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?
I have been using KDE on Arch across several machines for about 3 years now, then Manjaro for a year before that. At no point have I experienced instability or issues like that. Especially that last one; I’m the sort of person who regularly has 10+ tabs open on laptops with a fraction the amount of RAM that you have.
I would say that is definitely not normal. If that happened to me, I might search online or check
journalctl -b -p 3
to see if it yields any clues.had a couple of crashes when 6 was released, but they were fixed pretty quickly and has been rock solid ever since. Those crashes probably had more to do with my nvidia card than kde itself, tbh
KDE Manjaro running on 4 or 5 of my machines, pure stability. It sounds like a hardware issue.
Here are my suggestions to diagnose this.
Option 1. Setup an ssh server, connect from a second computer (or phone via Termux), execute $journalctl -fe, and observe the journal from your second device when the crash occurs. That should help pinpoint the issue.
Option 2. If you don’t have a second device, use a non-gui tty, access via Ctrl+Alt+F1. (Usually terminals are available F1 thru F6). Once again execute $journalctl -fe and observe it during the crash.
Tbh option 2 may just be easier especially if you have minimal knowledge of ssh. Good luck, ping me back if you find this helpful and would like more perspective, and apologies if this doesn’t help you.
If the entire computer crashes, boot into a terminal and browse journalctl history of previous boots, sorry I don’t have these commands off the top of my head but if you need them and ask I will get them for you.
journalctl -xb-1
where 1 is last boot, 2 is boot before that, etc.
For what it’s worth, I experience none of that. My laptop is absolutely rock solid with KDE, it’s like a MacBook you pull it out of your backpack and it’s ready to go before I’m even done opening the screen.
My desktop is currently just over 5 days of continuous uptime (no sleep). I’ve crashed more often because of ZFS than KDE.
Both are ArchLinux. I also have a friend on Bazzite that doesn’t have issues with KDE either, and it runs great in my VM.
Those all sound like possible graphics driver issues.
Those aren’t normal issues.
It sounds more like a driver or hardware issue which may only pop up in KDE (Wayland) and not in your other WMs (X11).
As a first step, try logging into the KDE (X11) Session and see if it still happens.Very much agreed. I ran into some similar issues for a while on KDE Wayland, also with strange freezes–and was concerned that it might be a (fairly new at the time) hardware issue. No, it was evidently some weirdness involving the then-current NVIDIA drivers, which was thankfully fixed not that long after.
If you do have NVIDIA graphics, you’ll probably want to make sure it’s using the latest drivers from them–and maybe particularly on Wayland. More stable distros do tend to ship older versions.
Do you have an nvidia GPU? It’s the most important thing to know.
Agreed, have had issues with especially older nvidia cards, 840 and 970. Atleast until I switched to prop. Driver
Is KDE actually good or it is overrated?
That’s like a trick question 😀
If I say it’s good, and that contradicts your own experience with it, you can say “see it’s overrated, people say it’s good, but in fact I know it sucks.”I use it on Arch but I’ve seen people using it on Fedora and it looked good and stable.
Did you try to look into it, see what’s causing the problems?
In my experience having used Linux and KDE Plasma for about a decade now, if you wanna have a good time you’re going to have to figure stuff out, check the logs, troubleshoot, look it up online, etc.
If you expect to go through different distros to find one that “just works” you’ll be disappointed, and you’ll be wasting your time. Issues can be hardware-specific, maybe you just need to pass a parameter to the kernel, or change a config somewhere or something like that…I’ve been using Debian with KDE Plasma for over a decade and I can count the crashes with the fingers of one hand.
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 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 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
archinstall
and 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.
openSUSE has the best integration of KDE, but I wouldn’t expect to see issues like yours on any distro, really…
KDE just works on my machine, which is lower specs than yours. I’ve never had it crash. I use Endeavor OS, so it came with it by default (which was part of the reason I chose it).
Edit: I don’t do much tweaking of the KDE settings other than the main color scheme. I also have never had an issue with waking from sleep on Endeavor (but I recall in years past that was an issue with most distros I tried and unrelated to KDE since I was less a fan of its style back then and didn’t use KDE). My set up is a normal desktop PC that I use daily for everything, including gaming.
I use Fedora KDE, and I don’t think ive ever seen crashes that bad on my system (AMD CPU and GPU). I used to have a small problem with RADV crashing during video playback, but that solved itself after a few updates.