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Comment by prmph | Hacker News Reader

GNOME is ugly, to me. Personally I think KDE is the pinnacle of Linux desktops. Might be a bit heavy, but there is no other Linux desktop I think comes close to it in the level of polish and aesthetics, and I've used a lot of them.

I consider KDE even more polished than the MacOS and Windows desktops.

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KDE has been lighter than GNOME for a few years now.. Their continuous iteration and polishing approach instead of break-the-world-and-remould-it-in-our-image approach from Gnome also shows up in any real-world use.

I really don’t see the polish everyone talks about in KDE. Here’s a perfect example: Konsole the KDE terminal. https://apps.kde.org/konsole/

Why does the toolbar need giant copy/paste buttons? Is any terminal user actually clicking buttons to copy and paste? The vertical space those buttons take up is enough room for at least 2 more lines of actual terminal output, which is important.

The UI is just such a mess.

The KDE UI is actually a marvel of consistency, thoughtfulness, configurability, and beauty, IMO.

For your complaint, have you thought about the fact that those buttons are very useful when running in a virtualized environment (which many people, including me, frequently do)? It saves you from having to fiddle around with matching the key combinations for copy/paste you are used to on your host.

Plus, using KDE in general does not mean you have to use all it's apps. I personally use Tilix instead of Konsole most times. Just like most would probably prefer to use Firefox or some other browser instead of Konqueror.

There is indeed a fine line between desktop environment and complete DE ecosystem.

Having spent a long time on i3wm, I learned a lot about how to build your own DE effectively. These days I'm on KDE but definitely don't just assume that I want to use the kTool for everything, I've brought a lot of things from my i3wm days with me.

Using KDE has always felt to me like someone was creating a touch UI.

By default everything is so big that even a gorilla could hit it with a fist.

Not that my eyesight is the best at this age, but I still like to keep my screen real estate to the actual content instead of MASSIVE buttons.

Eh, not sure what massive buttons you are on about. I only see normally sized buttons. I for one appreciate the thoughtfulness of not making everything so tiny that it becomes like a game of targeting UI elements, when we have massive screens with oodles of real estate.

I’m not sure why the copy and paste actions couldn’t be placed in a right click context menu instead of taking up 2-3 lines of actual terminal output for every user of the software all the time… it’s just a waste of space. It’s not just Konsole either, kde apps seem to love random buttons and absurd amounts of chrome on everything when most of it is rarely used and just steals screen real estate from what you are actually trying to work on.

I try to use KDE every 3-4 years and always come back to GNOME (which is bad in its own way)

It's still, to this day, full of growing-pains-bugs, so every time a die from a thousand papercuts. I use NVIDIA+Wayland though and a lot of issues stem from that. Still, GNOME behaves better for me

What exactly bothers you in KDE? I've used it on a bunch of Gentoo installations this year with only the more minor consternations expected of a Linux desktop like changing default shortcuts.

As a side note, getting to wobbly windows has become a milestone of a Gentoo installation for me now - GPU driver has to be functioning for compositing, so by that point the system is largely functional. Feels like a rewarding treat at the end - it's a trivial graphical task on any modern hardware but it still feels like a fun flex after growing up with Pentium 4-esque workstations that couldn't handle KDE at all.

Somehow I keep hitting what I call "z-index issues". Examples: just for one frame I will see a background window drawn on top of everything else. Or a single line of pixels in Konsole will show me my desktop wallpaper (instead of being correctly half-transparent and showing the window underneath). Or only a random portion of the background window will get drawn on top of another for no reason whatsoever.

My other gripes this time around also include:

1. Inability to make my secondary monitor static, while the main one gets to switch between virtual desktops, which is my preferred way of working 2. I couldn't find a good screenshot tool that would be able to capture rectangular sections of the screen on Wayland (AND worked with scaling), besides the built-in one, and I hated the built-in one because it insisted on opening its own window every time and I couldn't find a way to make it just silently take a screenshot and put it in the buffer. 3. Probably something else

Same. I like much of the philosophy behind KDE, but every few years or so when I try it I'll hit something (or more typically, a series of things) until I reach a point where I just go back to Gnome.

When AI gets to a point where I can just have it fork Gnome and make the changes I want to it without a large effort from me, it will be a momentous occasion :-)

Xfce hands down...

> Personally I think KDE is the pinnacle of Linux desktops.

Whereas I feel like KDE has an interface cloned from Windows, which is a traumatic experience.

I like Gnome. And I like that they didn't do a dock.

I don't need a list of all my running apps in icon form, which makes the KDE bar redundant.

For me, if they put Windows 10/11 on Debian that’d be an endgame desktop. MacOS was nice for awhile but they’re trying to do too much.

As a long year user of Windows (Windows 95 till Windows 11), MacOS and KDE Plasma, I have to say that KDE Plasma by this point is the best of the bunch.

What sucks in Windows is that you have multiple layers of old configuration editors none of which allow you to configure everything, want to change Network settings? There are literally 10 different places to do that and some haven't changed since Windows 98.

MacOS has this things where stuff you should be able to configure isn't or at least you can't rely on it being configurable next time. Just running a binary can be a challenge of remembering which obscure key you need to hold down so your OS treats you like a big boy. Every software update removes icons from my dock and I have to pray my audio interface still works (or roll back, which is a pain in the..)

The thing Windows and MacOS got going for them is that there is a lot more softeare for them, but since the enshittification-wave you can't really trust that something that works today, will work in a year.

KDE Plasma on the other hand just gets better, everything is configurable, the network settings alone put any other OS to shame easily. All the rest just seems to work, the desktop environment never once got into my way and when it did I could change it into not doing that ever again.

Windows kernel has lots of nice features that people wishing for this usually don't get, including virtualization based security for key kernel modules, and drivers.

If Microsoft would care they have all the penguin tools,

https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/product-overv...

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