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Comment by nycticorax | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, just use KDE Plasma. Sure, it's not 'minimal', but on modern hardware it sings. It just works. It's a batteries-included desktop. It's built on a toolkit that people actually like using (Qt) and they don't change it constantly in backwards-incompatible ways just because the mood strikes them. It doesn't treat you like an infant with ADHD. They don't constantly fix things that aren't broken. Plus if you have a problem you have a decent chance of finding the solution via Google, unlike with a lot of the 'long tail' WMs/DEs people have mentioned.

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As a KDE user i agree with this point of view. KDE is the most customizabile DE ever created. You can tweak the crap out of it to make it look and behave EXACTLY the way you want it. And, from my experience, the performance of the current 5.x version (running on Wayland) is very good.

And if you turn off composition (something you can't even do on most DEs), it runs even better. :D

(Actually, though, I've never used it on Wayland, so I limit my statement to X11.)

I have xfce and KDE plasma installed. If you turn off everything in desktop effects for KDE, I can't tell any difference between xfce and KDE in terms of performance on an old 4 core i5 with 16 gigs of ram.

The only real difference is that KDE is much prettier. I almost never boot into xfce.

I've used KDE quite a lot. A like it, I really do. But the amount of small issues I have with compositing and caching that build up over time, regardless of distro, until after a few months I'm plagued by flashing and compositor crashes, or menus and file managers hanging for ages...it's just untenable. There are too many small bugs in too many nooks and crannies, and with KDE's scope (and scope creep), I'm not confident they'll ever be fixed.

This has not been my experience with Kubuntu 20.04 or 22.04. I have occasionally (like maybe once every six months?) had an issue that seemed likely to be Plasma-related, and was fixed by a reboot. And there was an issue with Plasma Search where if I let it search "Recent Files", it would hang the whole UI if I did a search that (I guess) was a match for some recent files. (Worked around that by unchecking "Recent files" in the list of things that Plasma Search searches...) So I mean not 100% issue-free, but nothing like what you describe. And certainly compares quite favorably to other Linux DEs I've tried (Gnome, Mate, XFCE, LXQt).

Never even tried KDE, I'm using XFCE4 and it's good enough. Is KDE better or is it just a matter of what you're used to?

I switched to KDE from xfce4 because it handles dual monitor better and remembers settings for various second displays.

Then I started using Bismuth for tiling. Add to that the need for various desktop things like status icons, notifications, wallets etc, I am pretty much stuck because no wm provides this combination of features unless you take a tiling wm and spend days configuring it. (There's also the option of using something like xfce4 with the wm bits from a tiling wm.)

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