I don’t like KDE at all. Too busy, terrible-looking right click menu on the desktop (some lines long, some short). It’s that stuff that give me OCD. I like cleanliness in the UI.
What are you trying to run it on? An Arduino? I haven’t tried it on a raspberry pi but I’ve never had an issue with performance on GNOME and I don’t have the latest hardware
They like to complain about the memory usage on startup. Because it caches a lot of applications for fast loading. It will clear them when required. The more memory you have the more it will use. My laptop has 16gb it uses around 3gb on fresh boot with Fedora 39 and GNOME, I recently upgraded a 10 year old workstation to 64gb (because it was cheap) and with Fedora Silverblue 39 it uses a bit more memory on startup. Unused memory is wasted memory.
I’ve said it before, I don’t really like KDE or GNOME because they’re on opposite ends of the spectrum.
GNOME seems to have a very vivid ideal of beauty, and that ideal is “empty windows that don’t do anything.” Open up a utility app, Big window with lots of empty space with a few buttons crammed in the top bar and not enough options to do what you actually need to do.
KDE feels a lot more amateurish in that…things don’t line up as well, the spacing between elements is off a lot, and the whole experience is BUSY! Lots of UI elements everywhere. A basic utility will have more options than you knew what to do with just in case. It’s hideous the way the control panel at a nuclear power plant is hideous.
So I use Cinnamon. Which Gnome is trying very hard to corrupt, but for now it works while still being comfortable and comprehensible.
I like KDE’s conformance to open standards, which is better than GNOME’s, and pace of development. However you’re absolutely right that the UI on KDE is inconsistent, messy, and buggy as hell. GNOME is still my go to because it’s just so polished, but I’m looking forward to COSMIC this year for that nice tiling workflow
I will happily use any desktop environment that allows me to bring up a summary of all active windows by pressing the super key. That’s just too ingrained in me now. I even find myself mindlessly doing it on Windows.
Whenever I have to use Windows it’s in front of other people an I swear they all think I’m an idiot when move the cursor to the top left and wait for something to happen only to experience disappointment
I felt that way before meeting a GNOME dev. Their target audience is the whole world of users who either don’t already have a computer or don’t know how to use one. They don’t want people customizing their apps. They don’t want a calculator named anything other than “Calculator”. They’re target audience is the 2B users that we don’t currently interact with.
I mean that’s fine, but when people complain about text being too blurry and not sharp enough, their response was something along the lines of sharpness not being the sole metric for performance…
who the fuck does that? and they do this shit all the time
I think they’re targeting people who want to get stuff done. I don’t want to remember the icon for every application I use, I just search or I click on the window I want. Not a waste of screen space at the bottom, just a thin strip of basic stuff so I can focus on the task at hand. Yes KDE is supposedly easier to customise but that’s a requirement given it’s fugly out of the box
Slowly more and more distros are looking over to a KDE future. GNOME devs being so incredibly hard to work with and this feeling of a huge community that is KDE and with how polished Plasma 6 is becoming, many distros are finally looking to at least give Plasma a try as a default. GNOME is well polished but there are so many extremely important and urgently needed features that KDE already implemented that are not even being discussed for GNOME. Many distros are getting fed up with how slow GNOME is into advancing their desktop. They take 2 years to change a few buttons around. And now that Plasma 6 has a 6-month fixed release schedule, it finally aligns with what distros want.
First Valve shocked the corporate distro world by choosing the seemengly less stable KDE as their default for the Steam Deck, which proved to be an amazing choice after all. Then recently, Nobara Linux, one of the most used Fedora distros, also switched to KDE as the default. And now Fedora is discussing into switching the main distro too. Qt6 is also a really flexible and promising framework and developers seem to have more fun working with it than with GTK4.
Recent switchers from Windows also largely prefer KDE instead of the minimalist approach, macOS-like GNOME. And linux has been gaining a lot of popularity and market share recently, and I could bet that a lot of these new users are not on GNOME, at least not on vania GNOME.
A great example is KDE having hit a HUGE record of bug reporting and feedback submissions, which means that more people than ever are using KDE actively and actually trying to help the project somehow. KDE has also been having a huge presence in social networks like YouTube and TikTok (especially because of its fun and interesting features that make GNOME look plain and a bit boring, needless to say GNOME vanilla wont convince a Windows user to switch…) which might speed up its adoption too.
Ah i see kde has fixed the issue where dropdowns had broken behavior when scrolling …kde.org/…/f6ca218607ff7e5d5066eb3224154c3256cb95… this was my main blocker why i couldn’t use it when i tried it around 2020. Maybe i could give it another try?
GNOME always seemed like an odd choice considering how little customization is available. It feels like a prescriptive approach, you will use your computer the way GNOME feels is appropriate, whereas KDE tries to accommodate however you want to use your computer.
Back in the Gnome 2 days this wasn’t as much the case. Plus KDE was kind of a mess back then so the main choices were Gnome or XFCE which had fewer features. When Gnome 3 came around the devs switched hard to a much more opinionated approach, leading to Gnome 2 forks like Cinnamon since KDE was still very underpolished. It’s a bit regrettable that all that effort was poured into Gnome forks instead of improving KDE especially considering how great it is now.
Having a company behind software means you can pay to have your bugs fixed. Big distros want that stability for their corporate customers. It’s no secret or anything. KDE has sponsors, but doesn’t have a direct relationship with a huge contractor like RH. Same reasoning for systemd.
I wonder if the Gnome team’s cavalier aditude towards agreed upon standards is related to Redhat’s influence 🤔 It’s totally possible the devs are just high on their own fumes due to being the default for so long.
This is the advantage to GNOME. I know that all I need to make a Linux desktop work the way I want is to install GNOME and GSconnect. I really like default GNOME, adwaita, and the actually usable out-of-the-box experience. Sure there’s a learning curve but that’s true of every desktop and I really hate the context menu hell that KDE imported over from Windows.
Not to mention there are still a lot of amateur mistakes over at KDE like the recent themes fiasco.
People who want the customizability of KDE will use the KDE spin or a distro that ships it by default. People downloading a massively popular distro like Fedora should get something as maximally functional as possible out of the box, and with all the stuff they’ve been adding recently, GNOME is more and more polished almost to a macOS point. I just recently found the built-in RDP, SSH, and filesharing toggles in the settings menu, and they’re easy enough that I’d actually call GNOME quite beginner friendly at this point.
Meanwhile I CANNOT be productive in GNOME. There are hundreds of maybe thousands of KDE features that make IT and dev work so extremely easy. I could make a 50 page comment just listing them. I can start with how horrendously basic and generic the default gnome terminal is.
But then KDE also is in fact good for average ex-Windows users because it has stuff where people expect it to, has features that people expect too (cough minimize/maximize buttons cough) and well yea KDE is better for average users.
So KDE is better for IT users and developers, and is also better for average users. And since it supports vsync off, VRR and HDR it is also better for gaming.
I’m a developer and I’ve strongly preferred KDE over Gnome for many years. I find the lack of features and customization in Gnome extremely irritating.
Gnome Shell through extensions is very customizable but the two problems are that those extensions can break on Gnome updates and Gnome applications usually don’t offer that. I used Gnome + non-Gnome apps for quite some time years ago because I wanted to use Wayland as early as possible.
Can someone ELI5 why this even matters/is such a big deal? Does the default DE have its tentacles so deep in the distro that it can’t be changed by users to suit their preferences?
I run i3 on Debian, and…well, actually, there is no “and,” I just installed the WM I wanted and that was it. And as I recall the installer asked what DE/WM I wanted to install anyway.
Its a huge deal. If X desktop is the default, it shows that the distro developers and maintainers usually test and optimize more and better for that specific DE so your experience with the default DE will always be more stable and polished than non-official ones. Extra GUI tools that the distro makes usually are also better tailored to the default distro. Like Manjaro and all of their locale, kernel and other packages that are integrated inside the KDE settings. Or popOS and all of their utilities being integrated into Cosmic. Etc etc. More money and dev time is invested into the default DE.
The Fedora Project currently maintains 10 desktop-oriented spins (excluding GNOME since it’s the default), so they’re not going to be abandoning one of the most popular DEs in use. GNOME is going to be maintained regardless of their default choice of DE.
It’s probably not gonna happen, but it’s great that this discussion is happening at all. Maybe it’ll encourage Gnome to improve their customizability, which seems to be the main advantage point of KDE
Red Hat doesn’t have influence over the development of Fedora, that’s the job of FESCo. Red Hat owns the trademark and is one of the sponsors of the Fedora Project, but their interest is solely in enterprise applications (a task that is not suitable for Fedora), not in consumer desktop platforms. I’ve already discussed this at length here and here if you’d like more detail; there’s no point in rewriting it.
I like the UX KDE gives over Gnome. It feels way more like a personal computer, something that you can modify and do multiple tasks with.
Gnome is a lot more limited in functionality, but it’s also a lot more stable. KDE is buggy and has a tendency to crap the bed a few minutes after startup, which never happened to me with Gnome.
It’s a though decision, but lately I’ve been thinking of switching back to Gnome.
has a tendency to crap the bed a few minutes after startup
Tell me you are an nvidia user without telling me. Either that is hard to believe. I use KDE daily for more than 8-9 hours a day, sometimes my pc goes for a full week without geting turned off, multiple apps tabs and servers on, themes installed, widgets on the desktop, I am such an extremely heavy KDE user you have no idea. Still, zero crashes. Sometimes something goes a bit “wut” like moving a window around gliches a liiiiiiitle bit, but it instantly corrects itself and goes back to being stable. And I am on Plasma 6.0.3, funny enough has been more stable than Plasma 5.
Update your KDE or use a distro that has better KDE support. Some distros fck up KDE packages and get it unstable. Fedora KDE is rock solid for example. Nobara has been great too and its now KDE by default.
To be fair, it’s a laptop with an Nvidia GPU. Though I only use Intel’s integrated graphics in a clean, vanilla Fedora 39 installation (no weird extras or tricks on top). I actually installed it from scratch because switching from Gnome made some things a bit iffy.
I’ve had issues with windows disappearing into corners I can’t reach in my own screen (happens with Firefox, not sure if other applications are affected as well), random and complete freezes (keyboard nonresponsive) and I can’t drag and drop files from the file manager into mpv or view files properly with it or Fedora’s default video player for KDE. Gnome as limited as it is, manages to be a way smoother experience.
I really want to like KDE but my experience hasn’t been the same. I even donated to the project lol.
KDE is buggy and has a tendency to crap the bed a few minutes after startup, which never happened to me with Gnome.
Then our experiences are vastly different. I have never encountered any bug or instability with KDE Plasma 5, and I have used it on a dozen or so devices. This is probably some driver problem specific to your machine.
The reason this is feasible now, is that KDE is changing the release cycle for Plasma, Frameworks, and the Apps to all be aligned with the sometime-before-the-distro-release 6-month cycle, that allows for a release of everything KDE to be taken, tested properly, and released with the 6-month release cycle for Ubuntu, Fedora and other distros following that release cycle. Until recently, we would have the releases of these components all separate throughout the year, meaning that it would be harder for the distros to package, test and ship Plasma as a flagship desktop because of stability concerns (also because of bugs).
Now, with Plasma 6 being all about making Plasma better and more stable, especially in the Wayland department, I’d say Plasma is superior to GNOME in every way (except funding). At this point, it’s not too unrealistic to see distros consider the switch to Plasma, including major distros like Fedora, as seen here. I really think this is the best time to consider using Plasma over GNOME.
fedoraproject.org
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