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Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

I think KDE Plasma 5 is really quite good. I switched to it from Unity when I switched to Arch last year. I don't ask for much from a desktop system, but I like how easy it is to customize KDE. I don't think it tries to be OS X at all - seems like a slightly more tasteful Win 7 to me; though I see that in Gnome.

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Yeah, to be honest I think Ubuntu should've picked KDE. It's a more direct competitor to Windows 10 which is in my view the best desktop OS. Gnome 3 is nice, just had it installed a couple of days ago. But some things are unpolished, some don't make sense. GTK open dialogs don't even have proper image previews which has been a feature requests for a lot of years (something KDE does have).

Coming from a heavy KDE user (on 3 different laptops, a Dell Latitude, a Thinkpad X220 and an MSI): the number of little bugs and glitches in that DE is wayy too high for it to be adopted by the leading desktop distribution.

It makes much more sense for them take a better base to start with, and then rally developer effort to make it more customizable/productive, than take a project with a huge featureset but very fragile and unstable.

Yeah, I think KDE would need a 10,000 papercuts project before it would be ready as a default desktop that OEMs etc... would be comfortable shipping.

Ubuntu has always been focused on the GNOME platform - they started with the GNOME environment and Unity itself is an alternate shell for GNOME desktop. GNOME is going to be much more familiar to their developers and users - users will use the exact same applications they'd use in Unity and they will look good and make sense. KDE is really an alternate universe, and one I enjoy and prefer for now but I don't thing this would make sense for Ubuntu. If you want a KDE-focused distribution based on Ubuntu, KDE Neon looks awesome.

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