Hacker News Reader

Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

It's worth it to try KDE Plasma rather than GNOME. It's lighter and faster than GNOME by a fair margin, and it's far more customizable. GNOME is great for your OS X convert who isn't used to anything being customizable, but KDE is an utter delight for everyone else.

View on HN

Unless something changed recently, it is weird to say that GNOME/KDE is heavier/lighter when they are both insane resource hogs. I use Xfce or MATE nowadays.

Plasma has made massive improvements especially around performance over the past couple of years. I switched from MATE myself and haven't looked back. I recommend giving it another look!

Both the KDE and GNOME stories have actually changed quite a bit the past few years.

I disagree. I started on Ubuntu 19.10 with GNOME but switched to sway because gnome-shell was always taking 3+% of CPU. It's hard to understand why something that should be doing nothing is one of the largest power draws on my laptop.

Plasma/KDE is mostly great, but a major thing that GNOME and Xfce still do better is GVFS and GVFS-FUSE. That means I can browse to smb://something or sftp://something, double click a file and it just works whatever the application is (e.g. play in VLC, edit in VS Code). This has never worked in KDE where only KDE apps can open remote files (and even that has bad performance).

GVFS/GIO is nice, but at least on LTS, it can be a bit rough (with i/o errors under load, at least during PhotoStructure imports). Also, somewhat frustratingly, the GIO system mounts network file systems with paths that include a colon character, which breaks standard PATH parsing.

KIO is also gaining that capability.

If this article is to be believed, then there are situations in which KDE is actually more light weight on system resources then XFCE.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-...

Well, XFCE resource usage grew with GTK3, probably :(. But there's something off in their test methodology. They claim to measure idle RAM usage, and there's 2x difference between tests, on same distros..? (for comparison, my Arch XFCE install takes 480MiB after boot)

I'm appreciating the time-passing irony in suggesting MATE, given it is a fork of GNOME 2.x and that it had plenty of it's own share of "resource hog" complaints back in its day.

Emacs was called a resource hog, once.

What we get from older technologies is better tuning.

Personally I prefer to stick with KDE neon for a full KDE experience. It's built on Ubuntu LTS but uses the latest KDE packages. I've found it to be a lot more stable than just using KDE on top of a Ubuntu release.

The major downside to KDE Neon for me is that, although it's Ubuntu-based, because it ships its own Qt, it breaks PPAs for Qt-based applications such as FreeCAD or QGIS.

I've tried KDE Neon, but ran into issues installing Nvidia drivers. The only Ubuntu flavor I've found that supports them really well is Pop_OS!.

I get it, I should be using FOSS drivers, but I do a lot of work involving neural networks and CUDA, so Nvidia's drivers are non-negotiable.

FWIW I've had good luck with Nvidia binary drivers on Mint, both the Cinnamon and Mate-based variants.

I'm that guy who inexplicably loves Unity.

I'm running 18.04 LTS and Gnome 3 is unusable due to lag/resource consumption on a i7-2600 system with an nVidia 710 GT whereas Unity runs butter smooth.

Unity doesn't get in the way of me interacting with my desktop applications and is fairly utilitarian compared to GNOME and KDE based desktops.

I've gone back and forth between thinking of switching to KDE Plasma and sticking with gnome. Moving DEs comes with a significant time commitment and my old experiences with KDE were just too jarring.

My main work machine runs i3 with KDE. I'd avoided kde in the early 2000s because it seemed clunky at the time. Then used Macs for a while before switching back to linux. KDE plasma is great.

You can make an argument for something, without demeaning something else

I'm not demeaning GNOME at all, I'm contrasting against it. GNOME is a great product, but I didn't like that its recent incarnations seem determined to smooth out the user experience by removing user choice. I tried out KDE (having used it long ago) and was very pleasantly surprised to find it both faster and more tweakable than GNOME. I'd expected tweakable, but the performance was unexpected. Plasma is a far cry from the KDE of old.

The GNOME project seems to have made a conscious decision to go for the consumer market, which usually cares more about things "just working" than their being tweakable. That's a good thing - that market needs to be served - but it's not what I wanted. A big part of the reason I run Linux is for detailed control of my user experience, and KDE is the better product in that regard for my use case.

> OS X convert who isn't used to anything being customizable,

> KDE is an utter delight for everyone else

The way you frame it as OS X convert vs everyone else is kind of rude. I would say the hardcore Linux customizer is the minority, and everyone else prefers the easy to use out of the box UIs of OS X and Windows.

I'm a "hardcore Linux customizer" in many ways, but I'm also a happy Gnome user on my day-to-day development machine. I do love KDE but fiddling with it was distracting from my work.

To be fair, this probably says more about me than it does about either environment.

If I recall correctly, Gnome was touted as lightweighter than KDE back when KDE4 was released :-)

In...2008? That does sound right from my memory (given that Metacity didn't even have composting effects back then), but it was literally over a decade ago.

Gnome was lighterweight than KDE for a long time. It genuinely surprised me to find Plasma to be as agile as it is, but I was happy to be surprised!

It's been a long time coming, Plasma was a massive resource hog and pretty unstable for the longest time. It's brilliant now, though.

they swap places every five years or so

Is there any difference between installing KDE Plasma on Ubuntu v/s just using Kubuntu?

You know what they say, old habits, they die hard.

Well you compare a heavy JavaScript based DE (Gnome) with a C++ one (KDE, with Qt). That's also unfair.

But if you try i3 or OoenBox, they are way faster

> But if you try i3 or OoenBox, they are way faster

But those are just window managers no? You can run them alongside KDE or Gnome.

Gnome 3 doesn't let you configure an alternative wm. KDE does but it's broken by default with minimal wm. For example it wants to start a full screen window that would normally be the desktop interface over everything.

It's questionable how much value is added by running a plasma session over simply running KDE apps and services.

Eventually, you won't really have a choice about whether to run a desktop session once Wayland is here. I don't expect my favorite window mamager to be updated with Wayland support.

Which window manager is that? For i3, the Wayland equivalent (or at least 99% equivalent) is Sway (which I'm using right now over here). For Awesome, there's way-cooler.

WindowMaker

from the article:

> Canonical's write-up of the work done to improve GNOME is also interesting for the long list of what didn't work and how wrong some of the developers' initial assumptions were—especially regarding GNOME's use of JavaScript. > It turns out JavaScript had next to no effect on performance. So sorry JavaScript haters, but "assuming that JavaScript is slower than everything else written in C" is evidently a bad assumption

In 2011 gnome 3 was released with a memory leak due to a mismatch between compiled code and Javascript which saw memory allocated during animations that would be freed in no reasonable time frame. Eventually all memory in the system belongs to gnome shell.

As this is really hard to fix they fixed this by constantly running the gc in December 2018. This worked OK but didn't fix the issue for all until 2019.

Does making it broken for 8 years so usability comes 8 years late count as making it slow.

It should be noted that 3.34 has also seen some work on moving stuff from JS to C. Notably animations are now far less dependent on the JS part, with better performance as a result.

Be aware that QTs QML makes use of a Javascript variant too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com