Comment by hexbin010 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hexbin010 | Hacker News Reader

So I just tried KDE with Fedora 43 on a 4 year old Intel Dell laptop (I've used Linux pretty extensively for 15+ years). It's hilariously bad :

- I managed to make a process crash just clicking around the Settings app

- Sleep doesn't work (spins up the fans, then turns them down, then turns off off displays etc but I then the fan are spinning, so something is running). Looking at the menu, supposedly Firefox is 'blocking' sleep, but I blocked it, and that just meant the fans stayed spun up during sleep. Wtf?

- Monitor connected via dock via USB-C only worked after I plugged it directly into the laptop then back into the dock

- WiFi is preferenced over Ethernet (?!)

- KDE default panel is 'floating' which means wasted pixels below it. Looks ugly and wastes precious vertical space. And the blue highglight of the active window is over the top. And the default panel height is 44 pixels!

- Default fonts especially in Konsole look ugly on a 1920x1080 laptop LCD.

- Booting takes forever

- Impressive it can stream to Homepods out the box...but it cuts out when you open the sound widget in the taskbar. And also at random points

- The default pop-up notifications are too numerous

- The Night Light quick option is to suspend it, not to enable it. Which is interesting, as it's not enabled currently. I want to enable it! There is no option to once-off enable.

EDIT:

- And during boot, the LVM2 unlock is only shown on the built-in display. Then the Login Screen is kind of mirrored, but updates are only shown on the external display ?! (ie password characters not filled in on the built-in display). Very odd

I love Linux, and MacOS might be turning into iOS and becoming buggier, but MacOS has none of those issues.

Can you run MacOS on your 4 year old Intel Dell laptop?

I've been running Fedora full-time for years and have not experienced any of the issues you have listed here. Some of your issues sound like hardware to me?

It was running headless Debian for a while with no issues, and Windows prior to that. The hardware is fine (it's a Dell dock too fwiw). Drives are NVMe

I'm not sure what you mean by your question.

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So I tried KDE on Debian Stable, which is a bit less broken (it gets the Ethernet preferencing correct). But still:

- Logout causes the monitor to turn off then on, introducing more delays and flickering

- Only certain application seem blessed to be permitted to be pinned to the task manager when you right click in the applications menu. For the others, you have to drag and drop. You can only drop to the left of the existing icons, not the right. You can't change the order or remove them unless you enter the editing mode which is non-obviously done by right clicking then "Show panel configuration". You are however allowed to drag the open windows around without editing? Go figure

- Switching from the Dark theme to the Light theme just crashed plasmashell

- GWenview stutters between images because its default animation is enabled, and set to software. Much better turned off.

- Dolphin "Duration" column doesn't work for videos (I checked baloo was indexing properly, including with 'content') (edit: had to fully relaunch Dolphin...)

- Display scaling set itself to 170%. Seems like an odd number?

- Konsole configuration has many options, but none that I can immediately see to change the default font size ?! Well, at least I can configure Thumbnail generation and Memory Monitoring

(edit: oh right you have to create a new Profile - oh and you can't edit the current "built-in" profile. What a mess. Steps: hamburger menu, Settings, Configure Konsole, Profiles, New, Appearance, "Choose", Apply, OK, OK... not done yet...got to make your new profile the default one..."set as default", OK. Finally, you've changed the default font. Madness!)

I don't know how anyone defends this

To finish my review: there are a lot of rough edges and questionable defaults, but ultimately, KDE is impressive. It's extremely snappy, full of useful features. I can live with it

I think fast + full of features gets KDE a LOT of mileage in terms of what users put up with. But it doesn't help anyone denying that there are crashes and bugs all over.

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