Plasma 5.25
kde.org
kde.org
Besides the improved UX are there any other advantages of Plasma over XFCE?
Fresh Gnome on Arch or Gentoo I've seen ~650 at boot and around 750 with Ubuntu, around 650-700 with Fedora.
Gnome's Wayland implementation is much better then KDE at this moment, but KDE is quickly catching up. Nvidia still lacks, even with their EGL support. I use a Nvidia 1060 6gb on an updated (KDE 5.24), but several year old Manjaro KDE install with XOrg as a daily driver, and it's very smooth for me. Games work great. Maybe some occasional stuttering on my monitors that are 144 and 60hz (xorg limitation).
Gnome's gestures and by far and away better then KDE's too (at least as of 5.24, but 5.25 adds many more).
Agreed, with a caveat— Gnome's Mutter compositor for Wayland has bugs. It does not support server side rendered window decorations while KDE does. This means that the title bars for Alacritty[0] terminal emulator and the mpv[1] video player are ugly and not so functional. This is an intentional decision by the GNOME team[2]. Also the screen locks while watching videos on mpv because Mutter does not support the idle-inhibit protocol, although work is currently being done on this[3].
[0]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/5956
[1]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/pull/7186
[2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217
[3]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/111
To be fair, it's difficult because Wayland clients might have rounded corners and other odd shapes, and I'm not in a position to really look into it myself so I shouldn't complain, but argh, the indifference about it is frustrating.
I also run KDE on an under-powered (even at the time it was released) x86 tablet released in 2011 (the Airis Kira Slimpad - Intel Atom N450 1,66 GHz, 1 GB RAM DDR2 @ 800Mhz, Intel GMA 500). It was the only desktop environment that was kinda usable on a tablet at the time. It's slow (this tablet is exclusively used to play music by auto starting Clementine), but not slower than anything else.
A 5400rpm disk is tough though with today's distributions and maybe Xfce does fewer disc accesses than KDE. You probably should disable desktop search if you haven't.
IIRC there was a thread a while ago with benchmarks. And an XFCE developer confirmed that this doesn't surprise them, because KDE have a lot more dev resources to spend on optimisation than they do.
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "ForceCompositionPipeline" "1"
EndSection
Other suggest that it uses same or even less memory than Xfce, that may be true on fresh boot, but it's misleading, because Plasma utilizes lazy load aggressively and also still leaks memory like crazy.
I tried to use it for a while and I noticed that memory grows quite a bit after using it for a whole day for example. I witnessed once plasma-shell process using 600MB and kwin 300MB, which is quite bad, worse than even GNOME. You can restart processes and it returns to normal, but I don't want to do that, I want DE using reasonable resources, not 1GB for showing wallpaper and few windows
I also moved into XFCE.
KDE has the advantage of a full desktop experience, where all applications targeted to KDE can share the same developer stack and made to interoperate between each other, beyond classical UNIX IPC mechanisms.
GNOME had this as well, but seems to have been lost on their minimalism quest.
KDE devs are regularly in the kde subreddit and they seem nice and approachable.
I'm glad we are back in a good place with KDE 5, but it felt like it took way too long.
See the "window border size" dropdown here https://userbase.kde.org/images.userbase/d/d2/SystemSettings...
I say again, though: Defaults matter!
It is complete, mature and works out-of-the-box.
For users it has sane defaults but provides virtually endless customization and contrary to other desktop environments, user customization is encourage.
For developers, it provides solid libraries to build upon, not like other libraries that are constantly changing and making developers' life harder.
And yet, people don't care about it.
Took a many years of me interface hopping around, but I'm back at kde. I was using mate, but I'm back at kde on arch.
KDE is pretty great, though.
Once a long time ago there was also the licensing concern with Qt.
I'm sure it got a lot better, and people have even described Plasma 5.x as light weight. The times I tried it later, I liked it, but for the time being the Linux desktop has lost me and I'm using Mac :-)
That being said, I did recently try KDE5 for the first time in ages about a year ago, and it is now (again) my favorite desktop environment.
The KDE devs are the ones who decided to call the alpha version 4.0 so I wouldn't put all the blame on the distros here.
I think the problem with KDE 4 was not just but also experimental technologies like Nepomuk (desktop search is great in theory, but an EU research project is probably not the best fit for a production DE), Akonadi (yay let's run a MySQL server on each desktop), Plasma widgets (if you thought one widget set was enough for a DE you thought wrong apparently) and Activities that just didn't provide enough value for the overhead and change that they forced onto the whole system. A more straightforward Qt4 upgrade of KDE 3 would not have been nearly as problematic.
They made a successful transition from KDE 4 to 5, and are committed to users needs, so we can expect a smoothly transition to Plasma 6.
Now, compare it to Gnome, where every release means deeply changes for both users and 3rd party developers, and Gnome developers simply don't care.
A lot of applications' first KDE4-based releases were missing features as well. I remember that my favorite app at the time, Amarok, took a long time to reach feature parity.
Eventually KDE4 did mature nicely, and the transition to KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 was way, way, smoother. There were enough little quirks to notice the transition was happening, but you had more or less harmonious coexistence between KDE4-based apps and KF5-based apps as the developers of KDE apps each migrated theirs over as they saw fit. There was no big moment of widespread breakage or loss of functionality.
Afaict they're taking the same approach to rebasing things on Qt 6. To me it seems like the painful transition between KDE3 and KDE4 is something the developer community learned very well from, but I haven't followed along with any discussions which would really show whether that's the case.
KDE4-based Amarok was its own trainwreck. Released without support for dynamic playlists based on hard filters because FUZZY FILTERS ARE THE FUTURE. And it managed to trash its database twice on my system. It's the music player that made me stop using a dedicated music player program.
More or less the same for me. I loved Amarok until KDE4, but had to abandon it then. For a few years I used an XMMS2 client I wrote myself, but I grew weary of keeping that updated so I switched to VLC, and later mpv, with playlists loaded from my (custom, but general purpose) file manager.
Until Ubuntu switches to KDE, I am stuck in the Gnome-lets-remove-desktop-icons-because world.
Myself I'm running XUbuntu (XFCE) as my daily driver, works excellently and I have no issues doing what I need to do.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuntu
Edit: OK, "officially blessed".
I found happiness in xfce4 (that beauty hasn't crashed even once in about 8 years of using it heavily), and then sway (same story, currently at two years).
Is the problem. Plasma has been my daily driver since 4.4, on Debian testing, on systems which I know beforehand wouldn't have any random issues (Debian-specific also).
Autohide panels is something Plasma seems to particularly struggle with. Sometimes the panel will start spazzing out, flickering and neither appearing nor disappearing, before finally crashing completely (and sometimes not coming back until I manually(!) restart plasma shell.)
I've switched from Gnome after 15 years to Plasma 5, and I've never been so happy.
Contrary to Gnome, Plasma is lightweight, works out of the box without 3rd party extensions, but yet 3rd party themes and extensions are 1st class citizens.
It’s gotten better over the years but still has a long way to go. Something that would help a lot is if KDE came prepackaged with a handful of different full configurations that could be easily flipped between to serve as starting points.
And in the thousand options to twiddle, there aren't the options I want.
I'd like a panel that when vertical did not scale the controls on it, just kept them the same size but rearranged them. I want a 4- or 5-column vertical panel with nothing growing or shrinking in size.
I'd like the Xfce option to constrain the Start button to a single line of text+label.
I'd like the Xfce option to set the size and font of the clock.
I rather liked wm2. I would like the option of window title bars on the left or right edge, or even the bottom. Why not?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Wm2.png
I liked BeOS' title bars as tabs, not whole width. Can I have those, please?
Then if I stack windows on top of one another, I would like to move the tabs so they don't overlap. Or better still, have them automatically rearrange themselves.
I hate the trend of having no menu bar, just a hamburger menu. Can I disable that globally, please? I want a menu bar in every app, enforced by the desktop. Currently some apps have it, some don't.
I do not want desktop gadgets or widgets or plasmoids or whatever they are called. Not at all, not ever. A tick box to disable them globally might be useful? Maybe integrate with Conky for a desktop status monitor.
I used to have a machine with 3 screens arranged in a line, with the bottom edges level. (Don't have space in the home office, sadly.) If I can't have a working vertical taskbar, can I have one taskbar across the bottom of 2 or 3 screens, please? KDE 3 could do that no problem.
It's the DE of the Steam Deck, for which was apparently 1.5 million units were already sold in May. That's certainly one of the most significant events for the Linux desktop.
If you search for videos and blog posts, Plasma is usually a second class citizen.
It's easy to split hairs over "true Linux" or whatnot, but I think it's far more valuable to celebrate wins like ChromeOS and SteamOS in the hopes of encouraging more of this. I think that's what gets us closer to the general ideas and ideals of "Linux" and or "Free Software" broadly.
It won't be "Year of the Linux Desktop," it will be "Years of many Linux Desktops."
Free software is important to me because it is supposed to enable users to take back control of their computing.
In practice, I literally just got a Chromebook for my daughter and I'm happy to report that Crostini is fine, and I'd venture to say that "a major OS with strong Native Linux Support built in" might even be more valuable than "abstaining" and fully sticking with pure "Free Software."
(For the record, I'm a huge fan of Stallman et al and I want people like him to keep doing what they do -- I just think that Stallman's value isn't in everyone doing exactly what Stallman says, more like looking at him as a platonic ideal that we should try for, but realistically will never reach.)
Like WSL is not something most people will use on Windows.
My concern here is a bit about non-free software, but mostly not: I'd not be very happy with a purely free software version of ChromeOS (which maybe ChromiumOS is by the way).
It works as you expect and you don't ever need to tweak it unless you're really into it, which makes it... boring. Boring is good. You don't want your desktop manager to distract you, it's there to help you!
As for library support, I looked into it but the only real options seem to be to write code in C++ (not a fan) or to use some high level abstraction (Python).
I like GTK for projects like gtk-rust. The relevant types and macros seem much better supported than any Qt binding I've seen so far, and the Qt ones often come with unsafe code blocks out of necessity.
My Rust GUI code will (sadly) be GTK based because of its decent support without too many hacks. That's quite sad, because GTK applications look very GNOME-like, even when running on Windows or macOS. An unfortunate result of their unwillingness to consider other options in the CSD/SSD fight.
Stupid stuff like the inability for applications to look native in any desktop environment is why I don't think we'll reach the year of the Linux desktop any time soon. The Linux desktop can't even run applications in a consistent style.
Any way, I hope KDE will in time grow more language diverse. I'd like to switch my code to a less opinionated code base.
Now that I'm actually using Windows again on a regular basis, it really baffles me that people say this. Like, turn dark mode on and have fun getting blinded when random parts of the builtin Settings app are actually links to Control Panel, which just doesn't support dark mode at all and uses totally different widgets. Or try to fight a headache when some Java app has really blurry font rendering for some reason, even though the toolkit looks semi-native for Windows apps from 10 years ago. And have fun with all the Electron apps that completely ignore the native look and feel.
There is no OS where all apps have visual consistency. Idk why people pretend this is uniquely a freedesktop problem.
However, in my opinion the inconsistencies are rarely ever by design, except for Electron/Tauri/etc. applications because web developers consider themselves above concepts like "consistency" and "using system standards". The move from native to specialised, slightly outdated browsers has been a regression in usability in many aspects and the proposed solutions seem to be to switch to a dedicated, up to date browser rather than to look for consistency. I usually run most Electron apps in my browser instead because the "native" part of the application never seems to add anything, really, though sometimes developers don't port features to the web version.
Qt can copy the native look and feel quite easily but GNOME chooses not to expose a usable native look and feel unless you port the entire thing over to GTK+. In return, GTK+ doesn't even try to come close to a native look and feel.
If Qt and Wine applications don't look entirely native, that's because of technical challenges or a lack of free time to invest in platform behaviour. In these opinionated desktop environments and SDKs, the problem is actually a conscious choice: "our system looks better than your so suck it" rather than "we don't have time to make our UI look perfect on your system".
When developers choose frameworks that don't look consistent that's either because of cost effectiveness, lack of knowledge of native languages, or sometimes simple laziness. Those reasons can be annoying but they're understandable. The real problem lies with the platforms themselves for not exposing easy methods to gain consistency. That's why I blame Electron more than Spotify or Slack, and why I have such a dislike of Java's GUI libraries, GTK+, and GNOME.
Did they break the integration approach the KDE folks use for getting GTK+ apps to look good with GTK4? I know there were other changes to how theming works that caused some controversy.
As a non default environment for most distros, I think this is the problem they face. Once you get into the people going into the customisation sphere, everyone has their own little dealbreakers like moving a window left repeatedly with keyboard hotkeys not wrapping into the next monitor, or the amount of spacing on titlebars or the way the dark theme handles the settings app
Why not make that an option in KDE?
It doesn't work as well as i3 or sway.
No, I daresay it doesn't work as well as a dedicated tiling WM, but I don't use tiling WMs. :-) I have used xNix environments with just a window manager in the past, and while it works, I am not someone who lives in a terminal. In fact I almost never use them, just for occasional admin stuff, like a morning update run. Apart from that, I barely touch them.
So for me, I like the comforts of a desktop, and I don't want to give that up. But I do like tiled windows sometimes, so something that gives me a bit of both is of potential interest, while a pure-play tiling WM isn't.
Brightness controls are broken, both from the keyboard keys and plasma applet thing. echoing into /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness still works fine at least...
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454161
I can't drag windows between different virtual desktops from the desktop grid. Trying to drag one window drags all on that desktop and swaps them with the target desktop.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455268
Not introduced with this update but still broken: Every time I unplug and replug in my USB mouse, my inverse scroll direction preference isn't respected. I have to go into the mouse config GUI, uncheck it, apply, recheck it, and apply. Every time I plug in my mouse. Never in my 30 years of using computers have I see such basic functionality broken this badly. How how HOW does KDE not get a mouse configuration GUI to work correctly? Such basic functionality getting broken has seriously shaken my confidence in KDE as a whole. I just don't understand how something so basic and conceptually simple could break, let alone remain broken for so long.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435113
Other issues I've experienced in the past few months that have now seemingly resolved: Symlinks to files on my network share wouldn't thumbnail in the Folder View applet, but would in Dolphin. Power management (plugged in, unplugged, battery low, etc) notifications stopped working.
> And yet, people don't care about it.
I care, trust me. I really want to like KDE. But when each update inexplicably breaks basic functionality, how can I recommend this to any of my friends or family? I think they'd hate me for the recommendation.
As a user, I like Plasma a lot but what I'd love is even more bug fixes. It's not that bugs are there by the dozen, I hardly encounter one, but I have a global feeling that little details here and there could be improved.
Anyway, thx KDE for Plasma, it just rocks !
Nowadays I can't stand an environment without the sane defaults and powerful customization capabilities we can find in Plasma/KDE.
A big "thank you" to all KDE contributors.
Less sarcastically though, I found plasma to be the most usable of the bunch and glad to see the release cadence continuing. Gnome et al feel like they are on a relentless march to replicate Mac OS as closely as possible. I find Mac OS's approach to multitasking actively user-hostile, so something same like plasma is welcome.
Ironically I migrated to Mac OS because hardware support in Linux on common dell hardware is just not there, even in the 2020s
What could also be is that it's not actually sleeping.
That's a pity that in year 2022 apple sells notebook with only 16GB of RAM for $2000 and there is still no adequate alternative for the macbooks in terms of hardware, battery life and driver support.
MacOS feels so limited compared to KDE, even base functionality like alt+tab that shows windows previews(and not icons), or window arrangment with keyboards shortcuts or by dragging to the display corners, is not possible without 3rd party software.
Honestly that is one of the main reasons I use it. Years back, I realized no matter how much I customized or tweaked my OS I was never satisfied. Might as well not be satisfied and not tempted to waste time tweaking. But, like anything, you grow used to what’s comfortable, so now I just prefer it. It just works.
For example when they changed the virtual desktops to be no longer in a grid but in a row. That broke a lot of how I like to do things. In general a lot of changes in every release felt like regressions and many new features were unusable because I'm not exclusively on the Apple ecosystem.. So many of their smart stuff just won't work for me. Anything involving iCloud for example.
I'm really happy to have control back over my desktop with KDE. And it does satisfy me to adjust it to my preferences. But preferences vary of course!
For me that is another reason it works well for me, I’m all apple and I am definitely dependent on that ecosystem for my sanity.
Hope your control gets you to that nirvana I could never achieve. I’ll be envious.
Yes and that's Apple's goal of course, they are a hardware company. They want to sell as much as hardware as possible so they have no incentive to make things cross-platform.
I really lamented this while watching the keynotes. New features in Messages, things like iCloud keychain. Cool, but if I can't access it in Linux, Android or Windows, what's the point? Also, almost none of my contacts are on Apple's ecosystem and this means that any collaborative / messaging functions are also irrelevant. Here in Europe nobody uses iMessage.
In the end with every new release I could strike out most of the new features due to being not applicable and I was left with changes that I hated, very often changes to existing features meant to accommodate new ones. For example the way the new virtual desktops work was meant to accommodate the new full screen and split screen modes.
Another thing that bothered me is the way Apple pushes battery life. On my work Mac Mini I have set it to never sleep but still when I haven't used it for a few hours and go back to it, I can see everything playing "catch up" and being slow for the first few minutes. I think they call it "App Nap". For some apps I don't care but for others like Outlook (Apple mail is not allowed for work) I want them to be always be up to date. Apple make it very hard to turn this off. I'm sure they do this because they want to advertise huge battery lifetimes. But battery life is a non-issue on a Mac Mini. Energy saving is a bit of a thing but I'm willing to spend that little bit of power (because really it's not a lot) to have a responsive system when I go back to it.
It was stuff like this that bothered me more and more. Apple decides and you just have to go with it. One size does not fit me.
> Hope your control gets you to that nirvana I could never achieve. I’ll be envious.
It did already. It's not perfect but I don't strive for that. But my annoyance is much less than on Apple. I'm much happier with it. Part of it is that I don't expect or even want everything to 'just work'. I have no problem doing stuff in the terminal and in fact I prefer doing certain tasks there. Like bulk renaming files for example.
I don't miss much about macOS as a platform (and I still use it for work by the way). But I do miss some apps like Pixelmator. Gimp is definitely less good in my opinion. In particular I miss the ability to add simple shapes. But I still have to check out some KDE specific apps like Krita.
This is on FreeBSD no less. Wayland support is currently broken for KDE on FreeBSD but X11 is fine for now.
I've been trying to use Nemo as my default file manager in Fedora KDE, but something broke where I can't actually launch anything from Nemo most of the time, so I'll probably go back to Dolphin.
If possible, could you contact me through jpcrs at pm.me? Cheers
Overall the changes sound nice. I hope they'll keep the other window overview options though. I like the grid view in particular, because I use a 3x3 desktop grid (and I use the numpad as a quick switch for this)
You need to manually install `dkms` and `virtualbox-guest-x11` and then you can enable VBox' hardware acceleration and try it.
The floating taskbar is quite fun. Reminds me of Deepin. :-)
GNOME 2.x kind of reminds me of Classic Mac OS with a taskbar duct taped on while GNOME 3.x+ is kind of like what you’d get if you tried to turn iPadOS into a desktop OS.
Nothing in the open desktop world really mirrors Aqua-era OS X or modern macOS which is a bit weird to me. ElementaryOS aesthetically reminds me of OS X 10.9, but doesn’t operate like it at all in practice, instead also feeling kind of iPad-ish like GNOME does.
- Copying something old is kind of embarrassing, especially if
- Seriously, macOS isn't/wasn't clearly superior at everyhing. For example, I think the dock is a rather terrible idea.
But going with the Windows look by default is a good idea because, in terms of pure market share, that's what users expect.
I've done a lot of experimenting though and never gotten it in a state that feels as polished as macOS.