Revisiting KDE

KDE is the desktop environment that finally made me stay on Linux full-time and I seriously feel like its developers don&#x27;t get enough praise. Especially over the last years I feel like they&#x27;ve ironed out a ton of bugs and weird quirks and made KDE truly a joy to use.<p>I&#x27;m surprised to see how much Kate can do, and even more so that the author deemed it good enough to use in place of neovim. Maybe I should give it a chance someday.

KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era.<p>Exposed options make computing discovery possible.<p>Sometimes having a drop-down to pick your compositing mode opens a lot of possibilities to learn more about your system.<p>This is not what i.e. GNOME are going for nowadays, everyone wants to reinvent the locked down iPhone &quot;experience&quot;.

I love KDE. Its file manager in particular is a thing of beauty, unique in its ability to display large directories without slowing down and uniquely flexible and powerful. The desktop in general gets out of my way, with a good window switcher, launcher, and window manager. Nothing groundbreaking here, but everything mostly works as intended (looking at you, Win+Arrow on Gnome). Some of the default apps are great, like the PDF viewer Okular with its fantastic annotation tools.<p>The only thing I don&#x27;t really care for is the default look, which is a bit dated. A refresh would be nice. To be fair, it is relatively easy to customize the colors, which helps. Still, that steel-gray-with-neon is a bit boring.

I&#x27;ve been on KDE since coming back home to Linux a few years ago. A few thoughts:<p>* KDE feels like we just kept on iterating on the same UI since the early 90s. The functionality is very deep, but also intuitive. A lot of the depth comes from things like KIO, kparts and dbus, where we see a lot of functionality being reused from one app to the next. This means if you learn how Konsole works, when you fire up a terminal in other KDE apps, it works the same way.<p>* Customization is really a good thing. Everyone isn&#x27;t learning to use a computer for the first time. Computers have been personal for almost 50 years now.<p>* Would really love kmail and the whole korganizer get a refresh. It&#x27;s really good when it works, but needs some crashy-ness and jank removed. (BTW Akregator, the KDE-PIM RSS feed reader is still EXCELLENT)

I was a very happy KDE user during the 3.3 to 3.5 days. I tried sticking with the desktop after the 4.0 release (there were SO MANY changes and grand new ideas under the hood!), but lost patience soon after the 4.2 release - it just wasn&#x27;t ready for day-to-day use; all the rough edges made me bleed every day. So I made the plunge to Xfce, and didn&#x27;t look back for more than a decade.<p>Until some three months ago, when I had to set up a new, additional machine at home, and I decided to try the new (really: current :)) Plasma Desktop on Arch Linux for funsies. By now, all may Xfce machines, except the one at work, have been migrated to KDE. Now even my wife uses it on her personal desktop - she&#x27;s especially fond of Okular, KDE Connect, and digiKam.

KDE has a well articulated vision about how open source personal computing should look like. E.g., I like their growing collection of android apps [0] (KDE Connect in particular). Hopefully they can attract more resources to speed up executing on that vision.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.kde.org&#x2F;platforms&#x2F;android&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.kde.org&#x2F;platforms&#x2F;android&#x2F;</a>

<i>Looking back I&#x27;m not sure the Oxygen theme has aged particularly well</i><p>Well, I am currently using the Oxygen theme (with a GTK 3 version called Oxygen SCSS) and I like it a lot better than the default Breeze theme. Buttons that look like buttons, a nice glow effect when highlighting things, and some of the icons* I find absolutely gorgeous (the Log Out, Restart, and Shut Down icons, for instance, have this nice glassy look).<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iconarchive.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;oxygen-icons-by-oxygen-icons.org.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iconarchive.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;oxygen-icons-by-oxygen-icons.or...</a>

As much as I want to like KDE and agree with some of its principles (such as its all-too-uncommon lack of fear of proper menubars) I have a hard time using it long term because even after years of effort going into polishing it, it still has that distinct “designed by programmers” feel to it with awkward UI layout and whitespace distribution and quirky idiosyncrasies smattered throughout. I get why it has ardent fans but I don’t think it’s for everybody.

I know it is a very unpopular opinion on HN but I don&#x27;t get KDE. Sure, all applications are super feature-packed, which is mostly a good thing (Konsole, Dolphin, Okular are chef&#x27;s kiss) but also has its downsides: e.g. that, last time I checked, you cannot have a simple dedicated calendar app like gnome-calendar (or macOS Calendar) but must open the outlook-heavy KOrganizer which comes with mail, contacts, etc. Not really what I want when I just quickly want to check my calendar. But this is just a small annoyance.<p>What really bothered me though was the UI. All these lines! Everything has an outline. Every UI element has a heavily highlighted outline. It feels super dated and cluttered. But the last time I daily-drove it, I thought &quot;Hey I embrace the KDE life style. I am finally on the right side of the Linux Desktop according to HN and Reddit. Whenever people sh*t on Gnome, one of the big arguments is that you cannot customize it. So I just customize it, make it mine, lets go!&quot;<p>Well surprisingly the other themes were almost all equally bad or caused inconsistencies. So I went further down the rabbit hole and installed Kvantum. I found a theme that I liked and happily used it for some time. Until I noticed that the theme altered the functionality of KMail. Namely, when tabbing away from KMail, it would select another Email. Super annoying when you want to keep an Email open in the background as a reference while e.g. doing something in your browser. I raised the issue with the Kvantum dev who redirected me to an issue with KDE. I don&#x27;t remember all the details but it is an issue in KDE and for them it is a wontfix.<p>So, for me I basically had a similar experience to others here with Gnome. I try to make it work for me until I hit a wall where the maintainers tell me that my use case is not supported by the desktop. So I went back to Gnome. And you know what. I like Gnome. It works for me. It looks nice and is functional. However I don&#x27;t want or need to convert other happy KDE&#x27;ers which is also not the point of my little comment. I don&#x27;t want to dunk on KDE. It does a lot of cool things, but I just cannot stand the UI. Isn&#x27;t it great to have choice?

I really like KDE but one thing that saddens me is the state of the office stuff - like KMail, KOrganizer, Desktop Search etc.pp - there was an ambitious project called Nepomuk for Semantic Desktop and that failed 10 years ago? And the Backend launches a full MySQL at the moment - I hope someday all of this will be streamlined get&#x27;s an UI update and a fast database i.e. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cozodb&#x2F;cozo">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cozodb&#x2F;cozo</a> and the features will come back. Also KMail needs some usability improvements...<p>If this stuff would work and not crash adding calendars&#x2F;todo-lists in the ui would hopefully work and the original ideas and research concepts could be implemented in a fast an good way.<p>Well, one can dream :)

KDE 3.X was the first Linux desktop I ever used. It was back in the old days, when I installed a SUSE Linux that came in a magazine that my mother bought me after me finding it unexpectedly in a groceries shop while shopping with her.<p>I felt pure and simple fascination. I was a teenager that only knew Windows. I spent hours playing around with it and its familiar and attractive aspect helped me a lot on making easier to dig into the GNU&#x2F;Linux idiosyncrasies. Later, I moved to Ubuntu and Gnome 2.X, then Debian, then Slackware, then Arch then whatever was the trend at the time. All great experiences, and despite nowadays I use Gnome (in Fedora) exclusively (and enjoy it quite a lot) I will always have KDE in my heart.<p>The only shame is the fact that no mainstream distro (from the subset I prefer to use for technical reasons: RHEL based) use it as a first class citizen. I would be open to give it a try if that wasn&#x27;t the case.

I get much of the praise and dislike for KDE. What I&#x27;ve never understood is the success of gnome.<p>KDE isn&#x27;t perfect but gnome is a textbook example of broken workflows and poor UI design. How it became the default for many distros never made sense to me.

KDE is great. I&#x27;ve been using the Fedora KDE spin for years now. Just works.<p>Everything just seems to make sense, and I have not experiences the crashes or wake-up failures the author describes. Probably Fedora pre-vets which packages and version work well together.

&gt; Whereas on KDE applets typically quickly allow me to to perform the required action without having to dive into the full settings.<p>Indeed, but I had to actually remove applets which I wanted to use because once I added a few (Command Output applet to be precise), CPU usage started to jump by 2-5% on every addition and fans started to run full tilt. Running shell scripts that don&#x27;t do anything CPU intensive once every 5 or 10 seconds shouldn&#x27;t result in that.<p>Completely agree with the points regarding Task Switcher - when I use Breeze, I get this huge list of icons on the left which frankly looks terrible. There should atleast be an option to switch to smaller icons in the task switcher (I don&#x27;t see any &quot;Small Icons&quot; option, only the names of the themes).<p>None of these are deal-breakers though; I think KDE is the best &quot;mainstream&quot; DE experience on Linux.

I went with KDE from gnome shell, and it just works so nicely - would have stayed with gnome-shell, but it had some weird glitches in regards of screen freezing, while mouse moves, but with KDE life is so much smoother.<p>If year of the linux happens, KDE will play a big part in that.

I jumped to macOS 20-odd years ago, mostly out of frustration with the build quality of Windows laptops and the endless PITA experience of Windows itself. Figured the resale value of Apple laptops made it a minimal risk.<p>Bought a Lenovo laptop the other year and installed Ubuntu. Thoroughly meh experience there, really disappointed. But then I found KDE, and it’s my main dev environment now.<p>If Lenovo could come out with a laptop with the build quality of Mac, running a KDE environment integrated with their new Lenovo phone, I think they’d stand a very good chance of going head-to-head with Apple.

I miss the KDE 3.5 days. It was a super customizable and polished DE. It&#x27;s a real shame all that work was thrown away, every time I try KDE now I&#x27;m still disappointed, it doesn&#x27;t take much to get the first crashes and bugs...

My experience with KDE has been great, until you start using proprietary drivers &#x2F; hardware. I got an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 (solid laptop aside from the spotty keyboard) and it was an absolute nightmare getting the keyboard lighting and the laptop GPU to work reliably with KDE Neon.<p>I ended up just nuking it and restarting with Gnome. Gnome turned out to be a lot more restrictive, but the initial setup load was significantly less than KDE. The graphics card &#x2F; keyboard LEDs just worked straight out of the box.<p>The new widgets in KDE were pretty cool and very fluid. The desktop state didn&#x27;t save for me though and any time I rebooted&#x2F;logged out, everything disappeared from my desktop...

I am personally very perplexed with KDE.<p>Many Linux users hate GNOME. Sure, it’s not that customizable, and looks like it was made for the smartphone generation. But… I cannot deny that it is very, very polished visually and is much more familiar to people who aren’t as good at computers. If I was building Linux computers for poor people at a charity shop, I would use GNOME.<p>KDE… it is just so customizable, almost to a fault. System Settings can be mentally overwhelming - and why does every app have to start with the letter K? Also, whereas GNOME is content with generic names like “Web” and “PDF Viewer,” I’m just supposed to know Okular is my PDF viewer?

<i>Kool</i> article, but it was far shorter than I expected. Would have loved to hear the author&#x27;s POV on touchpad and gestures.<p>Still, the author gets points from me for using Opensuse Tumbleweed, a highly underrated distro.

KDE is what kept me away from Linux for a long time. I think everything they make &quot;looks bad&quot; (layout, design, graphics etc.) and I feel like they&#x27;re just pushing out half-finished features. It&#x27;s really a desktop about quantity over quality.<p>Cinnamon is what finally &quot;clicked&quot; for me.<p>I wish KDE the best of luck, but I just cannot stand it.

I wonder what desktop Linux would look like today if Qt licensing issues in the 1990s didn’t stop KDE from getting widespread support from Debian.

Apart from an early dalliance with Enlightenment 16 due to scavenging 486 computer components from skips in Cork (I fondly remember the donation of a P90 from my friend Barry) KDE has provided me with an almost ideal desktop environment of unparalled configurability and utility. It is fast, light, and as beautiful as you wish it to be.<p>And then there are the applications

Regarding the blurry icons in alt tab, I think this is a general problem on Linux and not KDE specific. I had the same issue with certain icons in Cinnamon, and the following steps fixed it for me:<p>Find the desktop file, for Cinnamon they&#x27;re stored in &#x2F;usr&#x2F;share&#x2F;applications<p>For the blurry icon, append to the end of the file (obviously replacing Audacity with the app name)<p>StartupWMClass=Audacity

Tried it recently to kick the tires on fedora and wayland as well. Pretty good and better than before but still so goddamn cluttered. Wish most stuff was plugins that I could remove.<p>All I want is a desktop as good as Win 2k with a modern terminal. Cinnamon seems to be the closest to that today, finally gave up on mate as it has been rotting from beneath.

It&#x27;s a huge shame that KDE applications won&#x27;t really work outside of KDE. I get that most KDE developers use KDE themselves, so non-KDE desktops aren&#x27;t their main focus. But it still seems a shame that so much effort is put into all these tools, but they barely run outside KDE.<p>For example, if one isn&#x27;t using KDE, there&#x27;s no configured KDE icon theme, and most applications will default to simply rendering blank icons. So buttons that have just icons are completely blank.<p>I also just downloaded `plasma-sdk` to try out `cuttlefish`, an application that&#x27;s designed to preview the icons from the KDE breeze icon theme. But it&#x27;s totally broken. The menus render some entries with the text having the same colour as the background. The icons are a mix of KDE icons, GTK icons and some black and white ones (so it&#x27;s not even usable for its main purpose). Scrolling with the mouse wheel has a weird lag (no touchpad, just a mouse). Clicking on the scrollbar doesn&#x27;t work, nor does dragging the little &quot;thing&quot; inside the scrollbar.<p>I don&#x27;t know how many of these issues are related to me using swaywm, and how many or something else, but there&#x27;s so many I don&#x27;t even know where to start. If just one thing is broken, and try to figure it out and report upstream. But if almost nothing works, the same attitude doesn&#x27;t really work.

I LOVED KDE 3.5. Holy smokes that was a good experience for me growing up. 4 made me switch, and years later, I tried KDE 5 (last year). And eh, I really tried for two weeks. That was super annoying, and coming back to i3 just felt like finally getting air.<p>It was slow, things didn&#x27;t work, and weird. I totally understand that people would use gnome or kde and call it a day, because it is much easier to get going with. But if you think you should invest time into your interface I would say try other things as well.<p>Still lots of other good things from the kde project though!

Coincidentally, I was cleaning out my garage last week, and I booted up an old ASUS eeebox running Kubuntu 12.10. The desktop looked just like the picture in this blog post. I love that style. I had to copy some things off and I was struck by how lovely the interface was to use. It was still quick, and to my eyes really pretty. Made me a little sad to shred that disk and give the machine away (but the general junk reduction is a real relief).<p>Kubuntu (or, better, KDE on Debian) has always been my OS of choice for desktop use.

My wish for KDE is that they move some of their quirks used, for example, to launch GTK3&#x2F;GTK4 applications so they start in the right size, or XWayland itself, somewhere scriptable. Right now, if something doesn’t quite work, you need to fix it in C++ and recompile the whole plasma-desktop, which is not very tinker-friendly.<p>Otherwise KDE has quite a renaissance for the last few years, I hope it continues.

My favorite KDE versions were KDE 1 and KDE 2.<p>KDE 3 was fine.<p>KDE 4 was not a worthy successor to KDE 3 and it was a massive setback with regards to customization.<p>After that I stopped using KDE.<p>KDE 3 was polished, KDE 4 looked like developer art.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kde.org&#x2F;announcements&#x2F;4&#x2F;4.0&#x2F;desktop.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kde.org&#x2F;announcements&#x2F;4&#x2F;4.0&#x2F;desktop.png</a>

KDE is great. The customizability really makes it shine above Gnome. I use AwesomeWM and some KDE apps like Dolphin.

Tangential, each time I used Kubuntu, stuff broke left and right. Did they improve over the last few years?

I went away from KDE because of this constant fluctuation phase, plasma felt never finished, always new ideas but never clicking (unlike eos). Maybe it&#x27;s time to also revisit. I agree that Kate, kdev etc are great.

I really wanted to change to Linux but a simple thing (what is mentioned in this article that it works flawlessly) of using my laptop on a second screen with the lid closed was not working automatically at all. Probably it is caused by the fact that I have a laptop with a discrete GPU. Tried different distros with KDE, but no luck. Btw, the same things was not working with other window managers either (tried Gnome(s) and xfce)<p>Shouldn&#x27;t be this way, having switchable graphics is not exactly a new tech.<p>I give it a try next year.

Switched to Arch recently, also after years of lazily using Ubuntu (though it was what they used at work as well, so it just made sense to use it on my desktop), and I also am giving KDE another go, and I can confirm a similarly usable experience these days. I absolutely do remember KDE being extremely buggy ten years ago but they seem to have made a ton of progress.

Have been a long time KDE user from the 3.x days through to 2019 when a long standing itch to try a tiling window manager moved me to Awesomewm. I still use Dolphin, Konsole and a few other bits though.<p>I also seem to remember using the Suse distro in those early times as it was the only one I could find that treated KDE as a first-class citizen and not a bolt-on. (Think I was Redhat before that. This is before the Opensuse and Fedora days.)

kde is my go to choice whenever i set up a linux desktop. it just works, for some values of work. furthermore, it works on my machine.

I&#x27;m not a KDE usr, but in KDE&#x27;s defense, when you typed &quot;mo&quot; it seems like it assumed &quot;monitor&quot; would be the search phrase instead of &quot;mouse&quot;. In that case, both are valid use cases and to me, it&#x27;s not that weird.<p>However, I&#x27;d prefer something which weighs application names over some other metadata.

Whatever happened to the 1.x revival project or whatever it was called? I am very fond of the aesthetics of the 1.x and 2.x series as it reminds me of classic Windows and MacOS. Is there a way to replicate the look and feel of 1.x and 2.x on modern KDE?

It really is time for the HN mods to review the guidelines. Nearly every comment here has been made almost verbatim thousands of times, in dozens of different forums, repeated for years on end.<p>The same thing happens when there&#x27;s any mention of an electron app, or Windows, or software having the temerity to not reveal its source. These issues turn so many HN commenters into echolalics.<p>This guideline should be extended to cover this kind of repetitive and pointless content:<p>&gt; Please don&#x27;t complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They&#x27;re too common to be interesting.<p>Assuming that the guideline writers really mean the justification stated here: more than 50% of the comments in this kind of thread are so often canonical examples of &#x27;too common to be interesting&#x27;, so the guideline should apply to this kind of standard trigger issue.

&gt; I think this is partially my fault for using Flatpak applications and expecting the desktop integration be 100% seamless.<p>Ha yes, definitely your fault for expecting Linux desktop stuff to work seamlessly!

Is there any possibility that KDE and Gnome will ever merge?

Not a fan of the confusing QT license

was anyone else thinking kernel density estimation?

oh how I love KDE and how I wish I could actually use it. But all the time, every year, I return to MacOS.