KDE Plasma: Full Featured Desktop That's Surprisingly Easy on Resources | Hacker News Reader

KDE Plasma: Full Featured Desktop That's Surprisingly Easy on Resources

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48 pointsjandeboevrie24 comments

I started using Linux around ~2005 in the GNOME2/KDE3 era. I loved GNOME2 more, somehow KDE3 never clicked, it was just weird. Anyways time went by and I really didn't like GNOME3 and generally where the design of GNOME went so picked up MATE. And to this day that's my default desktop environment. But I had some offsite job and had to use KDE Plasma there and... I was blown away. It's so so good. Probably the most mature desktop environment right now? Love MATE but KDE Plasma is really taking my heart! Anyways, I just wonder what went "wrong" with GNOME after GNOME2 (or at least I see something went wrong) because the current GNOME is just miles away from KDE Plasma

Modern vanilla Gnome is so dumbed down, it feels like it was designed for mobile/touch first and desktop use a distant second.

The general large size of UI elements and lack of any slightly advanced features and customizations (not even via config files!), that are basic features in Windows ar any other Linux DE, is infuriating.

I find KDE Plasma easily the best desktop environment there is on any OS. It has a lot of flexibility to make the desktop layout/look just the way I want it and also for it to behave just the way I want. There are a lot of features I quickly miss in other desktops, for example I miss activities a lot, the great integration with the KDE apps, the Vaults feature for encrypting folders, window manager is just awesome, and I like it how almost everything has a keyboard shortcut assignable so I can control it with keyboard. And all is just getting better and better, which is a complete opposite trend when compared to closed proprietary desktops that are just getting more dumb don with each release, and much more bloated and they even integrate more shitty features like spyware/surveillance and ads. So yeah, KDE Plasma is right now the best you can have on the computer.

That is until you pull out multi monitor support and realize how horrifying KDE has been. non-funded open source project tend to suffer from the same issue: they only work on the hardware used by the developers.

Except KDE is buggy as hell. Random crashes especially with Plasma, lock screen glitches, multi-monitor issues, inconsistent settings location (some in .kde, some in .config, some in .local, etc, depending on what you're using). Which is shame because I love Konsole, Kate, and so on. Global shortcut settings, and the ability to basically remap any application shortcut to a different combination is pretty powerful. I love KDE.

But...

While I understand that time is money and donations are appreciated and that developers need to eat, but lately it seems like any request for addressing any type of issue is met with "Maybe you should make a donation." lately in the KDE community. Lack of transparency on where those donations go is also an issue. It feels KDE lacks a good set of community managers.

Can't concur on the bugginess. It's definitely more rough and janky than Gnome though, but Gnome does get more dev time investment and is far more simplistic and less feature rich, so it would make sense it's much easier to maintain in a polished shape.

Also depends on the distro you're rocking. KDE behaves differently on each distro depending how well the distro maintainers integrated KDE.

Kubuntu, KDE Neon and Opensuse Tumbleweed should be pretty good options.

cannot blame KDE has more bugs than GNOME when GNOME has no feature left at all to break.

KDE5 Plasma is superb. I wish that it ran on OpenBSD. However I do not wish to run Wayland, D-Bus, or any sound server on an OpenBSD installation. So, I wish that it were light as twm, fvwm or OpenStep.

Well, you don't need to run a sound server, although no sound server means the volume widget won't work. And you don't "run Wayland", you run KWin bare (instead of on xorg) and it provides a Wayland interface - it's actually lighter (and arguably has a smaller attack surface). As for D-Bus, it helps provide all the functionality that makes Plasma, Plasma. But you don't have to use it. I have no idea why you'd want to neuter Plasma until it provides no more functionality than twm (just run twm?), but if that is your sincere wish, you need only run KWin standalone.

It runs great on FreeBSD, it's my daily driver. Wayland is not needed (and currently not working on FreeBSD with KDE anyway), but D-Bus unfortunately is. Sound you can do without of course if you don't need it.

Do you mean LXQT then?

KDE nowadays is buggy as hell and quite a lot overrated as a desktop environment, it has bugs everywhere in its main components: Plasma, Dolphin, Kwin. And that's just the X11 version.

The Wayland Plasma thing isn't really as mature software as you could say about Gnome and other Wayland software.

Somewhere in the dev community behind KDE most devs are chasing shinny new things and apparently won't botter to debug spagetti legacy code (the stuff behind 80% of the desktop environment), so serious bugs are a daily thing, even more after upgrades, because of regressions everywhere.

KDE 5.xx (and probably 6.xx, because it is mostly 5.xx code), IMHO is quite now on pair with the infamous version 4 (buggy as hell as well).

The "easy no memory" thing isn't quite right neither, IF the apps, components, whatever run without bugs - unlikely, even for common use cases - that will happen, but more often than not, you'll find your CPU/RAM in really bad shape because some misterious thing - KDE component, library, even the window manager itself - it just has failed somehow.

Or maybe your KDE just freezes over, out of the blue, because no good reason, Plasma could just dissappear in the middle of a rutine desktop task (closing/opening a video, taking a look at the preview window in the panel, etc.).

so, you could take this words as a rant, their not. They're just experience of maybe the last two, three years with KDE. And boy, lots of users could write the very same things.

As a counterpoint to this, I've had the KDE DE running for myself (8+ hours a day), my wife, and my grandparents, running on arch for more than 3 years. We've encountered no serious or really even minor bugs in that time. My only active issue is where notifications popping up when using the official Nvidia driver causes render lag for a second.

There was one bug in a KDE application, KDE connect, where it would crash when loading contacts from the phone. But it's open source, so I just fixed it, https://tkte.ch/articles/2021/09/06/KDE-Connect.html.

I'm not disagreeing with the parent post. I'm sure they've encountered lots of bugs. I'm just trying to show that your milage may vary, and for many users KDE just works.

I can also vouch for Plasma. Today I checked the uptime of my computer, and it is doing 16 days running Kubuntu with no issues, and it could be months if I was not rebooting to get system updates.

From my personal usage perspective the stability is somehow like this:

ios > Gnome > Plasma > Windows = Android

Considering that both Google and Microsoft platforms are giving me more issues, I would say that Plasma (and Gnome) are doing quite well. And not to speak of the actual usability, for desktop I'm yet to find something better than Plasma (I don't use macOS nowadays, but I had a great time back when I used Tiger and Leopard).

Same here, running my KDE Plasma on computers for days (especially work one) and no issues encountered. Can't remember the last time, except when Plasma was freezing because of a bug in Mesa3D graphic drivers update. I'm using OpenSUSE Tumblweed on most computers and KDE Neon on the work laptop. And graphics card is AMD Radeon or integrated Intel on laptop. I hear that a lot of bugs can be caused by using Nvidia graphics, but I can not say anything about this as I have always used AMD/Intel because they have proper opensource drivers.

I have used KDE daily since I started with Linux 20 years ago. In fact, I'm typing this reply very from Plasma on OpenSuse Tumbleweed. I haven't seen any of those bugs that you mention.

Maybe your installation is somehow broken?

Sorry but you must be running some magic version of KDE. I also run into the same issues above.

At my workplace I moved almost 30 computers from Gnome to KDE, because we were fed up with Gnome's "simplicity", and nobody has complaint anymore. Not a single bug in three years. Maybe you are just unlucky?

I've brought this up and always some people coming out of the woodworks saying "OH I have had ZERO problems with KDE."

I'm thinking, You don't see your plasma taskbar disappearing and coming back? OR copying files bringing your system to your knees? Copying 1+GB files just freeze the desktop entirely to the point where I've just gotten in the habit of opening Konsole and doing cp / rsync instead.

How about using Kate, and can't really get to any of the dropdown menu because a theme you have is one pixel off and causing the menu to get deselected?

It's glitchy!

Since KDE4 it feels like the solution to bugs is just push out the next version as fast as possible and hope it disappears. Right now they are pushing out 6.xx and no longer prioritizing fixing bugs for 5.xx anymore.

I put up with a multi-monitor bug for months, where none of the KDE native applications will remember it's size or position if you resize them on any monitor that isn't your left-most one. Posted a bug report, filed as duplicate. Apparently one of the devs know what the issue is. The answer was "I'll take a look at it when I get get time to pull my second monitor out."

I was encouraged to make a donation by someone else, see if that helps get some traction and the ball rolling on something I personally need fixed.

/smh

KDE is the only window manager in existence that I think is better than Windows 10. I'm a fan of KDE for 20 years. Linux desktop was completely unberable to me until I started using KDE. Some KDE programs like kdiff3 or konsole are still the best ones I've used in their category. Kate was my favorite coding editor until VSCode took over. Ability to open files and directories through ftp or sftp as if they were local files was absolutely wonderful in my PHP days.

Mostly because KDE Frameworks are OS frameworks done right (and what Qt offers as well).

GNOME used to be great as well, nowadays I no longer know. I was on the GNOME side back in day, even wrote an article on The C/C++ Users Journal advocating for Gtkmm.

It would be so nice if WinDev would have followed similar approach in rich C++ APIs, or more .NET love for that matter, instead of their deep love for COM with crap tooling for IDL files and C++ code generation.

Extremely buggy.

KDE isn't bad, but MATE uses less resources.

Yes, it's buggy as hell. Whether you run on Debian stable or their own Neon distro, you're just switching one set of bugs to another.

KMail is categorically unusable; the editor makes me scared to type anything. And looking at the process list behind it (a dedicated mysql, daemons running left and right) is nightmare fuel. Hence it's Thunderbird and Outlook web for the work calendar...

And it's not exactly lightweight either. I've had to upgrade from an i5 T450s & 20 GB RAM to a T470p with i7-7700HQ and 32GB to keep things from OOMing and being generally sluggish.

KDE is still my daily driver though, largely because the excellent QTStep theming [1] at least gives you a semblance of a civilized, old school user interface. I just wish there were more usable QT-based applications around to make use of it.

[1] https://store.kde.org/p/1211687

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