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Comment by bdbenton5255 | Hacker News Reader

I use Arch and love KDE Plasma. It even has a blue light filter. Am never going back to Windows. KDE runs faster, looks nicer, does not have forced adware and telemetry. Great daily driver.

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I have been playing with Cachy and Plasma in a VM and I am probably going to install that on my next PC build that I am planning. I am currently dual booting Ubuntu and Windows. I haven't logged into windows in over 6 months so I probably won't even setup dual boot with my next machine.

Using Cachy after testing some distros. I tried Nobara but it was too limited. Before this I've used Debian based distros (ubuntu, debian), Redhat/RPM (Redhat, Mandrake, OpenSuSe) and even Gentoo.

So far I really like Cachy. It's been great for the bit of gaming I do. I had a bit of audio grief, but installing a different kernel seemed to have fixed the issue. Overall I'm pretty damn happy with it. It was much easier than default Arch. I tried Endeavour and though it was nice, there was something about it I didn't quite like (I don't recall what). I'm off Windows entirely - between shoving their AI stuff and Ads everywhere, after decades of off and on use, Linux is my forever home.

And yeah, KDE is pretty nice and solid now.

I also really like the BTRFS file system which I didn't know about until installing Cachy. I like the idea of being able to go to a snapshot before I messed something up or a system update did.

I figure if I ever need anything Windows related, I will just load windows in a VM. Gaming wise, mostly the only games you can't play on Linux are Windows games with root kit level anti-cheats. Not sure if that is a downside...

The (much more complicated) middle ground is to put a second GPU in your PC, boot Linux with that GPU, and then reserve the primary GPU for your gaming virtual machine (and pin CPU cores so cache isn't useless while gaming). End result: more reliable gaming experience in a sandboxed environment. There are some anticheats that will detect you're in a VM and lock you out, but there are ways around that if you're persistent enough. Or just don't play such games, which is my preferred approach.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#Wi...

I too have been on CachyOS for 6 months, dual boot but have no need to boot into Windows.

I am running a modern PC (z790, i9-14400k, RTX 4070-Ti)

My main concern was gaming on Linux and I have been pleasantly surprised at the limited issues I have had -- only minor things.

I have recently played around with Gnome-boxes and seems to do the trick although it would be nice have GPU passthrough.

I love CachyOS and the Plasma DE and do not plan to return to Windows.

That is what I use as my main machine - https://i.imgur.com/hbDzVus.png I have been on this setup for a while and it is absolutely the best - clean, fast and customizable.

If you need an instance of windows at random periods of time, you can always run it as a VM with VirtualBox or KVM/Qemu... or Karton as headlined in the article.

I cane back to plasma after about year of gnome. It made me realize how much I dislike gnome. There are just so many issues. Inhad to solve them with extensions, but then it broke on updates. I couldn't get it to have English as language but ISO units.

I had to install an extra app to control startup applications.

Fractional scaling and several displays was wonky, made screen recording impossible. My 60fps display has a stuttery mouse pointer.

Hiding keyboard layouts like Swedish Sami or svdvorak didn't make things better.

Copy and paste not working cross screens (wtf?). Drag and drop not working if you switch windows using alt+tab. Context menus locking focus from the whole desktop: open the nautilus file transfer dialogue and suddenly I couldn't click anywhere else than in nautilus. Having it open and trying to interact with another app just wouldn't work.

At the end had accidentally tried KDE in a VM and realized I wouldn't tolerate a hammer behaving badly. I went back to opensuse the same day.

GNOME has great software, nice UI, horrible UX. It's like as if the designers actively tried to make their software as opinionated and as castrated as they physically could

GNOME is nice, but only if you only GNOME. Any attempt to alter the linux ecosystem beneath will result in a lot of pain.

It's really sad what happened with Gnome3.

Gnome2 was a good functional desktop, sure it was copying the 2000s with windows 98/2000 style, but it worked. Hell, even OpenStep is more functional than Gnome3 as a daily computer interface.

Gnome3 targeted a weird mix of incompatible devices, like a windows 8 interface, and kinda failed as a design given the devices it optimized for never took over the market. There's not that many tablets running Gnome or touchscreen laptops anymore.

It's almost like Android took the design team by complete surprise, while they tried to make desktops a tablet experience, but failed at doing both.

FWIW (not much) but I love Gnome3.

I have my Arch Gnome3 setup that resembles a tiling window manager... a la as demonstrated by Typecraft - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1kZd1f724U

I used to run Hyperland but was tired of constantly tweaking it... so this is good and easy enough.

Nice, I still want to dive into Niri or PaperWM (Niri is inspired by PaperWM but more minimal, needs Wayland and written in Rust where PaperWM is a WM on top of Gnome).

I hear good things about COSMIC as well. But I'm too busy being productive at the moment to mess up my well working NixOS/Vanilla-Gnome based laptop :)

> Gnome3 targeted a weird mix of incompatible devices, like a windows 8 interface, and kinda failed as a design given the devices it optimized for never took over the market.

I'm not sure about that. Convertible laptops are quite popular as a product category, and GNOME 3 works great on those. Besides, MATE and Xfce are still around if you prefer a traditional desktop interface.

Agreed. I gave gnome a pass for years because, well it’s largely designed for touchscreen devices right?

Fast forward to 2024 I get a Linux tablet with gnome installed (phosh) and guess what? Not a single gnome video player exists that works well with the touchscreen, and many of the apps only work by keyboard!!

We lost so much in the transition, and they didn’t even bother to nail the supposed new use case. Gnome in itself is a complete failure, so far at least. Cinnamon and Mate are decent but suffer from GTK deterioration. Phosh seems to work well enough.

I like kde these days and have it on a machine, but every time I open the context menu on konsole I get upset because there are a hundred options in there. I want a simple menu.

> I went back to opensuse the same day.

Such an underrated set of distros.

I tried KDE 1.0 two decades ago. Although it looked like a copy of windows ideas in some points, it already seemed better even at the time.

It was better up until about version 3. Then KDE got worse and Windows got better.

I think KDE is back in top again.

KDE 4 was the bad one, not 3.

In fact, it was so unpopular that it inspired a fork of KDE 3: https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

(IMHO, later versions of KDE got good, but even today I understand the appeal of just sticking to the same thing)

And it still exists, by looking at the NEWS section! That's a long grudge to hold :)

I don't know that it's a grudge per se; people liked KDE 3, so they forked it and stayed on the working thing that they liked. Don't fix what isn't broken.

Yeah it's kinda the same thing that happened to gnome 2 though it wasn't really a fork but rather a respawn in the form of cinnamon.

I think you're thinking of MATE. Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME 3.

I was going to reply that current MATE is more "modern" that late Gnome 2 compared to "Trinity vs KDE3", but then I went to compare screenshots and I wasn't right. But in both cases I'm amused that people can get so attached to a UI paradigm that they rather fork it and spend time and effort keeping it alive. It doesn't really click with me, but I admire the effort.

Never understood that part really. I was using KDE 4 since 3.97rc2 (which wasn't easy to install and still had some glitches) and absolutely loved it.

Really? Interesting. I loved KDE3, but hated KDE4 so much (slow, unintuitive UI, bugs) that I haven't looked at it since, preferring Xfce instead. I guess I could give it a spin again...

It had a lot less features than kde3, all the semantic desktop stuff didn't work and kdepim didn't work either But they did run at 100% cpu very often.

I wanted to use KDE 4 when it released, but it kept crashing on my machine. I would update it every once in a while and try again but issue would always pop up. By the time "plasma 4.4 is stable" was declared, I had lost interest and started using tiling window managers .

That said KDE 6 is pretty solid. I rarely have issues with it.

I remember it being very slow and buggy, and missing a lot of features I liked in 3.5. Dolphin also felt like a big downgrade from Konqueror. I didn't start liking KDE again until Plasma 5.

KDE 1 was clearly a 'copy' of CDE, hence the name. KDE 2 was much more windows like.

Kde 3 was released over two decades ago in 2002.

Dude I've been running Ubuntu with Plasma for almost 3 years now as a daily, and it's perfect. It's what windows 7 could've been. Maybe I'm stuck in my ways, but as a dotnet and devops guy, 2020s was the perfect confluence of open source, works on Linux tooling to fully switch over. Rider, datagrip and vscode, and I don't have to deal with docker or wsl anymore. It's beautiful. I only boot into windows now when I have to deal with .net framework OG stuff, and I'm pretty sure I could kill a weekend and get a VM to boot from my windows nvme so I never have to leave.

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