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Comment by bobajeff | Hacker News Reader

For me I needed like 5 extensions to mold gnome into an acceptable desktop. (I forget which ones)

Then during one install I was having trouble getting one of the work arounds to work. (I believe it was a distro bug) Which lead me to give up and try KDE again. (Hadn't used in years) I was kicking myself for not doing that sooner everything works as it's supposed to.

I do miss gnome's Expose-like windows overview thing though. KDE has one too but it's not as good. But it's not as important as having my desktop behave like a desktop without some third party hacks (which will probably break at some point or stop being maintained) tricking it into behaving normally.

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I had exactly the same experience. I've been using Gnome for the last 7 years, with few extensions that were essential. The latest upgrade to Fedora 38 broke everything. Extensions, fractional scaling, Gnome and apps were crashing.

I tried KDE after many years. Other than some UI choices that I find not that great, it has been an amazing experience. Everything works out of the box. No hacks are needed for electron apps, fractional scaling, no extensions necessary.

I really do wonder what I do wrong with KDE every time I try it.. I see people write stuff like this, but my experience is the complete opposite. KDE is the most sluggish horrible mess for me every time I try it, it feels like a game constantly fluctuating between 15 and 25 fps when interacting with it.

Gnome on the other hand has never missed a beat, despite having it's issues needing solved with extensions. Performance wise it's always been 10/10, even on my 3x4k setup.

Wish I didn't need wayland, because I really just want to go back to xfce..

That is odd, I have never had performance issues with KDE. It was no quicker or slower than any other high end desktop system.

My only issue with it is that it seems to try to do a little too much - but that is just a matter of taste.

Personally, KDE is the jack of all trades - it can do anything you ask it, Gnome goes a little too simple, I really like Cinnamon as a middle ground. But each to their own.

Yeah I really don't understand it. There really has to be something wrong somewhere because I can't imagine KDE actually being as bad as I experience it, because absolutely nobody would be using it if so.

To me my favourite is xfce by far, it is so simple and fast without being too simple where it becomes an inconvenience. But, I need wayland so Gnome and KDE are the only really good alternatives for now. (Yes I know there are plenty of alternatives like sway, enlightenment, etc etc but no.)

Are you using Nvidia? I remember there was an issue with Nvidia and Aurorae (one of the window decorator used by kde). Try changing system theme in kde settings in case one of them doesn't trigger the slowdown issue.

Same issues on both my nvidia desktop, my amd desktop, and my amd laptop. I definitely first suspected nvidia, since well, it's nvidia. But I wouldn't have the exact same issues on other machines without nvidia as well then..i hope

Haven't tried KDE lately, but I tried it a couple times on the last 20 years, and every time I couldn't sustain more than a couple hours.

Main complain is that it is noticeably slow and the GUI looks like an experiment to turn all pixels into clickable things. I think there is nice tech under the hood, but that's not what I'm looking for.

You should give it another try. It's improved a lot.

Cinnamon seems to be forgotten/underappreciated, I really enjoy using it. I've tried a range of different desktops environments, and I end up finding cinnamon just does what I expect, with reasonable defaults.

> Cinnamon seems to be forgotten/underappreciated, I really enjoy using it. I've tried a range of different desktops environments, and I end up finding cinnamon just does what I expect, with reasonable defaults.

The Linux Mint Cinnamon version is actually pretty good: https://linuxmint.com/download.php

But also, XFCE has always worked well enough - it's lightweight, responsive and has most of the features you'd expect, albeit little to no eye candy.

Cinnamon is pretty cool. It’s old school desktop paradigm but clean and modern looking. I urge anyone who likes XFCE to try Cinnamon.

My main issue with Cinnamon is that fractional scaling doesn’t work well (to be fair, it only works in Gnome and KDE) but since Cinnamon handle bigger text very well, I have a nice experience just by checking « bigger text » in accessibility settings (while XFCE will scale text up but will keep the rest - mostly icons - really tiny).

Other than that, it’s a labor of love.

I can second this. I have no need for Wayland at the moment and am still happy with XFCE but every time I read a comment praising KDE I give it a go again to see what I am missing out on. But it always feels, 'off'. I cannot quite put my finger on it. It feels convoluted, a bit sluggish. There are some animations/transitions which get in the way for me. I really do want to like it and honestly wonder if I am doing something wrong.

Just one little thing ruined my workflow back when I tried KDE ~2018. It was the newest Plasma version back then. What really screwed me over were bugs with window focus. Sometimes you have to click twice to get a window to focus and it's really really breaking my workflow in a subtle way. It wasn't the only problem, but one that I didn't even notice at first that they really annoy the heck out of me.

It was then when I tried the obviously inferior Gnome (3.28 iirc). And while I felt a bit constraint with it, I was so much quicker with it.

> There are some animations/transitions which get in the way for me.

I do hate those (but I hate all animations/transitions in desktop environments). You can turn them all off, though -- that's what I do.

> KDE is the most sluggish horrible mess for me every time I try it, it feels like a game constantly fluctuating between 15 and 25 fps when interacting with it.

This may be an issue with your specific hardware. I never encountered slow-downs with KDE, even when fancy compositor-effects were new and I went overboard[1] with them, everything was smooth as butter.

1. Who wouldn't want their wobbly, semi-transparent windows to disappear in a burst of flames when closed?

That is the weird part, it happens on all my various machines. I have an RDNA2 laptop, KDE is sluggish. I have a 3900x+2080Super desktop, KDE is sluggish. (Though that's nvidia so..) Even my 5950x+7900xtx desktop, KDE is sluggish.

I really do not understand it, it's almost as if KDE just runs out of sync with my heads internal fps.

My KDE has fantastic frame-rates on an old Polaris AMD card. I never recall KDE being particularly sluggish, even when I could only use Intel's Integrated graphics.

In KDE, moving mouse cursor to top left usually leads to expose-like behavior unless it is unconfigured.

Yes I am always configuring this out because I find it annoying... but others may like it?

Same story for me. I was so happy with my workflow on gnome3 with some extensions (top bar workspace scrolling for example) but I was tired of the extensions breaking and the move to horizontal workspaces killed it for me. Moved to KDE. Although I can't say I'm happy now that I think about it.

Give a chance to XFCE 4.18 please.

That's actually the desktop I was using the longest before I realized I wanted a more feature complete desktop. For example I prefer a file manager with integrated file search over Thunar + Catfish. Also xfce has a bug where it will change the resolution everytime the screen goes to sleep. That being said I might've been happy with LXDE + xfce4-panel + Dolphin but it seemed safer to me to use one desktop environment rather than mix and match parts from the different ones.

Why is a searching file manager a value add? I usually structure my filesystems to the point I know where everything is going to end up before it gets there. The only exception is image files, and even then, I try to structure things to keep the madness constrained.

The only thing that adding search to a UI ever seems to accomplish in my experience, is giving UX people an excuse to foist another query language on the user, and decreases the overall navigability and discoverability of a filesystem.

Yes, I understand there are lost causes who don't know anything exists that isn't on their desktop; in fact, more exist than is necessary because we've stopped exposing people to the fundamental units of organization inherent to information storage.

It's at the point where every time I end up using a search bar, I twinge, because someone couldn't be arsed to figure out a way to help me actually come to terms with the shape of my data.

Not everything in my system is organized by me. In fact most of it isn't. I'm not going to reorganize all of the zip files or repositories I downloaded and extracted. I'm also not going to learn where the distro decided to put things that I might have to touch.

Thunar search now lets you filter directory and offers a button to search with Catfish , click and it then opens Catfish with search results of the term you where looking for (no need to reenter search term)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're describing what I remember about using Thunar + Catfish.

In Dolphin and Nautilus I'm able to search using the file manager and results are treated like another directory I can navigate back to them and select and/or run commands on them. It could be just my perception but I also think searching is faster than with Catfish. I really can never go back (until Thunar has that too).

The issue I always had with XFCE was that the edges of windows were set to 1px which made window resizing terrible and I had to spend time Googling how to change the grabble area, until the next update and I had to do the same again.

XFCE is awesome, but let down by some rather sharp edges.

I find it that has way to many buttons

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