a lot of bugs during that time, but I always knew that I was using incomplete alpha software. KDE4 wasn't stable enough for every day use until 4.3 or so and many people started to use it with 4.1 which was just the first version which claimed to be usable at all (most basic programs had been rewritten, but many more advanced programs still weren't ready).
Yes, but this problem was caused by the KDE release team botching their announcement. They had an alpha release, a beta release, and then a big 4.0 release. Then, it turned out that their '4.0 release' was really what everyone else would consider alpha/beta, and they didn't want people actually using it for production environments yet. They screwed up communication royally, sending mixed messages about whether the software was actually ready or not.
source: I maintained some KDE-related packages on arch and the 4.0 release was horribly botched.
True, it also meant that distributors were replacing KDE3 too early and the system wasn't receiving much updates anymore before KDE4 was usable. I ended up using mostly XFCE, Gnome and macOS the years after. ;) Might give KDE5 a shot though.
IIRC, that was on purpose. KDE purposedly release KDE4.0 even though it was not completely tested in order to have more bug reports.
In retrospect, that was a stupid move.
Still in retrospect, I still miss KDE3.
https://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/
But I can't find there any warning what so ever. So even if the people who were actively engaged with the development knew that this software wasn't ready for prime time, they didn't mention it and therefore I have to agree with you that this move must have been done on purpose. :-/
But it was communicated with the community what KDE 4.0 was about [0]
Obviously there were mistakes made. But the fact that KDE 4.0 was not ready for every day use _was_, in fact, communicated with distro's.
Don't you mean that it was released too early? People will in general install and use the released version and complain if it's not good enough.
There was a KWin bug that filled the task bar with graphical artifacts over time so that you couldn't tell anymore which taskbar "button" was for which window. They kept blaming the video drivers until someone proved to them that they had a resource leak in KWin.
The KMail/Akonadi bug that I still remember vividly as it was very annoying and long lived was one where you would get messages duplicated.
Most systems (out of a pool of about 200) I can query run:
- Gnome 3 (about 80) - i3 (about 30) - Unity (about 25) - Mate (about 25) - Others (KDE included, about 40)
And those are minimally managed systems, all they have to run is orchestration software and IPA, so they choose their own distro and DE and everything else.
I suppose most of the use is because they don't use the DE itself that much, it's mostly just a launcher for the stuff they use. It's mostly full-screen IDE on one monitor, browser and terminal on the other.
Why not use a pure WM of a kind or XFCE then?
> full-screen IDE on one monitor, browser and terminal on the other.
What do they do with the activities stuff then as they use to have 2 physical monitors?
What I found annoying about gnome 3 was the persistent useless panel at the top of the screen (I still use gnome at work and I use the dash-to-panel extension[3] to make it slightly less useless).
[1] http://obamapacman.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Mission-Co...
[2] https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/en.linux/images/9/97/GNO...
[3] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/
(Maybe the KDE foundation should dedicate manpower/resources to the Kubuntu project before their LTS releases or something, as they'd massively increase their usage base this way...)
I use KDE neon which uses a mildly stripped-down Ubuntu 16.04. I surf, do some web development, attempt to learn Clojure, and make my desktop look very pretty. So far (couple months) I've had the "it just works!" level of experience.
Edit: Actually, I suppose that is distinct from the LTS Ubuntu release /with/ KDE.
Kubuntu 16.04 comes with a really outdated version of Qt and with KDE Plasma 5.5, which was essentially still a development version of the 5.x series.
KDE Neon pretty much just exists to fix that hot mess.
Do some people still live by "build it and they will come" nonsense? I mean, nobody expects dedicated marketing campaigns for an open source project, but at lest some links in the places where people could see. Event on the neon.kde.org page I see the crucial information that this is based on Ubuntu LTS burried in a big wall of text I wouldn't have ever bothered to read if I wasn't actively digging for details.
I'll wait for a version based on Ubuntu 18 LTS when that comes, and definitely try it, but boy, it's like whoever works on this took great effort to keep it stealth or something...
1) They don't want to run a distro. KDE is distro-agnostic. Maintaining their own distribution would imply that this is the KDE distro, where you want to be to get the best KDE experience. (Hint: It's actually not.)
2) They don't consider it a distro. "Distribution" implies that someone spent some time to put together a collection of software which works reasonably well with one another. So, it would mean that they do integration testing. KDE does not do that with Neon. It's just Ubuntu with KDE smacked on top. The Ubuntu-part is tested, the KDE-part is somewhat tested, but the combination of those happens to function most of the time out of pure luck.
3) Many people looking for Ubuntu with KDE on it are (reasonably) new to Linux. If you're more skilled, you'll probably go for openSUSE or Manjaro. There's of course reasons why you might prefer Ubuntu even as an experienced user, but it is still the case that many noobs look into KDE Neon. And KDE Neon is not for noobs. The Ubuntu-part is stable, but the KDE-part is not, it's bleeding edge software. Often not really tested, so things might potentially explode there. The lack of integration testing adds to that. And then as the grand-grandparent comment hinted, KDE Neon does not come with a whole load of software. It misses lots of software that you'd expect in a full-featured operating system, which is also in particular bad for new Linux users.
As for waiting for a version that's going to be based on Ubuntu 18.04, I'm not sure, if that makes so much sense. Presumable, or hopefully, Ubuntu will fix that hot mess themselves with 18.04. The most recent version of KDE is an LTS release, so they'd be hard-pressed to choose wrongly there, and they previously had such an outdated version of Qt, because they used that outdated version in Unity 8, which they've stopped developing, so they should not fuck up there either.
So, unless you actually continuously want to see the latest development in KDE, using KDE Neon won't make that much sense anymore after Ubuntu 18.04 is released.
Also, Ubuntu 18.04 is released in 2018 in April, hence 18.04, it's <year>.<month>. And they usually release in April and October which is why you usually XX.04 and XX.10, with every second year in April being an LTS, so 18.04 is going to be the version number of the LTS. For smaller fixes, they add a number behind that: e.g. 16.04.5.
Then Manjaro is also solid, mainly because KDE is at least no second-class citizen on it, like it is on most distros.
And if you want something Ubuntu-based, then KDE Neon is the way to go, even though there's essentially no integration testing between the KDE software and the underlying Ubuntu base.
KDE 5 has been excellent and suprisingly lightweight aswell.
It's also got autocompletion and acts intelligently to a limited degree (basically it remembers that when you typed in "Fi" last time, you wanted Firefox, not Filezilla, so it puts Firefox at the top).
Of course, this does use up more CPU cycles than the pretty basic search in Xfce. You can turn off some of those search features, if you don't think you'll need them.
And here's some random examples of the features that KDE has:
I do some webdev, so I need a color picker every now and then. I have one of those in my panel.
I also have a little button in my panel that I can click on, which pops open a list of the most recently modified files in my Downloads-folder, effectively acting as a direct access to my downloads.
Lastly, you might want to play around with turning off compositing in KDE's settings. That does limit some features, but should speed things up quite a bit, too.
Hah! This is amazing! Never thought of using folder view applet like this!
One offer: Instead of turning compositing off, you can set animation speed to instant.
That means you get nice things like transparencies, but there's no animation.
I really can't understand why people would want to use something as dumb as dolphin (created to be as dumb as nautilus) when you have the great and awesome Konqueror at your fingertips.
When I moved from running CTWM to a real desktop environment in ~2001, I submitted patches to both KDE and Gnome to add support for my oddball WM config (basically mapping move/resize/iconify to alt+mouse button press). KDE merged my patch. Gnome closed my bug request, saying that what I wanted to do were against the their design guidelines. So I've been using KDE for most of 2 decades..
Choosing to use Ubuntu 16 LTS, I gave up considering KDE as an option after trying hard to put up either with the official repo one or a newer unofficial one (both were buggy and unstable, and lacked essential features to me like Win+<number> task switching shortcut that is available in latest KDE, and especially combining this with drag-and-drop freely reorderable taskbar entries to actually enable my "standard" worflow that I can use fine in Windows 10, Unity, or Xfce+custom dock).
Hope the Kubuntu guys take care not to shit the bed with the LTS release (because their non-LTS one were always fine, like in not just up to date as expected, but waay more stable too!)...
[0] https://kubuntu.org/news/plasma-5-12-3-bugfix-updates-availa...
Funny argument after Windows 8. So KDE gets marketed as ressort for confused windows xp users?
I enjoyed customizing my workspace for years. Now I use gnome shell, I relax and don't waste brain cycles on irrelevant stuff like which icons show up here or there. I don't use my desktop to do work or anything meaningful.
The file manager has many options that anyone that does any work would be useful, like tabs, splitting the screen, icons/list/detailed view of files, opening a terminal inside the file manager,previews, FTP integrations and all of this is an option, including that you can configure the toolbars to show/hide buttons.
Other example(maybe other DEs have this too) I can have tabs in the terminal app (konsole) and in the tabs that I am SSHed in I use different color scheme(with red on black) so I am aware and not run dangerous commands on a remote server.
My point is that a KDE user is not one that chooses KDE over Gnome due to UI but is more about functionality.
Take Windows as an extreme. Slow as all balls, around 1.5 GB RAM usage and essentially no features that go beyond the basics.
On the other hand, take Enlightenment. It's got fancier graphics effects than KDE, nearly as much customization and I'd say about half the features (which is still a lot more than Windows, GNOME, even Xfce), and it starts up in the blink of an eye, has extremely little lag compared to other DEs, and only uses about 150 MB.
It's also really buggy and not really a complete, polished DE, so despite all its advantages, I would only recommend it, if you really feel comfortable with desktop Linux and don't mind a bit of dicking around to get things working the way you want them to.
And GNOME clocks in at around 1 GB RAM usage, making it the most heavyweight Linux DE, despite it lacking tons of features that pretty much any other DE has.
(KDE nowadays clocks in at around 600 MB, Xfce at around 350 MB.)
I agree that a WM will have less features and eat less memory so if you do not need the features of KDE use a WM. Also you can disable some of KDE features like compositing, akonadi if those are the things you do not need.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubu-1704...
I am running an older version of KDE and my plasma uses less then 230MB in total(including shared memory)where only one instance of Chrome uses 450Mb and Xorg uses more then plasma for me (it may differ for other versions and configurations)
Gnome Shell is okay if you buy into the exact configuration/vision it presents. If you want anything slightly different, the extension system is a clusterfuck, as an end user. Extensions crash, don’t work with updated versions of Gnome Shell, etc. And several simple functional needs such as hide window title bars (to save screen space) were a pain to get working correctly.
Its Win9X/2k-ist behavior fits me just fine, as i try to ween myself off anything involving the big DEs.
Personally, I'll run away screaming from reading any sort of manual on how to use software, rather than just dicking around with it, so I only really managed to get into tiling WMs with AwesomeWM, which is still relatively graphical.
It wasn't stable for me though and it generally felt sluggish so in the end I switched to Apple.
like you said, if i really needed all those fancy features and eyecandy I'd rather switch to apple or microsoft.
I'm still taking a look at kde and gnome once a year or so, especially since kde5 looked really clean and nice, but it just isn't there yet..
But KDE is pretty light these days and it doesn't really get in the way. It's really polished.
2010 was the KDE 4.x times and it was indeed a bad time for the project.
Things are quite different now.
As an example a feature I like but you may not like(and you could disable it) is plugging a photo camera, I get a prompt and I can chose to import the latest pictures, in a simpler setup with just a WM I would have to use the file manager, find the right subfolder in the camera SD card, find the recent images or select all, navigate to my image library,then copy paste them . I like this feature because it saves me time, but since is KDE is configurable.
Other must have feature for me is the zoom feature (I have bad eyes), the ability to customize keyboard shortcuts(in Windows I can't change the zoom app shortcuts), the ability to move the panel and notification to my preferred side or corner (is important if you have a bad eye to put notifications to the side of your better eye though some designers think they know better and not let you move them)
Not sure I'd ever go back to KDE or Gnome or XFCE now that i've gotten accustomed to i3wm.
There's hundreds of lightweight, no-bullshit options in Linux land. GNOME and KDE are the only ones that stick out from the crowd. No one forces you to use them and especially they have every right to exist, even if they don't suit your taste.
Nowadays only use Unity on a travel netbook, soon to be replaced with GNOME with the upcoming LTS release, the remaining laptops are on macOS/Windows.
I'd say that -unfortunately- the DE/WM world is irrelevant these days. We need decent UIs & OSes for the mobile world; Android and iOS need competition. The latter is proprietary, the former partly FOSS but data hungry.
krunner also supports opening Kate (the KDE editor, roughly similar to Sublime Text) sessions directly.
Its probably a menu in the top right corner of either your username 'tile' or the screen, depending on your login manager
As someone who uses Cinnamon as my day to day at home and Awesome at work, what would entice me to switch?
Now when people want to try "that Linux thing" I hand them Debian KDE if they are a Windows user since it is closer to Windows start menu out of the box, at least for my purposes.
Compared to Cinnamon, KDE is pretty much better at everything. It's a thousand times more configurable, it's more feature-rich and the default applications are more powerful. The search in KDE, called KRunner, is also something that many people love.
Where Cinnamon is better:
- Not making your eyes bleed over when you look at the settings screen (because KDE really has a lot of settings).
- Less incompatible options. In KDE, you sometimes dick around with one setting and it invalidates another setting. (Usually nothing important, though.)
- Less features usually means less confusion for less technically inclined users.
- Its keyboard shortcuts are quite similar to those of Windows. KDE deviates in places from that.
- It uses probably like 100 MB less RAM and presumably a few less CPU cycles. (In the default configuration, that is.)
- It's somewhat more stable. KDE has gotten a lot better at this over the last couple of releases, but it's still not yet quite as rock-solid and probably won't ever be.
- Cinnamon is better at being Cinnamon. In KDE, with how configurable it is, you can rebuild most desktop environments in it and Cinnamon is very similar to the KDE default, too. But if all you want is exactly Cinnamon, then just using Cinnamon is cleaner.
As for Awesome:
+ It's a lot lighter than KDE.
+ It works better independent from the distro. I don't think there's any distro where Awesome is not good. With KDE, I'd consider openSUSE, Manjaro and KDE Neon good. Fedora and Debian are not terrible. Ubuntu is often garbage.
+ There's some keyboard shortcut in Awesome to unminimize windows in reverse order of how you minimized them, which I was quite fond of.
+ It has tiling.
There's some scripts that you can use in KDE to also make it tile its windows, but those are more limited than the tiling you have in Awesome. They are also somewhat laggy and sometimes just bug out.
You can use bspwm or i3 inside of KDE, which is also somewhat hacky, but it does work well enough that I use KDE+bspwm as my daily setup. If you want a quick guide on that, let me know.
Benefits of using KDE over Awesome:
- KDE has lots of smaller and bigger features that Awesome doesn't have. I for example do some webdev, so I have a color picker widget in my panel. I could live without it, but I'd also just rather not. And again, the search of KDE is just really good. Awesome doesn't have anything like that.
- Again, the KDE default applications are really good. Having those preinstalled rather than needing to hunt everything down yourself is worth something. And even if you don't end up using the desktop environment, lots of these applications are considered best-in-class by many people, so you could end up incorporating them into your Awesome workflow.
- The KDE applications + the desktop environment also form a whole. They work well with one another, work similar to another and are thoroughly tested on that desktop environment.
- KDE is a desktop environment, not just a window manager. So, it can handle volume, notifications, screen brightness, power management, connectivity etc.. With Awesome, you need your own custom solutions for many things.
- Partially as a result of that, KDE is also more compatible with the outside world. Quickly hooking up a second monitor or a projector to Awesome is not necessarily something I'd feel confident about. And just in general more of these sort of edge cases are tested against and implemented in KDE, because the user base is much bigger.
I mostly use headless Linux these days, but when I have a GUI at hand, I always miss the old GNOME. I heard there are some continuation project, haven’t looked into them yet, though.
Anyway, I really hope something like Budgie or Pantheon takes over Gnome though... distro integrators seem to prefer GTK-based DEs almost exclusively nowadays (probably have their reasons), but the flagship GTK DE Gnome 3 is not something you can recommend to anyone doing anything other than "sysadmin + coding" work, and even some of us developers are not that fond of it...
Then I agree with you, tiling managers are probably way more productive and better than every single on of those DE, but it's about the amount of users, not the one with most innovation or creativity.
That said, I may take Pantheon for a spin - I've been a happy KDE user for many years but I never mind trying new things and perhaps learning something new. Everything I've tried so far made me return back to KDE but one must keep an open mind.
You mean like Objective-C, C++, Eiffel, Scheme, Nim?
Compiling to another native language is a shortcut to avoid implementing a complete compiler backend.
With C being the best option as target language on UNIX systems, given its ubiquity.
C++ first compiler that actually generated native code without going through C was written by Walter Bright sold by Zortech, which then sparked the race from all other compiler vendors.
Objective-C started as a macro processor for C, hence the [ ] syntax and @ prefixes, to make it easier to find them.
Nowadays the macro processor is gone, but at assembly level Objective-C code still gets translated into a bunch of objc_msgSend() and similar calls.
Again, the point is that Objective-C started as macro processor generating C code, which gregopet states it is silly for Vala devs to choose the same path as Brad Cox and Tom Love decided for their language.
GNU Common Lisp comes to mind as well (not to be confused with GNU CLisp, which is an interpreter implemented in C).
If you have experiences that prove why its a disadvantage then please do share.
Writing a LLVM backend is not harder than generating C code in the long run. The only advantage of the C code option is portability, so if you target some crazy microcontrollers C is fine.
FWIW I never had any issues debugging Nim (a language that compiles to C or C++ or Obj C)
That said, the current Loki (0.4) release is in maintenance mode already; I'd wait for the Juno (5.0) release.