Progress on Plasma | Hacker News Reader

Progress on Plasma

ubuntustudio.org

95 pointsjlpcsl134 comments

Personally I consider the KDE the only DE that feels like it can compete with an OS like Windows or OSX.

It's just a lot of small things that add up to make it feel cohesive. Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in.

A lot of people call that philosophy bloat. But honestly I've got a PC with 32 GB of RAM and a laptop with 16GB.

Like the Ubuntu Studio people have said 50MB more ram usage compared to XFCE isn't a bother at all.

> Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in.

That’s a nice feature. But it has little to do with Windows/OSX equivalence.

It also highlights something I felt last time I tried KDE (admittedly a while ago).

There were lots of nice UX innovations and polish. But they didn’t feel familiar to me (as a user of many desktop environments). This makes switching much less of an appealing prospect to me.

> But they didn’t feel familiar to me.

I'm shocked by this, especially when the alternative here is GNOME. You can put a lifelong windows user in front of a plasma machine and they will be able to figure it out easy. There is a start menu, a bottom taskbar, all the window buttons are where they belong, etc.

Contrast with gnome, where you can't get anything done unless you already know the magical keyboard shortcuts.

Plasma gets criticized often for having too many configuration options and too many features, which I think is just insane. It works perfectly well out of the box, but it allows you to tinker to your heart's content.

No disagreement here.

I don't use gnome desktops, for similar reasons (although I'm also not the target audience for adopters, as I currently use Linux as my primary desktop environment!)

I use cinnamon, as, for my personal preferences, it strikes the best balance between familiarity, 'prettiness' and functionality of the options I've tried.

I think Cinnamon is really underrated. It has sane defaults, is reasonably performant, and will be familiar to anyone coming from Windows.

In general I feel that Gnome has terrible defaults, and are hostile to the user making changes away from these defaults. It's also less performant than Cinnamon -- animations can lag on my machine for example, and my machine isn't exactly bad.

I think Plasma is nice, and it's certainly more customizable than Cinnamon, but I think this comes at the cost of reliability and an overall feeling of cohesiveness. I also think there's a point where you don't want every right click menu to contain an option which allows you to fundamentally change the functionality of your desktop.

I'd probably be using XFCE or Mate if Cinnamon didn't exist.

What?

You literally said you have only a limited amount of experience with KDE (from 'undefined' time ago), and yet you felt qualified to opine on its suitability for X... now?

What?

As you said, you got a PC with 32GB of RAM and a laptop with 16GB.

Exactly - a desktop experience should track the current desktop hardware. If you have 512mb of ram and a pentium 4 then too bad. Let’s not hobble the future because of the past.

Amen. Stop fighting the last war.

And you don’t need every desktop environment to handle every use case. If you have limited resources, run something like XFCE.

What about people who bought a low-to-mid range laptop last year? While 8G isn't .5G, it's still low enough that you'd quickly hit swap (a bloated modern browser + multimedia authoring tools)

Tracking "current" desktop hardware is a quick way to get yourself another vista.

If you bought a budget computer do you really expect it to be able to handle running even minor taxing applications. In my experience most people who are buying a budget laptop need a great web browsing experience and maybe an office suite (if they aren't using a cloud one already).

My guess is running a browser with Spotify or YouTube, some social networking tabs, and maybe google docs or office 365 word will not pose any issues.

> While 8G isn't .5G, it's still low enough that you'd quickly hit swap (a bloated modern browser + multimedia authoring tools)

High memory usage from a browser or multimedia authoring tools is not the fault or responsibility of the desktop environment?

Edit: Or was your point more that the desktop environment should use minimal memory so that the user can have a better experience with their applications? That makes sense, except in this case Ubuntu Studio explicitly states that it’s designed for powerful machines and not ones with more limited resources

Firstly 50MB isn't ".5G", it's 0.05GB (you're out by an order of magnitude).

You're point about not tracking current is relevant though....or at least it is for some domains. When it comes to multimedia authoring you do expect people to running at least current systems because multimedia authoring is hardware heavy processes thus professionals will invest in the hardware to support them. Even weirder is the expectation that you'd want to be running a hardware heavy web-browser while running your hardware heavy authoring tools on those modest systems. That feels like you're making some unfair demands tbh.

As for KDE5, that runs fine on older hardware. I have a 7 year old laptop and KDE flies.

FWIW I've been running KDE Neon on an older Intel NUC, sporting an i5-4250U and 8GB RAM. For normal usage like surfing the web, writing documents, file management, email and watching YouTube it has behaved very well.

Obviously the CPU is a bit anemic which is noticeable when you do CPU heavy stuff like watching non-h264 videos on YouTube, but otherwise it's been very smooth and functional.

There' no such thing as a "current desktop hardware" in 2020. Specs haven't been changing in like a decade.

Yeah, a large reason Vista got lambasted so widely was because netbook form factors were gaining steam at the same time, and Microsoft had built it with the assumption that most new users would be using contemporary desktop-class machines. The old assumption that users would throw out their old equipment and upgrade to something in step with Moore's Law was no longer valid.

That’s not really true, though desktop hardware hasn’t improved anywhere near as much as laptops, where the difference is very substantial. Computer hardware of equivalent cost or high-/low-endness has gotten quite a lot faster (and much more power-efficient); for many sorts of tasks similar CPUs will be four or more times as fast. But it’s really SSDs where the most obvious improvements have occurred, and for most practical computing terms, compare a fast and expensive HDD machine of ten years ago with a cheap SSD machine from now and the modern one will be waaaay faster.

Sample article doing some comparisons: https://www.techspot.com/article/1666-old-1000-cpu-vs-budget...

Your current desktop hardware.

According to the steam hardware survey (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey) current desktop hardware is 8GB of RAM or less, that's what half of all users have. There are more people on 4GB or less than there are with with more than 16GB. Your machine is the statistical outlier here and shouldn't be catered to at the expense of everyone else.

In Ubuntu Studio's context, one would expect the typical user to have decent RAM as it caters for multimedia which needs a lot of RAM.

Ubuntu's minimum requirements for desktop users is 4GB RAM. I presume that an extra 50MB is acceptable.

I'm still rocking a 7 year old Samsung Chronos with 8GB RAM and KDE5 flies.

There used to be a time when the real world footprint between KDE and XFCE was significant but that's not been the case in a long time.

These days the footprint of your average desktop chat client has dwarfed the difference in memory usage between most of the major desktop environments. So if you're looking for places to cut corners that would be the first place I'd suggest looking.

I'm using KDE (Kubuntu 20.04) on four laptops turning 10 this year. They are AMDs first gen APU, so they were nothing fancy when they came out. KDE runs just fine, with animations. Main thing to upgrade was an SSD for a really speedy setup.

That's the one upgrade (SSD) I did too.

This article is about Ubuntu Studio switching to KDE.

> For reference, Ubuntu Studio is created for more powerful computers, is not meant to run on low-powered or older hardware, and is not meant to give an old computer new life. For that reason, from our perspective, the RAM usage between the two desktops is nearly the same.

To me the problem with bloat is that it makes projects harder to maintain, also more bugs, not so much about ram usage. If the system in place makes sure the codebase is easily understood and adopted by contributors, then by all means, make all the crazy features you can think of.

Besides an integrated terminal, Dolphin also has a split mode! https://i.imgur.com/4blIFer.png

How does a file manager made by four Dutch guys for free beat Explorer, the file manager of the 99.9% marketshare multi-billion-dollar hegemon OS (which only got a dark mode like yesterday)?

And tabs. And drag-dropping things by accident doesn't simply move/copy files but asks you what you want to do.

The integrated terminal behaves badly with zsh/oh-my-zsh (random memory being printed to screen, extra space on the prompt whenever you switch folders), and sometimes fails to track folders. Should I report these issues?

Of course! The answer to your question is always yes. This is very helpful to OSS developers.

Well, Norton Commander[1] had a split view and an integrated terminal in 1984. Shipping a power-user file manager has simply never been a priority for Microsoft.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander

Not too mention whatever passes for a file manager on osx (finder) that looks and acts like it was created by a thirteen year old boy as his first real program. And not even a boy that's going to go on to program for a living at that.

>> "Like how the file explorer has a built in terminal that follows the folder you're in."

You can type cmd + enter in any Explorer address bar and Windows will start a command prompt in that folder. It's not the same, but at least simplifies things.

KDE is actually one of the lightest in terms of memory usage of all the DE's.

today. after gnome rewrote the whole thing under "new management"

That was 9 years ago.

that's how long KDE prejudice is going on (and how long gnome is still missing old functionality ;)

What KDE can compete with I don't know, but I do know its the only DE I can stand and actually enjoy using. And I compare it not only with Gnome, but Windows and MacOS too. Highly recommend you take a look if you don't know it (recently).

Why is it that the basic unit of distribution for anything Linux is a Distro? Want to serve web applications? Here’s a server distro. Want to work on penetration testing? Here’s a distro. Want to develop embedded systems? Another Distro. Creative arts? Distro again.

The OS level fragmentation of Linux is maddening, when you consider that what these actually all are is different operating systems. Why does the Ubuntu desktop operating system need to be re-engineered from the ground up in a to-the-bare-metal OS install just to make it compelling for creatives? What on Earth is wrong with the base Ubuntu desktop distro that makes this in any way a good idea?

Is it due to the way that application package repositories are selected and integrated into base desktop distro repositories? It seems like I should be able to install Ubuntu desktop distro with a KDE desktop package selected from the repo, then select all these creative apps and bingo - I’ve got Ubuntu Studio. Or at least start with Kubuntu. I’m sorry if I’m being negative or antagonistic, I genuinely don’t know - what is it about distro engineering, politics or organisation that leads to this situation?

It’s a combination of politics and the way that DEs step on each other on Debian-derived distros (more than other package managers, for some reason). For the most part, these specialty distributions are just for newer users who have specific goals and aren’t willing to troubleshoot on their own. Linux is such a vast community that there’s a lot of software that doesn’t play well together. Many people see the value in providing an integrated experience for a particular use.

Some people want or need a tailored experience that they don't have to configure much if at all. e.g. making Linux suitable for near-real time audio work, restricting Linux to a set of well-tested stable packages for high uptime, making it as close to a standards desktop experience where the expectations are set by Windows and MacOS, making it sandbox absolutely everything by default because you have reasons to be extremely security-conscious, etc

Many of these goals are incompatible or at least unfriendly to each other, so you need tailored experiences. And that's fine.

Some of us don't. I use Arch btw.

> I use Arch btw.

Why not Gentoo? It's Fun Too

> Fun Too

I see what you did there. Btw good to see funtoo also still alive.

> I use Arch btw.

That's like the OS-equivalent of being a vegan these days: how do you know someone's using Arch?

They'll tell you without you even asking :D

j/k btw.

Not sure how I feel about this as a vegan Arch user. :)

On a more serious note, it's actually worked well in my experience for finding other Arch users. It's rather likely that someone exposes themselves as an Arch user soon after a first encounter rather than finding out months later, so (as with veganism) serves as a relatively salient marker of community membership, for better or for worse.

> Want to serve web applications? Here’s a server distro. Want to work on penetration testing? Here’s a distro. Want to develop embedded systems? Another Distro. Creative arts? Distro again.

The distro you're looking for is Debian, and, if you exclude embedded, any up-to-date popular distro.

> It seems like I should be able to install Ubuntu desktop distro with a KDE desktop package selected from the repo, then select all these creative apps and bingo - I’ve got Ubuntu Studio.

Install the Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Xubuntu etc metapackages and you'll have what you want. This is a non-issue.

Linux is only a single entity at the kernel-level. You're getting mad at the diverse community that consumes the kernel for not acting in unison.

Specialized distros are for people who have a specific use-case they want support for out of the box, without having to configure certain subsystems from scratch to solve their particular problem.

The number of distros is an artifact of free licensing/copyright and people working on their problems and collaborating only when solutions to those problems overlap.

>It seems like I should be able to install Ubuntu desktop distro with a KDE desktop package selected from the repo, then select all these creative apps and bingo - I’ve got Ubuntu Studio.

You can do this quite easily. If you're already on Ubuntu it's as simple as enabling the universe repository and then doing this:

    apt-get install 'ubuntustudio-*'

Which installs a bunch of metapackages, some themes and some performance tweaks. That's all there is to it, everything is in the same repos and there really isn't any fragmentation. From the Ubuntu side it's all based on the same Debian and the majority of Debian packages will run without issue. The presentation of all these different distros is just marketing.

The devil is in defaults.

If at anytime ostree or Nix-like distributions will take over, then I would expect more "channels", "repositories" or other wie-heißt-ers, than distros.

We're already seeing this with Snappy and Flatpak.

That's not true.

> Want to serve web applications?

apt-get install nginx

> Want to work on penetration testing?

apt-get install nmap netcat

> Want to develop embedded systems?

I don't even know what you need for that besides ssh and busybox, honestly.

> Creative arts?

apt-get install gimp

Yes I know of course, so why do we need all these tweaked specialist distros? Are they really just repackaging stuff or do they actually contribute real value and if so what is it?

Yes. For example, if you're working with audio, you'll want a realtime kernel, and an audio subsystem configured for that use case over a default desktop distro.

Running a realtime kernel on a desktop can be slower, and a desktop Pulseaudio setup isn't going to be enough for someone working with audio, they'll probably want Jack, too.

The big split is between packaging systems. You have:

- The Debian family using Apt: Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.

- The Red Hat family using RPM: RHEL, Fedora, Cent OS, etc

- Arch using Pacman

- NixOs using Nix.

- Gentoo compiling from source

In the case of Ubuntu Studio, you get hundreds of apps and plugins and FX systems and other creative apps, already installed out of the box, courtesy of the distro politics you don't seem to understand .. to get a similar degree of packed install on a Windows or Mac DAW you'd have to, at least, spend a week selecting things and downloading from vendors, getting iLok working, and so on.

With Ubuntu Studio, once you've installed it on your hardware you have TONS - and I mean TONS - of things already installed and ready to go. No further work ready to get your workstation settled - just open the apps and start working. This is a feature not a bug.

I wish KDE had the same level of resources behind it as GNOME does.

I keep occasionally trying new versions of GNOME but it feels like a DE optimized to look good in screenshots and always falls short when actually using it.

KDE on the other hand looks relatively good and is infinitely more usable to me. It's got some rougher edges and a weaker application ecosystem but still comes out ahead for me.

I also vastly prefer using apps written in QT to those written in GTK and despise CSD...

I don't want to defend Gnome because I also can't stand it over KDE most of the time, but I think GNOME is built for one actually useful thing... laptops.

Gnome feels good on a computer with a single small display.

I'm probably the last person who still uses Unity and it's for this exact reason. I set the launch bar to auto hide and use the compiz Expose clone hot corners to switch windows.

It all just gets out of the way.

I don't know why Gnome didn't adopt the Unity menu bar integration, instead you get to waste space on the taskbar on the bottom AND that useless status bar on the top.

> I don't know why Gnome didn't adopt the Unity menu bar integration, instead you get to waste space on the taskbar on the bottom AND that useless status bar on the top.

Are you referring to the Window List extension? Why not use Dash to Dock instead, or even Dash to Panel (not sure if it’s current state, I don’t use it) which will also replace the main top status panel.

I’m a GNOME user on a single display (X because NVIDIA and 3D industry apps) and it works well for me. I do like the other DE’s though, I’m pretty agnostic in that sense.

No I'm talking about how the "File Edit " etc menu is drawn in one and only one place like in MacOS so that every application doesn't waste screen space drawing their own menu.

Oh, right. It’s been such a long time since I’ve used unity I completely forgot that was a thing, my bad.

Most of the time when I think about Unity these days I think about the sidebar launcher and the maximized window mode integration, not the rest of the features it provided; I didn’t get to spend a lot of time in Ubuntu.

FYI, KDE/Plasma supports all of those features you mentioned:

1. You can set the launcher/taskbar/panel to auto-hide. 2. You can set up the screen corners (or a keyboard shortcut) to show an Exposé-style view of all running applications/windows. 3. You can have a global menu bar.

You can get pretty close to emulating Unity's interface with Plasma, especially if you use Latte-dock. But there are still certain things that can't be done; the biggest to me is having the menu bar (File, Edit, etc.) in the title bar of all the windows (a global menu at the top works though). You can get a button that then gives you those options, which is close but an extra click.

After installing Ubuntu 18.04 I tried staying with Gnome. I installed extensions to get closer to the behavior I wanted. I realised i basically had a cheap, slow knock-off of standard Unity functionality. I installed Unity and never looked back. I'm no longer waiting for the window manager when switching virtual desktops. Load on the system is now once again due to me using it, instead of the window manager.

I actually find that GNOME is worse on laptops. My X1C6 is running at effectively 1600x900 and the amount of vertical space wasted by the height and padding of GNOME/GTK titlebars and widgets drives me crazy.

With KDE on a laptop I just set up the dock vertically on the righthand side and I'm good to go.

GNOME's workspace switcher/overview thing is better than anything KDE has though. It's much closer in function and polish to macOS than KDE is.

Maybe there's some extension to fix this now, but I always hated how GNOME's workspaces were just small boxes on the opposite side of the overview button/hot corner. And even more so that they were a row, not a grid. KDE's exposé-like grid that separates all the windows on all the workspaces is so much more useful to me (not sure if that's enabled by default though).

Yeah but I hope it's not the same kind of resources - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HarfBuzz...

Gnome developers have their head buried deep and firm in sands at this point.

Harfbuzz isn't a GNOME project. It's used by GNOME, KDE, Chromium, LibreOffice, and several other projects. The entire open source text rendering stack depends on it at this point.

https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/05/25/pango-future-dire...

> Using Harfbuzz for font loading means that we will lose support for bitmap and type1 fonts.

It's not as straight forward.

That is not related to the other article that you linked. The Type1 format is extremely old/deprecated and has been superseded by OpenType. And bitmap fonts don't even have a concept of hinting, they are just bitmaps.

Pango is a Gnome project. They moved to using Harfbuzz and as a result dropped support for bitmap fonts. That hurt not just Gnome/GTK users but whoever else uses Pango and there was user pushback about it.

Pango prior to version 1.44 used kerning hints provided by FreeType but now makes use of the hints provided by HarfBuzz. But HarfBuzz doesn't support all of the hints supported by FreeType and thus a regression for some users depending upon their font hinting preferences and what visibly looks the best to them and their displays.

Remember Pango is a Gnome project.

The original article you linked was not about Pango or Gnome and did not mention those things at all other than a vague reference to a different bug which may or may not even be related. As far as I can tell no developers have done a full (and time-consuming) investigation of this issue to actually get a full picture of what is going on. I would encourage you to actually read the articles you link and their primary sources, because what you're saying is somewhat contrary to what has already been said. Repeatedly airing grievances about decisions that have already been made years ago is, in general, not helpful to you or anyone else.

The user pushback was unnecessary because this is a deeper technical issue than just these fonts. Additionally bitmap fonts are still usable as long as they are appropriately converted to OpenType.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to disagree / take issue with- I thought it was the point about Gnome developers and their heads for which I gave plenty of backing information - there was no technical reason not to continue to use Freetype hinting until Harfbuzz supported it or give distros option to choose. But instead in both cases they just said screw your users who need that. Nothing you have said so far refutes my point that Gnome developers don’t care about their users.

It is not helpful to try and conjecture whether or not upstream "cares about users". There is no reason for me to refute or agree with your point on this matter; if there is some other desktop environment that you prefer to use instead, then my agreeing or disagreeing with you wouldn't change your ability to go use that. I will not join in an angry mob for or against these developers either, that won't help anything get done. I politely request that you avoid trying to make these type of arguments about some other person's motivations in the future, because the only real outcome is to turn people against each other and create enemies, when what you really want seems to be just to get the bug fixed in a friendly way.

Just from looking at the bug report there was a technical reason given related to other bugs and deficiencies in freetype. Please read the bug report in full detail, no developers are deleting features for no reason. Distros always have the option to choose whatever solution they want in response to user complaints. They can stay on an old version of whatever package they want or they can patch Harfbuzz and contribute the patches back upstream. You should take it up with your distro if the problem persists and they've not bothered to do either of these. Either way you have to be prepared to deal with the consequences which are: missing out on other newer features because you stayed on an old version, or spending the time/money to get the work done to add back in the features to the new version. Or you can upgrade anyway and do the workaround which is to convert your fonts.

I switched some years ago to KDE from Gnome. The only thing I wish I had from Gnome is the quality of text rendering.

Maybe it’s subjective, maybe it’s a measurable thing. I’ve not looked, but I feel KDEs text rendering is worse on my daily driver.

Linux apps pretty much universally do font rendering via FreeType. Have you tried switching to Cantarell? I for one fell in love with Inter UI back when I used Plasma.

I haven't, I'll give it a go :) Thank you!

FWIW if anyone else comes back to this I spent a little time last night and I've addressed my font rendering issues by;

* Removing an errant font-config lcdfilter configuration entry (this was a left over from when I was running "infinality" and should have been removed)

* Switching font from Noto Sans to Ubuntu

Its not perfect, but its a lot better. I'll probably play with oversampling (rendering X at a higher resolution and scaling down like OSX) at some point to see if I get the quality I want.

KDE works much better for me, personally. Just avoid the aboslute shitshow that is Kubuntu. (I know they try hard, but...)

Go for a distro that follows upstream more closely.

Yes, I've settled on Manjaro KDE since the demise of Antergos. Do vanilla Arch once for the experience and then find better things to do with your time after that...

I honestly don't understand the idea that Arch is time-consuming or weird... but maybe my needs are less esoteric than the rest of the world.

I'm just a bit mystified, but... whatever makes it work for you.

I'm not implying that Arch is time consuming once you set it up... but if you can't see how installing Arch is more time consuming than installing Manjaro you're just being intentionally dense and contrarian.

KDE neon?

not sure why the title of this has changed. previously it was "Ubuntu Studio: Progress on Switch to KDE Plasma", which while it does not match the title on the linked site was informative as to what the post was about.

it is now "Progress on Plasma" (matching the site), which given hn's diversity could mean near anything. the context is easy to figure out if you're browsing ubuntustudio.org, but difficult to figure out if not in that context.

I've noticed quite a few of these changes lately, and understand the request to "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize", but adding context to a very generic title isn't editorializing.

Categorically mandating the preservation of the original title verbatim, come hell or high water, is simply incorrect. On the original website, a page title comes with plenty of assumed context - it's assumed that the reader has some idea of where they are, and why they are there. On Hacker News the title must stand on its own merits, amongst a jostling diaspora of contexts. How often do you see comments saying "I thought this was going to be about <x>"? Too often I say! Change the rules! Viva la revolución!

They write about negligible memory overhead by KDE over XFCE, but the measurement is done on a Live image just after a fresh boot, that is, not a real use case. I would ask them to take the same measurements after like half an hour of loading all XFCE accessories and their corresponding ones on KDE. Otherwise the test wouldn't take into account the impact of loading times and caching of modules and libraries, which KDE has in much larger numbers than XFCE.

It doesn't really matter. Ubuntu Studio is a distro tailored for multimedia production. You are not going to use that on a machine with a small amount of RAM.

For comparison, I am running Mageia 7 with Plasma and after the entire day of working (C development, browser open with many tabs, e-mail ...), the machine shows 3.5GB used RAM with another 6.5GB of cache/buffers, out of 16GB of RAM.

Squabbling over few hundred MB of RAM that Plasma may take extra is ridiculous when a web browser alone can take 2GB+ RAM and a large RAW format photo loaded in Gimp or Krita detto.

Good move.

I've played with various DEs, and my work desktop still runs with Gnome (I do not really get a choice there).

At home I've been using KDE for years. It's the only one that makes sense to me. I use it on both Laptops and Desktops, small screens and big screens.

People who use KDE, what's your favorite distro? I wanna give ita shot.

KDE has their own plasma distribution, I've never used it but it seems like a solid option

To elaborate on this, we (we as in other developers in KDE, not me personally) have created KDE Neon (https://neon.kde.org/) which is Ubuntu LTS + the latest KDE software. It's great for using the up-to-date KDE Plasma & application versions while having a stable base in Ubuntu LTS.

I've personally used it for nearly 3 years now, and never had any problems with KDE Neon. It probably isn't a good option if you'd like to have the newest versions everywhere, since the base system is only thoroughly upgraded on every Ubuntu LTS release.

If you have any questions regarding KDE software or KDE Neon, I'd be happy to answer them on #kde:kde.org (Matrix) which is also bridged to #kde on freenode.

I've been a happy KDE Neon user on my secondary desktop, an Intel NUC, for about 3-4 years now. I use it multiple hours each day and it's been a very pleasant experience, as in it does its thing and doesn't get in my way.

Was seriously considering using it for my primary desktop, but that'll have to wait until there's a viable RDP alternative.

I’ve been using Fedora for over a year with KDE. Before that it was Kubuntu for a year. The difference is night and day in my opinion. I believe this is due to the constant updates on fedora that fixed many annoying bugs I had with the ubuntu install. The downside is that you are likely to get a kernel update about once a week, it honestly hasn’t been an issue and i’m a college student who needs essentially 100% uptime on my boxes. But in my opinion it’s the perfect trade off since it’s not quite rolling but still on the cutting edge for the most part.

That.

I've been using the KDE spin of Fedora for many years!

I'm not a fan of DNF as a package manager (it's fast enough for bulk operations but takes a long time to do very simple interactive things, compared to pacman or apt), but I wholeheartedly second this recommendation for people who want to avoid installing hundreds of PPAs and third-party repositories to get their work done. Fedora also has a lot of niche packages (like the Zola static site generator) that are only in the AUR or third-party repositories for other distributions. The defaults are good from a security and usability standpoint as well.

If you are willing to switch away from apt, openSUSE is a fantastic KDE distro. It stays close to the base KDE as much as possible (unlike Manjaro).

Mageia could be an option.

Kubuntu, because I like debs and apt and the appeal of Ubuntu-ish distros is that things generally work out of the box without too much fudging around.

Why does choice of desktop environment impact choice of distro? I ask as a question out of my own ignorance.

I started with arch and I just bolt on whatever desktop environment or window manager I want.

I like to get a comfy "out of the box" experience, which can differ quite a bit between distros, especially how smoothly it all fits together.

There are occasionally little things that are available on one distribution and not available on others. For example, with Cinnamon and Linux Mint, you can right click on items in the start menu and there will be an option listed to uninstall the clicked program. This was (and probably still is) missing from Cinnamon in Debian / Fedora.

I imagine there are other things like this with most distributions.

Or for something like Plasma, you can go with Kubuntu or KDE Neon. Both of them are Ubuntu derivatives which are meant to be used with Plasma. But KDE Neon will get you the latest Plasma version, and Kubuntu will not be bleeding edge.

arch

Another arch-er here.

The main reason I moved to arch was KDE Plasma 5. When it first came out version 5, was buggy, but usable enough to be a daily driver. A rolling release made it easy to get the latest updates and I haven't needed to revisit my decision since the last 5 years.

Whenever i've tried KDE my favorite experience has been on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Its a rolling distro, but provides a really nice installer and stable experience because of their automated QA process. The KDE stack is provided as intended by upstream without much customizations (they use their wallpaper for the lock screen and desktop), and the updates are quick. If you try it, you might also like their support for btrfs + snapshots. If an update isn't to your liking, it'll allow you to boot into an old snapshot and rollback.

I still use tumbleweed, but with Gnome and this has been my distro of choice for the past couple of years. (I moved from Ubuntu)

Slackware. I use the Plasma5 packages maintained by Eric Hameleers, and it's a wonderful experience.

Arch Linux because of simplicity

As a longtime user of Ubuntu Studio on a very productive DAW, this is welcome news - XFCE has certainly been a great choice for the last few years, but KDE has a lot more to offer, especially now the resource usage is comparable.

I have a feeling it'll also sway MacOS DAW users to take a closer look at just what Linux has to offer pro audio users - amazing latency specs, even when compared to Mac, which has traditionally had better latency than Windows - as well as a full suite of excellent tools for Audio and Video production, out of the box. XFCE is functional but MacOS creatives get a bit snobby about it during the first OOBE - won't be so easily snubbed when KDE is on by default. I look forward to giving this new version of Ubuntu Studio a tryout in my studio ..

Is this a joke? There's so much overhead in getting a working setup compared to MacOS, and only one of the major DAWs even runs natively on it. The tools are far from "excellent" compared to the offerings on MacOS and even Windows.

I can't even get the Jack server to start on my Ubuntu machine. It's not snobbiness, the software isn't there and what is there is user hostile.

I know the reply to this comment is "have you tried X, or just do Y then Z!"

On Mac I install software and double click it. I plug in my interface. Maybe I plug in a dongle if I need it. That's it. There's no messing with configurations, installing or uninstalling dependencies, drivers that work, driver management software that works (or just exists), and no bullshit like jack needed at all.

Linux, including Ubuntu Studio is miles away from being sensible for any audio content creation. The experience is horrible.

I agree with you, unfortunately. Obviously Linux has a great deal of flexibility, but the basic tools one relies upon for audio editing either aren't there or are significantly handicapped. I once tried a basic project idea on my linux laptop to see how well I could get it to work; after three days it was almost usable. The same project took me an hour on my Mac with Logic Pro X.

Either your experience is really not so up to date, or you are being disingenuous about your own professional skills with Ubuntu Studio. Perhaps you have shitty hardware that requires vendor proprietary drivers - I don't. All my digital I/o is supported by Linux out of the box on JACK. I don't have to configure anything to get my 56+ channels of digital I/o (Presonus) working - just wire up to JACK and get on with work.

Another thing: in my configuration, REAPER runs better on Ubuntu Studio than it does on Windows - and not to forget that out of the box you have everything in a base Ubuntu Studio install, ready to go. Literally hundreds of plugins, already installed. Tons of usable DAW apps onboard, ready to go. No iLok, no downloads, no Catalina-style upgrade disasters disabling everything that was once working - oh, but we do have sources for everything, though.

Now, what you describe matches my experience with Mac recently, specifically after a Catalina upgrade in which absolutely nothing worked and that particular part of the studio was not production-ready for days of paid customer time until it all got sorted. Good thing we had REAPER on Ubuntu Studio to use for tracking while a junior engineer struggled to get the MacOS DAW back in shape ..

I'm glad your experience with Ubuntu Studio was positive! I don't know why you accused me of being disingenuous; I assure you I was not. Recording audio in was seamless, as you mentioned. Plugins were frequently unstable, however, and crashed my computer. It was hard to figure out what worked, and it was hard to find a decent convolution reverb that sounded as good as Space Designer. The only software I found that had easy timing adjustments was Tracktion, and that also crashed frequently. It was hard to use MIDI tracks side by side with audio, both because the interface of Ardour was confusing and because (shock) it crashed frequently when I tried to. And it took way too many steps to load an SFZ library. I certainly have problems with macOS too, but I really am desperate to leave Apple entirely, and I wish Linux worked for music for me.

All that crashing sounds to me like you had bung hardware somewhere.

Anyway I can only encourage you to have a closer look at Ubuntu Studio in a fresh instance. It really has been very stable and quite productive for me.

This is not a joke, but I don't think you could've even tried Ubuntu Studio as a professional - seems more likely you sniffed at it as a hobbyist and couldn't deal with it.

I haven't found it to be any hassle to get a working, stable and low latency setup with Ubuntu Studio AT ALL, but then I've chosen my hardware properly: Presonus for everything. Its amazing, and very good latency - exceeding even the results I get when I put a Mac on the same chain.

56+ channels of digital audio, countless external synths and effects, literally hundreds of onboard synths and fx and processing plugins, including some stuff that you won't get elsewhere. (Plus: sources for everything in case a professional engineer in our studio gets the urge to extend functionality between sessions...)

Yes, it works out of the box very well. Far less stress than getting a recent new UAD acquisition going on our iLok'ed Mac DAW, even.

(Catalina, FFS!)

>On Mac I install software and double click it. I plug in my interface.

All you do with Ubuntu Studio is install it and maybe do a package update using standard onboard tools. After this, the system is ready to go, out of the box, without too much fuss - all the apps you need to start recording multitrack professional audio - nothing extra to install, no iLok, and literally hundreds of amazing plugins, fx, synths, and so on to explore, already installed.

Ardour is easily a productive professional DAW, like any other, and REAPER is even native on Linux now, with a very easy single binary to download and double click .. matching your user needs on MacOS, even.

You should really give it a try if you haven't done so yet. Your prejudice for the mainstream might be keeping you from having an honestly astonishing experience.

My professional experience includes developing tools for major production environments (7-8 figure budgets for audio content). I don't really want to launch into a rant here, just to say that my "prejudice" is very much post-judice based on a decade of industry experience, and like many Linux users - your experience has not been mine, because my knobs are turned to different positions and I can't recreate the environment that you describe.

I'm glad that your environment works for you.

FWIW, I also dev for pro audio. Perhaps that has something to do with my enthusiasm for the emergence of this new platform...

> I can't even get the Jack server to start on my Ubuntu machine.

Interesting. Recently I've tried JACK to play with Jamulus - and having used it the last time around 10 years ago, I expected a long configuration battle to make it work.

But... it just worked. PulseAudio automatically suspended itself and JACK simply started and worked fine. I could even make PA output to JACK with a single command, so all the other apps continued to work simultaneously without any wrappers or other tricks to route them to JACK.

It was almost disappointing :P

Ubuntu Studio works on par with the other DAW's.

I think there is a lot of prejudice against this platform - the others require immense investment after all - and this is supported by your last line ..

But really, the prejudice against it is not valid.

> I have a feeling it'll also sway MacOS DAW users to take a closer look at just what Linux has to offer pro audio users

I'm sorry but I just don't see this happening anytime soon. Linux distros like this don't have the mindshare that Windows and macOS already have and these users still use the proprietary software like GarageBand, Logic Pro, FL Studio, Reason and Omnisphere. And no, wine doesn't count for them.

'Professional Audio Users' won't bother with a Linux distro that doesn't have 'official support' for their existing proprietary setup if they were to attempt to migrate. If they're lucky to get exactly everything running on their unsupported system via Wine on their chosen distro, plugging in their favourite hardware should better recognise it or not crash Wine. The moment one of those issues occurs, they'll go back to macOS or Windows and will be staying there for a long time.

Also, one needs to define 'Linux support' in terms of DAW software.

I have 15 years of experience running Ubuntu Studio professionally, and 20+ years doing pro audio with other platforms. I'm currently producing/engineering in a high end studio loaded with all the latest high end gear, and I stand by my statement: Ubuntu Studio is clearly a viable, professional platform now.

I've done a ton of work with this, and its a rock solid and highly stable DAW platform. More so than MacOS' recent Catalina clusterfuck .. and light years ahead of Windows' headaches.

Sure, its not the hype-intensive candy land of Windows/MacOS, but then again .. that's the point, entirely. From the get-go, Ubuntu Studio packs an amazing punch - just installed, out of the box, there's more happening in this OS as a DAW than on either MacOS or Windows, and even after a fresh install of either of those options, you'd still need to spend hundreds of bucks on programs and plugins just to match what Ubuntu Studio offers. Plus, go through all the hassles of installation, iLok, free plugin installation nightmares, etc.

You'd be surprised just how great things are, out of the box, if you'd just get over your prejudice about it not being 'mainstream' enough to support your ideals for what constitutes 'professional' DAW usage.

I run REAPER and have tons of VST plugins from my Windows DAW onboard the Ubuntu Studio rig - they just plain work.

Sure, it doesn't get the attention it deserves from pro audio developers - but that is changing. Lots of devs are seeing Ubuntu Studio rise in the scene. And this is only going to improve with this inclusion of KDE ..

Totally agree. It doesn't matter how well Ubuntu studio runs, it doesn't have the right apps. And likely never will. Wine is a non starter. And the stability of such a system is generally unproven as many vsts have no official Linux support. I'd love to try it if fl studio or reason or similar had a Linux port. Or Linux had an audio app that could compare; it doesn't. Until then, there's nothing compelling.

You're pretty much off the mark, on every single point:

1) Most Windows VST .DLL's run just fine, unless copy protected - and even then, iLok can be made to work. You won't have a Catalina-level catastrophe on your hands, either.

2) Apps: This is the entire point of Ubuntu Studio - once done with an installation, you have an amazing suite of apps to try out, without requiring further installation/sourcing. Multiple DAW apps are available: Ardour, Rosegarden, Bitwig Studio, QTractor, LMMS, Audacity, Renoise, Tracktion Waveform, ZRythm, Radium - and even REAPER (one of the best DAW's in existence) is Linux-native now.

3) FL Studio runs great under Wine and there is no reason not to run it that way. It is quite stable and has not crashed on me, ever, after years of use. LMMS is also a viable alternative to FL Studio too, also very stable.

4) Ardour is excellent, and so is Harrison Mixbus and XDubber.

There are many amazing new-generation apps which are available in Linux native versions, too - see for example VCVRack, which performs better on Linux than it does on my Windows DAW ..

You're completely missing the point. It's fine for amateur, non-live, non-critical work. But just because it works for you, it doesn't mean the software is stable. Hell, KDE itself (at least the kubuntu version) is not very stable so I doubt this version of ubuntu studio will be either. And suggesting to run VSTs on an unsupported OS or FL Studio under wine is likewise fine for amateur, non-live performance mode. For everything else, it's tempting fate especially when your desktop environment crashes when displaying the desktop number after switching desktops (one of many, many issues that cause kde to crash, lock up etc.).

The software is stable and I've used it professionally to track bands in a real studio for years - right alongside full-blown ProTools, REAPER, and now Luna systems, which have just as much failings as you seem to think would preclude professional use.

In fact the Linux DAW has saved my ass a few times - most recently with the catastrophe of Catalina nuking entire suites of apps and plugins that were needed for production.

FL Studio under wine: pro's can use it. Just because you don't like the technology doesn't mean its not professional - you just haven't bothered to get competent at it. As is demonstrated time and again in the pro audio world: its not the instrument, its the artist.

Ubuntu Studio is great for artists and anyone wanting to learn pro techniques, whether they are fashionable or otherwise, would be wise to give it a go - in spite of the naysayers who have gained no production experience with the tool because of their own prejudices...

Despite KDE is my desktop of choice nowadays (and XFCE is what I always retreated to when Ubuntu switched DEs or when something stopped working), I don't really get why does Ubuntu Studio have to use a DE different from that of the default Ubuntu.

I hate to say this, but I feel like the only way we'll ever have a popular and coherent linux desktop is if some large company found it worth their while to consolidate all of this (and actually had the muscle/influence to get people to go along). (I guess you could kind of say that's what happened with Android -- though obviously for mobile and not really in the right spirit). The current linux user-space reminds me of like feudal Europe or something, the idea of anything important coming out of all the bickering just seems like a lost cause. It's forever doomed to be just-usable-enough but never in any way that it'll gain any sort of adoption.

I'm more curious if snap/flakpak-based installations will benefit Ubuntu Studio more than servers and other desktops.

One of the primary benefits on audio side of Studio iirc is that the Jack audio server is installed and working.

Jack, at this point, doesn't work/sandbox well with flatpak (or snap).

Redhat is leading an effort to create Pipewire which will act as a kind of combination of Jack(low latency) and PulseAudio(modern desktop features) that also fold in video routing.

As part of the design goals of Pipewire it will sandbox well with flatpak etc.

I'm sure there will be lots of whining and noise from poorly informed users but I think it's going to be pretty great when it gets there.

From https://ubuntustudio.org/about-ubuntustudio/ :

> Ubuntu Studio is the most widely used multimedia-orientated operating system in the world.

Is it the fact or the goal?

I've never used Ubuntu studio but this caught my attention, and to be honest it makes a whole lot of sense to me. I understand though that it's really bad news for XFCE users.

It's quite nice that they managed to make the plasma version look the same as the Xfce version.

I don't know where all of the love for KDE is coming from. It's got so many graphical and UI bugs even in comparison to XFCE that I can't use it as my daily driver.

What kinds of bugs are you talking about? I think part of the problem with KDE is that it's large enough that two users might be using completely different parts of it---I find that it's far more stable than GNOME, for instance. I'm not a fan of how its compositor makes scrolling look (I much prefer how Sway or even Windows does it) or how the compositor interacts with SDL applications, but that's not exactly a "bug".

A good user interface is one you don't realize you're using. KDE is flexible enough to fit many workflows and doesn't (try to) constantly get in your way.

Can you expand on what's not working for you? I use KDE via Kubuntu and have found it very stable. The only quirks are desktop environment things that I don't think XFCE even does OOTB, like sometimes it fails to auto-connect bluetooth speakers. The graphics stuff seems totally solid.

Its probably selection bias.

I liked KDE but it was too complicated for my use case. In general I have found that the fewer features a desktop environment has the more I enjoy using it.

I’m surprised that the logical minded folk of HN aren’t more geared to minimalist environments like simple window managers. If you’re an engineer why do you need or want a fully fledged desktop environment? I stopped using KDE after I discovered all I needed was a window manager and application launcher.

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