Hacker News Reader

Comment by treve | Hacker News Reader

Could be wrong, but I kind of feel that you might want to give Kubuntu a shot. Everything is really predictable, but it still looks nice.

View on HN

I use KDE on a day-to-day basis, but I wouldn't call it that predictable. They're still infected by the rewrite and change everything disease. They also introduced pointless frameworks like anakondi which had dreadful performance. KDE4 was a incomplete buggy disaster at first and KDE5 can still be pretty buggy. This week my KDE panel decided to vanish losing all its configuration. I'd like to use something which just works, like KDE3 did.

Amen. KDE4 was a disaster in the beginning. I toughed it out then. I was in academia and could spend some hours dealing with breakage.

When Ubuntu shipped KDE5, normal usability stuff broke horribly again. Nowadays I have two kids and a job managing a large IT organisation. I simply can't defend spending the time any more. So I switched to xfce for the time being. Of that breaks the UI in any comparable way, I give in to the hordes that keep ridiculing me for not using a Mac. :(

Honest question:

What do yo mean by "normal usability stuff broke horribly again"?

I'm using Neon now and it is one of the least annoying distros and DEs I have ever worked with.

Totally fair question. Sorry for not being more specific. All multi monitor and docking/undocking broke in seemingly random ways. That's despite giving state transitions ample time (ie. not detaching a screen and then immediately closing the laptop to put it to sleep).

Also I was bit by the bug that somebody else mentioned here: the panels would disappear with sweet reliability. If I remember correctly, this was a bug that would hide the existing dock. So if you simpy recreated it, you'd have two running side by side, and so on.

There was more but I don't remember specifics. The screen issues were enough to be a big practical problem for me.

Edit: speeling

Thanks!

I don't use docking and rarely use multiple monitors so that might explain a bit of the difference in experience.

I started with KDE with Plasma about a year ago, so I don't have that history. Kubuntu runs extremely well on my XPS 13 with hi dpi display, so I don't really the problems you're seeing.

Except the music player! It's pretty broken on a hidpi screen.

I am a very happy user of KDE Neon, it is polished and their ux experts seems to be either real experts in the field ux instead of just being experts in copying stuff from Mac and quoting Fitts law - or they are mostly kept in check.

But does KDE work well on a low resource machine?

I'd not expect it to work too well on even the newest Raspberry PI.

I would however expect it to work well on my 5 year old laptop.

Bloat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com