Hello folks. I use many distro from Debian to Fedora to OpenSuse and Arch. I also use many window managers like i3, dwm and qtile. On desktop environment, I use XFCE the most. Currently, I am looking to try something new, hence KDE.
I am looking for something with a beautiful UI and works out of the box. So, something on the same spectrum as XFCE but more pretty.
I tried out the distros with preinstalled KDE: Fedora KDE, Manjaro KDE, Kubuntu.
The good: KDE is beautiful and very easy to use. I actually enjoy using my computer more.
The bad: it crashes… a lot even when I turn off all the animations. My system is not that slow: AMD 7 Pro with 64 GB of RAM. Some examples:
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Logging in, KDE hangs for 30 seconds. Even when I finally see the desktop, I would need to wait a further 10 seconds to finally able to interact, i.e. click and open stuff.
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After resume suspend, system would hang and there is nothing I can do except for a forced reboot.
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Browsing the web with only 3 tabs opened, KDE also hang.
As much as I hate GNOME, everything just works. I installed the GNOME flavors of above distros and never experience any hiccups.
If KDE works for you, do you use a preinstalled distro and which one? How about if you install KDE from scratch, like Arch?
Look at the reddit called “unixporn” and search for Xfce. You ll see what’s possible with Xfce. For me the KDE crashes are a dealbreaker. My Xfce setup is so simplified, that nothing can be ugly. I use Bspwm for the windows and stripped down Xfce panel (dont touch third party status bars, such as polybar, its waste of time if you already have Xfce). No menu such as Whisker menu, but Rofi instead. I got Xfce stability without the old looking.
In my experience, KDE can run just fine, but it is seemingly pickier about drivers and hardware (I’ve had a loose DisplayPort connection crash it several times) than other desktop environments.
Plasma 6 started very prone to crashes in my laptop when it released. I like how it works a lot more than Gnome, but Plasma tends to be buggier for me too.
This last month I’ve been having rendering issues in a lot of software, like Firefox and Okular in Fedora 41 (and now 42). I don’t know where they came from as it was pretty much perfect last month.
Sometimes I think I’d prefer to return to xfce in laptop (like I tend to use in desktops) or use labwc.
I had issues like that about a week ago, when gaming the system was super sluggish. It turns out that an update put the render under CPU instead of GPU, as in, without hardware acceleration, or software based.
Most of those issues I do not have. By waking from suspend, do you mean hibernate? A system d update broke that last year in OpenSuse and I’m assuming other distros. I sleep now and it wakes fine.
I’ve never had issues like that on Kubuntu, Debian, or EndeavourOS. KDE is great and I love it.
I have never gotten KDE to work well… but I’m a shitty user running on shitty hardware so grain of salt and all…
I’ve been using Fedora KDE for…months? Maybe a year now? And I’ve yet to see it hang or crash.
Vanilla Arch is much easier to install than it used to be. Connect to wifi via terminal commands or connect ethernet, enter
archinstalland go down the list.I’ve only ever had the waking from sleep problem, but it’s consistent in other DE’s for me. I have a desktop so I just turn that and hibernate off.
I had a known problem with krunner not opening after first run unless you killed the process, but I got rofi and customized it to the teeth instead. Found out that I love rofi. I probably won’t go back to krunner even it gets fixed now.
Arch is much more difficult to install now than it used to be as well. I remember when Arch had an installer.
it literally has one fym
Huh? Interesting, guess I’m out of the loop, since the install guide doesn’t mention it I didn’t even realize this got added back to the iso. When was that? I should check this out, I really missed the installer all these years, I understand why they did removed it originally, but if you know what you’re doing it’s just tedious work.
Yeah, it got added to the iso fairly recently, though before it did I think you could install it through pacman in your live environment.
It’s
archinstall. It generates a CLI list similar to Calamares for you to go through and steps you through everything.
I used to have hang on suspend resume problem on my Thinkpad E15. It somegot got resolved in later updates. Might be a random firmware problem, that’s really hard to track down. So may be it mostly comes down to luck.
I think Linux nerds are clowns who don’t understand that not everyone wants to learn what -xvf means just to extract a goddammed file.
Kde is solid and requires zero fuckery in my experience to work well. This is in fedora, suse, arch (endeavour), void.
I use KDE with Chimera Linux which is only in beta. Rock solid.
Yes, that’s what its always done.
Kde works great for me, I don’t have any special hardware. I have used it with fedora and bazzite.
I use arch and so I get the latest kde releases and sometimes things are buggy. But usually those are fixed next update. But yes, it is beautiful but man it’s not as stable as something like gnome
