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Exactly this.

I have been using KDE as my only DE for over ten years, including some years for work. Previously used Windows and currently, I have been forced to use Mac for about 4 years.

Window management in Mac is an outright disrespect for power users and built-in applications for Win are just not up to speed. In KDE, I just use most apps from KDE universe and most of them are a perfect fit.

KDE managed to take the good from Mac and Win and even improve upon it - and if you don't like it, you can most likely easily change it in the System Settings panel or application preferences. With Kubuntu, everything (hardware) has mostly worked out of the box and upgrading since Kubuntu 7.04 has been working pretty flawlessly.

When they release new features, it is evident that they care about users. The theming is consistent, elegant and yet heavily configurable. Plasma and Kwin support you in the way that YOU want to work and does not force some workflow upon the users. I can control my Hue bulbs from the desktop and interact with my phone (through KDE Connect) bidirectionally.

The only missing thing was auto dark mode and I created https://github.com/adrium/knightadjuster for it. Even without reading much documentation, I could accomplish what I wanted simply by experimenting with qdbusviewer.

Thank you KDE developers - thank you KDE community! Keep up the good work and thanks for caring about users!

Thanks for making knightadjuster. I wasn't aware of it, I generally use mostly dark colours anyway and I turn on dark reader in Firefox manually.

However, this sounds like a great automated option. I just wish it would work with firefox too :)

I don't use KDE personally because it ships with an absurd amount of bloat. And ever since I setup Hyprland I have had no need for anything else.

KDE apps are not included in the plasma by default. Plasma itself is very lightweight.

Sorry, I was referring to the bundle that Asahi Linux is using. I had a bad time trying to uninstall each package one-by-one and decided to just start with a minimal install instead.

Same on FreeBSD. It comes with the basics. Some apps like Krita or Kdenlive are pretty heavy but also incredibly powerful. So I have opted to install them but they are not in the base package.

I think some small apps like Konsole, Kate, Dolphin and KWallet come in the default install but you can't really do without them.

It does have some visual bloat when you compare it to modern tiling wms, though.

True but it's much more than a WM. Especially a tiling one which are designed to be super basic :)

I was a Gnome person for a very long time. Every time I tried KDE, I would run into some issue or other and would jump back to Gnome. The UI changes and the “beautiful” design stuff kept adding weight and I soldiered on thinking KDE must be in even worse shape. Gnome being default DE on my district and all… surely it must be better right?

Then, I read a blog post shared here that went something like “The toilet in my house is broken and Gnome File selector can’t show previews” that kind of shook me awake and tried KDE after multiple years since my previous attempt. Uninstalled Gnome the same day and haven’t looked back. I am so glad posts like this get written and hope it convinces more people that KDE of now is very different from KDE of yore

I had an almost identical experience to the parent, though I went KDE a little earlier than the publication of that incredible article, "GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker (and my toilets are blocked)" [0]. It's absolutely worth a read, regardless of your chosen DE.

...but after you're done reading it, perhaps you too will change your mind.

[0] https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...

Funnily people bash gnome/gtk for the no thumbnails in file picker but nobody bashes kde/QT for no sound or video file preview either.

When I am in kde/kdenlive, sure I get picture thumbnails but I don't have thumnails for videos from my camera nor can I hear the sound files by playing when hovering over the icon.

I'd argue the file picker thing is just a standard-bearer for a whole bunch of different problems. Just look around this comment section, GNOME has more problems than thumbnails. KDE might not solve them all, but I'd argue its proverbial toilet works much better.

I am using both, I have one laptop dedicated to kde to make sure I don't miss out on anything in case both evolve in different directions. I make sure I still use the kde one once in a while...but I still tend to go by preference to the one running Gnome.

So they might have more problems but it doesn't necessarily translate in worse user experience for all users. The file picker was one example but I don't see me use very often a file picker, I am more a drag and dropper these days. It may be because file picker is not that great on Gnome, but I just checked the kde one today...and realized that meh. I'd still rather use dolphin on kde to drag and drop to a particular app than go to open --> file and choose it in the file picker. It seems just more convenient to me.

So KDE seems more flexible, and may fix issues that count for the 0.005% of the population, but the configuration panel feels like an airliner cockpit. Gnome may not care about what annoys 0.005% of user but the experience seems to be more straightforward to many and less choice means less stuff to configure to your liking the day you switch from one computer to another. You'd really have to backing up your .config preciously if you start customizing kde to your liking.

In the end it is great both exist, as well as the alternatives and the standalone window manager. On screens 10" and smaller and on older and slower machines I still prefer using a tiling wm.

Hm of course I backup my .config. After all, this is Unix and most programs have their own settings in the .config folder and many other places. This is not an issue for me.

And I like airliner cockpits <3

I'm giving a KDE a go as I finally convinced the wifey (non-technical human) to use "the Linux" daily. I haven't used KDE myself for past decade so should be fun.

Yeah i need to start donating too. Gave kde 3 a chance and wasnt disappointed. If you want a good looking, privacy friendly (no ads or data harvesting) and stable de then kde is a good option. Only thing i dislike is their choice of qml for widgets. Also i think it has good potential for some form of monetisation so that kde positions itself as a strong competitor against windows and macos.

Have you tried gnome 42 or later? I actually went from macos to gnome and while there are some differences some of them seemed reasonable given the contributors capacity and all the forms they're trying to support. (I use it on a tablet PC, so the minimalism comes with enabling larger hit targets for buttons, decent multitouch support)

Yeah I did but I was actually very unhappy with macOS (I think it's been steadily going downhill since 10.4 Tiger and I finally left it a few versions ago). And like I mentioned, the big window decorations on Gnome were annoying for me as I don't use touch at all. If there was a way to simply set them to be smaller (and change the hamburger menus to real menus) it would have been fine, but it offers none of that.

Also there's some other things where I have my own opinions. For example, I like my virtual desktops laid out in a grid, not a row. Then I remap the numeric keypad to be a desktop switcher (I don't like keystroke combos, I use dedicated keys for almost everything). I have all my apps on specific desktops (and different browser windows on many!) so I know what is where. KDE allows me to configure all that right out of the box and it persists after a reboot. On Gnome I need so many plugins that I run into conflicts and version compatibility issues. It was not workable like that.

Also, KDE has some great ideas like the "Activities" which was a great expansion to my workflow. It's basically several desktop environments in one.

I use Gnome 44 on my Surface Go with Fedora 38 and it will stop responding to touch input until I plug in a keyboard and press <Esc> and then it's good until I log out or reboot. It's basically unusable and infuriating. There are few open issues on the gnome-shell Gitlab that seem to be related but languishing.

Yeah, pretty sure I know exactly the issue you're talking about. Tablet support isn't perfect and you still need a separate keyboard, and yet I'm tolerably happy with it all.

It's a little strange isn't it that a tablet specific DE doesn't really work well with tablets.

I wouldn't consider it tablet-specific. More that it has an aspiration to support tablets, like the early days of windows 8.

Why would it be tablet specific?

It’s a minimalist DE which is very handy to control both on desktop, and especially on laptop (via swipe left-right on touchpad), and takes only a single line. Selecting the app you use from its overview is personally my favorite way to interact with my computer.

I felt the same way initially. I -hated- Gnome 3 and the developers who ruined it, as Gnome 2 was so sweet.

Eventually, I discovered extensions, and user themes, and it made the whole experience not just usable but even better. Dash to panel and tray icons are essential, and make Gnome pretty nice. Or that could be the Stockholm Syndrome talking.

Without extensions, I wouldn't use Gnome 3. You could make the argument that shouldn't be necessary, and I'd probably agree.

I don't particularly like that Gnome seems at times hostile to extensions, and that they don't work more closely with the extension authors. Half mine seem to break every version upgrade.

> KDE is so great.

Funny, back in 2006ish, KDE development was stalled, and it was a janky, inconsistent mess. Everyone hated it and used Gnome, which had a simpler design and was far more stable and smooth.

Yes it was. It was in fact the reason I initially tried Gnome and didn't even consider KDE when I moved away from Mac.

After spending ages finding extensions to make everything work the way I wanted to an upgrade appeared and some of them broke. I then tried KDE Neon as a live image and I was like wow, this is nice right away. And what's better, I can really make it my own, configure it the way I want to. Without having to install any extensions. That feels so welcoming after using Mac for more than a decade.

However yes in the early '00s it was an inconsistent mess I'm terms of UX. Very similar to early Android in fact. It was why I moved to Mac back then.

A lot can change in that amount of time and apparently has. Also, as you're very likely aware, KDE runs on macOS, though idky anyone would want to do that. It certainly wouldn't draw anyone back from FreeBSD. The best and worst parts of macOS are BSD — best because there is a BSD userland, and worst because it's inexplicably outdated.

KDE3 languished and lost a lot of users because they were so focused on the KDE4 migration. Then KDE4 came out and it was resource heavy and "overly aesthetic" so even more people jumped ship.

Meanwhile, GNOME did the exact same with GNOME3 even harder, but people had in their mind that the community would fix it or that KDE just had to be worse.

KDE kept trucking along; optimizing things, cleaning up and addressing complaints, not ballooning resource usage, etc. So now they're the refined and lighter option, while GNOME is overly opinionated and resource hungry. The only complaint I hear from non-user's today is that it feels old/last gen. But that's the appeal to me, I don't want "new gen" if it means touch oriented interfaces and dictated themes with overly simplistic applications.

I never used KDE but I have to say that I love my Ubuntu UI (Gnome forty something), and many people that I installed Ubuntu to replace Windows also love it, so is a net positive in my experience.

But then you have those terrible Snaps.

Ubuntu is not vanilla gnome at all. It's very heavily modified.

Is there a good tiled window manager for KDE such as Pop Shell for Gnome? That's the only thing keeping me back on gnome.

Plasma 5.27 added in some native tiling support. There are also some kwin scripts available to add tiling to it.

https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth

https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite

To use the tiling tool you can press `Win/Super + t`, I believe that is the default stroke.

Bismuth works for now but is effectively abandoned.

And so is krohnkite (as far as I've heard)

But thew new tiling tool is very nice. And it will probably be augmented in the future.

There will be a bit of a pause in feature releases for KDE now though, as they are working on Qt 6 compatibility which will take longer than usual.

I can vouch for Bismuth being pretty good. I need a 3 column tiling for my ultra wide and it works well for that.

Hotkeys allow for easy switching on and off and between tile styles. Still intend to try native tiling soon.

I've been using Plasma for over a year and did not notice that, wow.

Now if only I could make it behave like i3 with regards to a few things... time for research