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Comment by akshatjiwan | Hacker News Reader

KDE is amazing. For an open-source project the desktop environment looks really slick. Not that any other desktop environments are particularly ugly but KDE can compete with the best commercially developed desktops.

For a moment though I thought that this story was about the launch of a new plasma TV 'big screen' and it got me really excited.

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Yes! KDE is the only thing in the Linux world that legitimately looks better than the big competitors. Not always, and not all the time; programs that are really focused on design are still a cut above, but I truly believe that KDE looks (and feels!) better than macOS

I don't understand why there aren't more folks like us shouting it from the rooftops. It's almost bizarre how good it looks.

I’m curious about which distros are working well with Plasma, as I had some trouble with stability in the past. I have the feeling Plasma works better with rolling release.

I've been running two distros with Plasma: Bazzite OS and CachyOS. Both very different, and stellar with Plasma.

I use CachyOS in my ThinkPad and in my Framework Desktop, for work. A stellar OS, has great defaults, is very fast and prioritizes KDE although you can do other WMs too if you're adventurous.

Bazzite has been so good to use it has me consisting dropping PopOS as my dev distro for Bluefin

Fedora works well with it for me, no complaints. Though I haven't yet used it through a major version update.

Garuda deploys plasma with vanity

What's Vanity?

meaning, Plasma tricked out, right outa the box

Plasma is the desktop-mode interface for the Steam Deck SteamOS, which is the only way I use it. I'm usually a Gnome person, as I'm one of the people Gnome just "clicks" for, despite all its issues, but I've been really enjoying using the Steam Deck as a mini computer and Plasma has been quite stable and solid for that. Did some minor customizing, and no issues at all so far!

Yeah, Gnome consolidates feature changes into major releases every six months, so it aligns well with fixed release distros like Ubuntu and Fedora that have release cycles that are aligned with Gnome's.

KDE drops a new point release with new features ~ every four months, and has a more flexible release schedule, so it is just to just get the changes when they are released.

I'm currently running KDE on NixOS unstable which is great, but if I weren't doing that I'd still be on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Fedora are two solid distros I've been running for a few years now.

> KDE is amazing. For an open-source project the desktop environment looks really slick.

That is clearly an understatement. For me, it is the best desktop environment out there.

I don't want to say that it is perfect (there have been many versions over the years which clearly were not (e.g. KDE 4.0)), but none of the other desktop environments (including Windows and MacOS) have a similar feature set:

- mainstream UX principles like Windows - beautiful as MacOS - customizable and extendable like no other

I have to work with MacOS every day, and it is just painful to see how much better KDE is when it is not available...

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