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I wish KDE worked well on Touch screens. It seems to really fail at that. Don’t tell me it’s X11. X11 on Gnome doesn’t think my touches are a mouse. KDE thinks it is though.
A bunch of their touchscreen implementation work is Wayland-only, because it would’ve been a lot of work to retrofit it on X11. It’s well possible that the GNOME devs invested more time into X11.
KDE is putting the effort into Wayland. If you want the modern features you need Wayland.
It works fine for me, and I use Wayland.
Steam deck is quite good with touch I find.
It’s okay. But it would be better if it didn’t recognize touch as a mouse input. When I booted into Ubuntu once it worked flawlessly on the Desktop touch input working distinctly from mouse input. on KDE touches are mouse input which is annoying and uncomfortable.
It’s hard to believe that KDE used to be considered one of the worst DEs around and now it’s like Gnome is getting worse while KDE is getting better and better.
I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of hate for KDE back in the day was because Qt started out with a non-Free Software license, not because it was bad in terms of quality.
Yep. the Qt wars were real. And one needed to be careful about reveling your KDE use because you would get flamed with hatred.
KDE Plasma 4 was also really buggy when it first launched
Yep, that’s what brought me over to XFCE for several years. Back at KDE again, though
That was it for me. I was actually a KDE user way back in the KDE 2 and 3 days. I found KDE 4 unusable. KDE 5 never won me over. But I have been using Plasma 6 on Wayland and am perfectly happy with it.
I personally hated KDE because it was a buggy, unstable mess for a long time.
Are you referring to the fact that a lot of distributions shipped KDE 4 pre release code?
What is happening to GNOME is truly one of the biggest fumbles in OSS. They could have just continued improving things, but instead choose the path of most resistance, refused to commit to any logical strategies for further improvement, and are now stuck in a loop of nothing getting done
At least we have MATE: fork of Gnome 2.
Tried that last week.
God it feels so outdated.
Yes, it’s what I started on, but there are good reasons we don’t use it much anymore.Use Xfce if you want something traditional.
This.
I remember, when Unity first came out and Gnome was considering mockups for Gnome 3, so many people complaining and me thinking that, yeah, maybe these weren’t perfect but they so clearly contained improvements over Gnome 2.
It was an exciting time to be joining Linux because there seemed to be real desire to experiment with new work flows and UI ideas that improved the standard computing experience.
I feel like time’s kind of borne out my feelings, there.
Seems to be an organizational thing, at least some who try to work with- or are part of the Gnome Foundation mentioned this. Apparently KDE e.V. got a way more flexible structure with work groups, easier ways to propose changes etc. while Gnome gets awfully stuck with their panel/council structure (not sure which one is the right word in english).
When mentioning the problems with extensions (rather furiously since I just lost some work again and installed KDE) I was told both: Go on an create a PR, but also that “this was discussed and a panel decided against changing anything”. Obviously no one will waste dozens, if not hundreds of hours of their time even just creating a Proof-of-Concept for sth. like an extension API if some authority already decided that nothing is supposed to be done about it.
As long as your Gnome environment can’t gracefully crash without taking absolutely everything with it (like with KDE or other DEs) there’s no way in hell anyone should use Gnome on computers where actual work is being done, let alone something critical.
I always try KDE and after a while all the quirks and odd behaviors make me go back to GNOME. GNOME may not be easily themeable but it is predictable
Can I ask what quirks/off behavior you see (genuinely asking)?
Sometimes its a slight hang of a dialog box, like delay. Sometimes its a dialog getting stuck on top of other dialogs and it becomes unresponsive. Like it is above all other apps on screen.
And hard to describe minor stuff that just feels a bit off. Where as when I go back to GNOME it is smooth like a fully finished environment.
Maybe most people don’t notice stuff like that, but I’m the type of guy that friends call when they want to buy a used car. 500ft and I’m like nope, bad bearing on right side, transmission shudder at start off, worn bushing in steering…and others are like it drives great
Yup!
That’s the good part. There’s plenty of choice, and it’s easy to swap
Exactly this. It always surprises me when people get bent out of shape because there is an option that they don’t like. Even worse when someone makes a choice they don’t like. “Who the fuck cares. Let them do their thing. be grateful you have a choice.”
Exactly. Its the best part of Linux. I like what Zorin did, they customized backend of GNOME to give you 4 choices of DE style.
Umm, KDE/Plasma shell is a fucking absolute disaster of a UX. It makes Windows look good. Gnome has major flaws in its software that make performance go to shit, but overall the architecture and design guidelines are superior and at least have a semblance of direction. Just open the preferences/settings on KDE and you see nothing but pure chaos.
Always fun that posts that shit on gnome get upvoted to the moon and ones that shit on KDE get downvoted to hell.
This should tell a lot about real user experience
Just open the preferences/settings on KDE and you see nothing but pure chaos.
It looks fine to me. Everything is categorized nicely and you know where to find something you look for. I am not sure about GNOME Settings, because I have never used GNOME more than 30 minutes (because of annoyingly shitty UX), but it’s at least much better than what Windows does.
theregister reader detected. Maybe even one of the editors!
What is it?
The same sentence one of “The Register” writers uses to shit on KDE.
I don’t know… Friday I installed Linux on my dad’s “new” Thinkpad T495.
I tried to go with Gnome. It’s supposed to be the user friendly one, right?
First thing I want to do is change the charging limit of the battery to 80%. It’s not impossible to replace the battery, but it would be nice to not blow it too fast.
After 20m of trying and failing I switched to KDE, where the whole thing was 3 clicks.
And even if I didn’t know how to do it, the systemsettings window has a search function that will get you the right option in a split second.
Cool, a setting that’ll have zero practical real world effects.
Of course I love other people telling me what I am or am not supposed to want out of my tech. That’s why I exclusively use Apple products. Oh wait, I actually don’t.
…
And BTW, this is in fact a shitty joke, because even iPhones and Pixels and Teslas actually let you set a charging limit.
They all do, but grab an iPhone and let that shit work, count the cycles and battery life remaining after 180 cycles. Every single iPhone I encounter with that turned on gas excessive battery life decreases. Meanwhile my shit shows 100%. Wait til you find out I build the Telematics Control Unit and Battery Control systems for a large manufacturer.
a single setting like that being a dealbreaker for a whole DE
seems a bit like an overreactionIt is definitely an overreaction.
The rational part was that I have to mantain his installation anyway. I have a lot of experience with KDE, and having seen trouble with GNOME from the get go, I ran back to the safe choice.
Just came across this issue today. I need to install a font. The dir is not accessible through gnome Files. Actually, nothing but mmom ounted drives and my Home dir is. So if I to work in dirs outside my Home, I HAVE to use the terminal. Just to copy a font to a dir outside my Home.
XDG
What?
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-user.html
Use a fucking search engine.
LoL you are pathetic dude. Why spreading hate? Clearly you never felt the delicate touch of a woman
Or just explain instead of bringing that language. Why even bother answering?Classic Linux nerd comment. You always just “search!”. You just dump a random short. How Then you expect to read through pages of documentation to install a font? Yes, yes you do because you are probably a Linux god who enjoys reading through technical stuff that makes NO SENSE to non-technical people.
Maybe just not come with advice if you are going to be a dick as soon as one asks a follow up question.
Doesn’t gnome have a GUI available to install fonts? Pretty sure you just open a font file and you get the option to install, same as on KDE actually.
Still annoying that you can’t access the folder. Though, if it does show mounted drives, surely it also shows your root drive? From where you should be able to navigate anywhere you have access to.
Yeah I found out but the first three guides I found all use the c/p to font dir. However, you are correct - gnome and kde both have GUI apps to view and install fonts. But wasn’t aware since the guides I found didn’t talk about these apps.
So, ignorance on my part 😬
Nah, I think it’s simply a design choice made for gnome files. Been playing around with other file explorers that checks my requirements. The joy of freedom.
Gnome is made by designers, kde is made by devs.
I’ve found GNOME a pleasure to use. From my experience many folks that use Linux like to tinker with their computers. Even those new to Linux see a world of possibilities. GNOME doesn’t really embrace this tinkerer philosophy. They have an opinion on what at desktop manager should be and they’re constantly working towards that vision.
When I introduce GNOME to new people I explain to them some the project goals, design elements and how it’s intended to be used. Then I tell them that GNOME is opinionated on how things should behave and look, and if you try to force GNOME to be something it’s not you’ll probably end up using poorly documented or unsupported third-party extensions that break things. Generally the advice is, GNOME is great, but not for everyone, take the time to learn the GNOME way of doing things and if you don’t like it you’re better off switching to another desktop environment than trying to change GNOME.
If it’s not for everyone it should not be the default for many distributions, and other DEs should be recommended for beginners then.
I think the design philosophy of “you have to adapt to the software” is harmful. Software should adapt to you and disappear out of your way for common tasks. Something Gnome leadership fails to understand.I’ve been teaching Linux to a lot of high-school age kids this year. I picked Fedora Workstation for us to experiment with. It of course, uses GNOME. Like I mentioned in the above post I talked to them for 5-10 minutes about GNOME design and how it’s supposed to be used. One thing that surprised me is how much the younger generation found GNOME intuitive as soon as they learned to use the Super key. Many have spent more time on iOS than they have Windows. So some of the common pain points for us older folks, like not having a task bar, preferring each “App” to be full a screen and switching between them felt very natural for the kids. Very iOS like.
You can of course have your different opinion on if this is good or bad or if GNOME shouldn’t be the default on most distro.
Perhaps GNOME is a good default for distro because it’s similar to the interfaces young people are growing up with.
Gnome extensions are nice since they can do lots of useful things. They can cause issues but if you need extensions to use gnome you probably should move to something like Cinnamon.
If you can get used to the workflow it is very nice.
I have no problem with using Gnome. It stays out of my way and Things Just Work for the most part as 99% of what I do is in a browser or a terminal anyway.
I ran gnome for about a decade. I really didn’t like how a lot of bits and pieces of it worked so I went and found all of the plugins and religiously installed and updated them. Updates what happened, crab would break, I’d just have to deal.
At some point I tried KDE. And it literally did everything that I was doing to gnome through plugins out of the box.
I’m all about configurability but I’m also a pretty big fan of not having to fuck with it because it already does what I want out of the box.
You know that sounds an awful lot like how windows GUI behaves. I only recently started daily driving and the amount of gui elements you can change is mind blowing.
Windows 11 copied some KDE and Gnome features but they did a half ass job so the desktop is just broken.
I like gome but it needs extensions for basic runctionality and you need to use terminal for basic functionality. I have it visually basically unmodified, no dock to dash or desktop but damn i need to go extra mile to add right click new file and functional window tiling.
I think you would be better off on a different desktop. The desktop works in a very specific way.
I like gnome but i will be replacing it with kde. But mostly cause gnome breaks ftp and vscode for some reason, not for the painful setup of gnome
I hate Gnome because it doesn’t give you taskbar boxes to show all the open windows. There is a extension for this but it’s almost always out of date. How the fuck is anyone expected to get any work done like that? Pressing the “windows” key to show that tile view is a thing but I want to see what all is open without pressing a button first. It’s fine for watching youtube or playing games. And the ui looks really cool if you’re high off your ass, but that’s it.
I like a BeOS style vertical taskbar with window names. Neither of them do it well.
Gnome was the main obstacle in Wayland adoption, by not implementing “server-side decorations”.
The main obstacle in Wayland adoption was Wayland not being usable for years.
Honestly I can’t imagine why anyone would use either of these when there are lightweight DEs like XFCE and Cinnamon that are not only easier on the system resources, but also more stable, customizeable, user-friendly and more pleasant to look at. I stopped taking gnome seriously ever since they came up with GTK3. They had a chance to fix it with GTK4 but instead they somehow made it even worse (as if client-side decorations wasn’t bad enough, now theyre doing clientside shadows? Seriously!?!?). KDE is allegedly better because it gives the user more options, but anyone who’s actually used it will tell you that it suffers from the same kind of bloat and braindead design decisions as gnome.
None of those support Wayland as of writing this so that’s a no for me. Also Cinnamon uses about the same resources as gnome as it is gnome based.
From the top of my head I can think of a few reasons:
- Better feature support (HDR, better fractional scaling etc)
- Better integration (specifically Gnome)
- More complete graphical settings
- Quicker adoption rate
- Wayland support (X11 is pretty much dead at this point)
Aside from RAM (of which most machines do have plenty by now) there isn’t really too much overhead these days. In fact battery usage on Gnome and KDE with Wayland is usually better than with X11.
My preferred DE is XFCE. However, over the past few months, I have moved most of my work to a new distro and made the jump to Wayland. Both of these have landed me on KDE.
KDE has by far the most complete, and therefore painless, Wayland support.
KDE has been great to use honestly. I mostly do not think about it which is what I want in a DE these days. The configurations I need are there when I need them and not in the way when I don’t. KDE uses more memory than XFCE but not nearly as much as Firefox or Chrome.
I dislike modern GNOME but KDE has been great and, at this point, I feel like it is the best option on Wayland.
Gonna talk from KDE positions here. GNOME, too, has its place, but I recognize it’s not for everybody.
More pleasant to look at
Certainly not for the average person. For a normie user, KDE looks way way nicer, and it’s certainly way more modern than either XFCE or Cinnamon. Sure, the latter can be made into something modernishly enough, but the customization options are way more limited here. Either way, out of the box, KDE is much more preferable to most.
User-friendly
Can hardly find anything that is more user-friendly than KDE. Everything you can possibly think of is available graphically, the interface is extremely sleek and ergonomic, and you can change anything at all to your liking. Which leads us to…
Customizable
Why would anyone say XFCE or Cinnamon are more cutomizable is beyond my comprehension. XFCE can be somewhat reasonably customized, but the anount of technical knowledge required to do anything more than resizing bars is beyond the scope of normal users. Cinnamon is outright rigid, and its customization options are extremely poor by any means. KDE is easily customizable and can be turned into anything through a what-you-see-is-what-you-get graphical editor that requires 0 technical knowledge. Still, if you really want to go the old school way because you’re used to it, want something not offered, or can’t imagine yourself descending into the GUI designed for plebs, you can do it too. KDE is king when it comes to this aspect.
Stable
As far as XFCE goes, this does hold quite some weight. It has a mature codebase, allowing it to have plenty of things figured out. For mission-critical systems, it might be preferable. Same can’t be said for Cinnamon, but either way, every popular DE is stable enough for home use without much worry - including KDE.
In any case, having used all four, I stopped exactly at KDE and GNOME - the former being perfect for casual multitasking and entertainment, the latter being nice for focused work.
KDE annoys me because the menus are extremely busy with tons of options that are totally useless to me. I want a simple experience with minimal distractions. KDE is not that.
This is always a tradeoff.
KDE tries to be universal and useful for everyone. No matter what you plan to do with your system, KDE has convenient tools for that. But, no matter how they try to make the system less busy, full set of easily available functions always stands in the way of minimalism.
I wanna go back to XFCE when support for Wayland is okay.
KDE is allegedly better because it gives the user more options, but anyone who’s actually used it will tell you that it suffers from the same kind of bloat and braindead design decisions as gnome.
I’ve used KDE on and off for the past 20 years or so. These days I use KDE on my work laptop and Cinnamon on my personal one. Personally I think they both do their job just fine, but apparently I’m in the wrong.
You are not wrong.
However, at this moment in history, there is another consideration.
Today, Cinnamon means X11 and KDE means Wayland. Xorg is becoming a second class citizen in KDE. Cinnamon is not there yet on Wayland.
In two years, you can be back to using either one as you prefer (on Wayland).
Good point, although admittedly I’ve had my fair share of Wayland-related issues with KDE. Unless you want those few extra FPS in a game or HDR, is there really a noticeable difference from an average user’s perspective?
To each their own though? I can’t imagine why anyone would want something other than i3 (or similar), because almost by definition the DE is not the program I fired up my computer to interact with, and i3 “gets out of the way better” than most others in my experience.
But…that’s just my use case. It’s a horrible UX for most people, just happens to work well for me.
KDE is allegedly better because it gives the user more options, but anyone who’s actually used it will tell you that it suffers from the same kind of bloat and braindead design decisions as gnome.
I have used it & can’t tell you this. What am I doing wrong?
I install Fedora Workstation and change nothing. I’m pretty happy with GNOME in that case. KDE has been too fiddley for me the last few times I tried it. It’s there a distro that has a default KDE setup that feels minimal and out of the way?
I have both versions of the workstation and KDE one is less broken, more functional and less annoying to use daily. I patiently await when the projects that require my current software packages end so I can wipe my home and go manjaro or something.
ive had and heard of many bad experiences with manjaro, though they do a couple of cool things. i really wish you all the best on your manjaro endeavours, but would recommend (not from experience but rather what i have gathered) to use endeavourOS over manjaro. also that would fit your name nicely
Ah thanks for the reccomendation. I’ll give endOS a go first as iirc that was not fedora based.
endOS is like manjaro based on Arch. they feel closely related, hence the recommendation. i probably wouldn’t install it because i don’t want to deal with Arch’s quick update cycle, but that’s just my personal preference and no statement about the quality of arch and its derivatives.
endOS and Manjaro are both that keep being reccomended a lot and I really want to check them out, but I keep forgetting. My big wishlist is working vr, working hotas, not having to mess around with nvidia drivers every kernel update. Thanks for help!
Strong recommendation of EndeavourOS over Manjaro.
arch probably
Garuda KDE-lite is what I’ve been using my and it’s great
I have one PC on gnome and another on kde. I like them both for what they are. I lean towards gnome though. Looks nice, feels nice. I don’t find myself needing more functionality than what is there. I tried mimicing gnome in kde, for fun. Didn’t quite get there. I appreciate simplicity where possible.
My issue with gnome isn’t the software itself, it’s the project refusing to coordinate with crosse desktop protocols and refusing to implement anything that doesn’t 100% line up with their vision even if it makes the rest of the ecosystem worse.
It’s called a blackbox and it’s considered a good API design.
Is this ironic?
Same as you but I lean towards KDE since it doesn’t break as often when programming things across sftp and also VR and HOTAS systems work better on it for some reason.
Also cause right click -> open terminal in location and right click -> new file must be part of any desktop environment as a default.
Plasma’s growing on my and I think it definitely works better on a laptop but I just wish it looked like a modern operating system. It feels like something from the 00s at best.
It looks very similar to Windows 10. You think Windows 10 looks like something from 00’s?
The reverse actually, Windows 10+ looks like Plasma. They were “inspired” by it (copied it).
OP, if you don’t like the looks, Plasma has extensive theming support.
I know about the themes but most of them look dated as well. I know I’m complaining about free software but it should look better out of the box. I know some people love customising but it shouldn’t be a requirement.
How does it look like Windows 10? It looks like Windows 2000.
Then I don’t know what are you smoking. From the taskbar, window decorations to system settings - it’s very similar to how Windows 10 is designed, although with much less padding (by default, but it’s a good thing).
There are also some settings for the taskbar to behave more like a Windows 11 one, if that’s what you want.
Also as for icons they look much more modern than what’s on Windows, at least for me.
lol if
KDE has almost perfect fractional scaling, that was the real chadfeature for me.
I agree with the general sentiment, though KDE’s apps do have some real performance issues.
Dolphin sometimes takes 2-5 seconds to open on my gaming PC, whereas Nautilus (Gnome Files) is usually done before I’ve even let go of the click.
Maybe that’s just preloading, but it makes a bloody enormous difference in everyday usage.
I prefer Plasma overall, though.
It is easy to go fast if you have no features.
Dolphin sometimes takes 2-5 seconds to open on my gaming PC, whereas Nautilus (Gnome Files) is usually done before I’ve even let go of the click.
You might need to look into this more.
It opens instantly on my gaming desktop, Microsoft Surface 7 Pro, and ASUS ROG Strix
I just checked, it boots in .5 seconds on my Steam Deck. So yeah, there’s a problem somewhere 😅
Dolphin is the worst file manager, mostly because of how it doesn’t give you a file copy window but also because it’s just a shittier version of Nemo. Nemo is superior except that most of the time you can’t drag and drop files from a zip folder window into Nemo but only if you’re using KDE. Cinnamon is pretty much the only other DE I can stand and Nemo lets you drag and from from zip files all the time on Cinnamon but it’s otherwise worse than KDE.
Hmm, Dolphin takes about 0.5 seconds on my laptop. Might be that worth debugging on your system, even if it is some bug that your specific system triggers.
It’s wild what an impact organizational politics can have on a codebase
Not wild to me. Code is written by people, people who engage in organizational politics. No “base” created by people, digital or otherwise, will be free of such influences.
If you don’t know:
Gnome is better than KDE. With that being said, the dolphin file manager sucks ASS. The Nemo file manager is superior, except depending on which way the wind was blowing while you installed your distro, you have a 50/50 chance of being able to drag and drop the contents of zip folders into Nemo when running KDE. Dolphin always works when you do this on KDE but that’s Dolphin’s only positive aspect. The ui and button placement is worse, there’s no file copy progress bar window and the file transfer notification it does have is awful.
Cinnamon works with Nemo and zip file drag-dropping works all the time, but then you’re using a 10% shittier DE just to be able to drag and drop. Cinnamon doesn’t fully support wayland yet and its beta wayland support is terrible and slow so it’s a pretty bad one to be using right now.
I wish there was a fix. I would suck dick for fix to the “you can’t drag and drop the contents of zip files into Nemo on KDE except for if you got randomly lucky when installing the distro in the beginning” bug.
Use whatever floats your boat
I use Gnome because it works for me
I use Cinnamon but Gnome would be my second choice. I want to like Plasma, but every time I’ve used it there’s some glaring bug. Last I checked (few months back) font scaling caused fonts to look like absolute garbage. I found the bug online, tried all the “fixes”, no bueno.
I’m not going without scaling on a 14" 1080p screen.
Cinnamon and Gnome on the other hand: accessibility > large text. Easy. (Higher scaling factors can be found in font settings if needed).
Same. I really wanted to like Plasma, it’s really nice looking. But it just never works right for me. Most recently, my PC would crash every time I woke it from sleep. And my cursor wouldn’t stay locked to one screen in-game. No issues at all with Cinnamon. Everything just worked out of the box. And there are plenty of themes and icons to dress it up a bit. I used Gnome 2 back in high school, so if I didn’t use Cinnamon I think I’d probably go with MATE since it’s a familiar feel.
I think it only works if you’re either an absolute KDE config file genius hacker or your distro’s repository has actually good default configs and setup. Installing KDE on arch always works well for me but every time I’ve tried it on Ubuntu I just get an unusable mess. One time I had it such that I had to retype my password all the fucking time to “unlock the keychain” and then the stupid update window would ALWAYS show up during the worst possible time with impeccable timing.
