
Fedora KDE - ploggingdev
https://spins.fedoraproject.org/kde/
======
giancarlostoro
I'm one of those weirdos who loves KDE. KDE was the first DE I used back in
2007 when I first installed / had help installing Slackware on my computer by
a friend. Once he installed it for me, I tried doing it by myself without his
help and succeeded. The only thing I'll never truly care for with KDE is the
browser it comes with, it's like another IE type of browser, and it gets
confusing cause KDE will open websides in more than just Konqueror but another
weird browser-like thing. There's also like two different file managers... I
really do hope they kill off the weirdness. But KDE allows me to refine my
desktop to feel like either Windows, Mac, Linux or a mixture. I can decide
what my panels look like, where they go and how they behave.

It was Gnome 2 that gave me this power. When KDE 3.5 died and KDE 4 came out
(around Vista times) it felt so sluggish and unstable and I ditched KDE for
Gnome. Then Gnome became buggy and a lot less customizable. It still is,
plugins and all. I really enjoy that KDE never took my freedom to configure my
DE however I see fit, without having to install plugins. In that respect I'll
always love KDE more. To be completely fair I still find myself using Gnome
sometimes, it's not as awful as it once was, but KDE makes more sense to me. I
just wish I could map the damn windows key to open the "applications" menu
(one of those random things I wish KDE would just let me do), er I mean the
"meta" key.

~~~
Santosh83
It's not being a weirdo to love KDE. It's an excellent desktop and I'm
surprised more distros don't have it as default.

~~~
pjmlp
Besides SuSE, one of the best KDE friendly distributions was Mandrake, which
had the goals of targeting Pentium and desktop users, but they eventually went
under.

Also KDE suffered from Qt licensing and C++ use, which many GNU/Linux users
weren't found of.

The license issue was eventually sorted out, but the C vs C++ arguments still
carry on I would say.

~~~
Santosh83
Sure, those are not trivial issues from a developer perspective, but
distributions mainly aim to expand their user base among ordinary users, and
from a user perspective KDE is great and it remains mildly inexplicable that
it's not the default among more distributions.

PS. Mandrake was my 2nd Linux distro ever, back in its heyday almost 2 decades
back. Still remember Drakeconf with fondness!

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ploggingdev
I was watching this youtube video [0] about KDE neon and loved the
customizations that the person had made. I tried out a KDE distro in a VM and
made the required changes : use an app icon based task manager, set 4 virtual
desktops over 2 rows and set the same desktop wallpaper shown in the video [1]
and it looks incredible. It's been at least 4 years since I last used KDE and
was blown away by how stable and lightweight it has become (I hear it uses
less resources than even Gnome). And there's also the infinite customization
options and it looks good out of the box.

Now I'm considering switching to Fedora KDE as my daily driver. For people who
use Fedora KDE as their daily driver : what's your experience with this
distro? Anything that people new to this Fedora spin need to be aware of? Any
thoughts on the security track record of Fedora KDE?

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um-
OEl6b9N4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um-OEl6b9N4)

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/w439mEw.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/w439mEw.jpg)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I used the Fedora KDE "spin" for years and it's really fantastic. In fact I'm
still running it on my previous laptop which I keep around at home for odd
jobs and occasionally use for work when I can't be bothered to dig my new
laptop out of my bag.

The new machine has a 4K screen and as with many people I'm occasionally
hooked up to 1080P external monitors. I found that Gnome handled mixed DPI
setups slightly better so I'm using that these days but KDE is very polished
and well worth a try. Once KDE sort out the mixed DPI situation I may even
switch back.

~~~
jhoechtl
> I found that Gnome handled mixed DPI setups slightly better

Came here just to second this. This is especially true when using Wayland.
Gnome is better here, especially if you have the luxury to

* enable experimental fractional scaling of Gnome 3.26; * restrict yourself to properly ported GTK3-Applications.

The situation with other applications is not as bright. While eg. Libreoffice
looks good at first sight (crisp fonts under Wayland and fractional scaling
enabled), Dialog boxes are not resizable and become unusable, as important
information is missing.

------
cupofjoakim
KDE seems to have won a lot of ground since the pre-plasma days. All I hear
about it is how good it is. As a guy who can't be arsed to change the desktop
environment for his installs, I hope it becomes standard on more distros. Not
that I'm unhappy with gnome, but it's silly that it's the defacto default for
most of them.

~~~
baldfat
OpenSUSE is the best distro for most people but like KDE it has been Nuked by
the community over a decade ago. It has a super stable desktop in Leap, a
rolling release and a professional server, but people still hold on to Ubuntu,
Arch and Redhat? OpenSUSE does great in all three areas.

~~~
didibus
I love openSuse, use it as my main.

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SettembreNero
I've been using Fedora for something like five years, and I love it. It just
works. Recently I've been experiencing some weird issues with Gnome
(performance wise, low fps, I guess the whole shell megathread problem) so I
decided to try the KDE spin - whom a lot of people often disregarded as a
"second class citizen" \- and I must say I am positively surprised. Everything
is smooth and no big issues, great hidpi support and very snappy!

------
bringtheaction
I run Fedora KDE on my desktop.

It’s ok but I don’t know that I’d recommend it specifically over anything.

Literally the only reason I use Linux still is that Firefox and Chrome have
too many bugs and issues on FreeBSD, otherwise I’d run FreeBSD on my desktop
too as I do on my server and one of my two laptops.

My other laptop is currently running macOS but I almost haven’t used it since
I put macOS on it, partly because the mouse stops working after a while but
also because I’ve just been busy with a lot of other stuff so I haven’t had
time to sit down with macOS since installing it on said laptop some weeks ago.
Time flies by _way_ too fast.

~~~
gkya
I can not stop myself from asking this question when I see FreeBSD and laptop
mentioned together: have you ever gotten suspend/resume working? I long for
FreeBSD like an exile from the gardens of Eden, but I need suspend/resume with
X to work, and couldn't freaking do it in more than one year time I used it...

~~~
bringtheaction
> have you ever gotten suspend/resume working?

Yes I think so but it broke again. However I don’t use suspend/resume either
way so I don’t mind though I used to use it so I guess I just got used to it
not being available.

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anothermouse
I bailed on KDE overnight at KDE 4.1. You couldn't have an NFS mounted home
dir, as they had made mysql a requirement for Akonadi, without which kmail and
everything else failed to work.

Suddenly KDE was no longer 'enterprise' ready, as no enterprise I've ever
worked for has offered anything but NFS for home directories.

Occasionally I come across a coworker who uses konsole, as they like the tabs.
But I've never seen it in use widely again.

Have they removed this limitation?

~~~
beojan
It runs a local MySQL server, so I don't see why it would be incompatible with
NFS home directories.

~~~
pas
Probably the datadir was in the user's home?

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paines
Gnome has many many extensions, some of which are actually quite useful like,
governors / frequency changing, visual display of caps lock, and such. IIRC
these plugins/extensions are called plasmoids under KDE, right? Are those 2
plugins I described available ? I never seem to find them when I play around
with KDE.

~~~
rgun
If you ever try KDE again, when searching through the default plasmoids, you
will see a _Get new widgets_ button through which you can download new
plasmoids.

You can take a look at all the plamoids available for download here:
[https://store.kde.org/browse/cat/418/](https://store.kde.org/browse/cat/418/)

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krylon
This is probably a silly question, but what advantage(s) does this have over
installing plain Fedora and installing KDE manually? (Beyond convenience?)

I guess your installation will be smaller and you will have to process fewer
updates. Which is not insignificant, I guess.

Anything else I might be missing?

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kahlonel
I really wish there was an easy way to change terminal line spacing in ANY of
these distros.

~~~
baldfat
It is if you use a different terminal. Konsole, KDE's terminal, it is in
settings/advance setting there is a Line Spacing option.

------
chr15p
do many people still use KDE?

I never really got on with it myself. No distro seems to ship it as their
default desktop any more, only as respins. Gnome seems to have pretty much won
the desktop environment wars.

~~~
Theizestooke
One thing I didn't like about KDE was that it presents you with a lot of
configurability, but it's configurability I never cared about in the first
place.

Giving the user every option he/she possibly could want is not necessarily
good design. Tbh it seems like a cheap cop-out from making design decisions in
the first place. Leaving the user with a lot of noise.

~~~
baldfat
Configurability is the Number 1 reason to run Linux on the Desktop. KDE's
number one selling point is Integration. There is no better integrated desktop
in the world and that message is lost to 99% of people. I find that I use two
desktops the last 5 years. KDE or i3 (tiled desktop) but my applications are
always KDE even with i3.

I think that KDE has had so much FUD thrown at it that people just have a
negative view of it right away. Sure 4.0 was stated as a Beta and every distro
put it out (When KDE stated it wasn't ready for that) and everyone Nuked KDE
till about 4.7.

~~~
fredmorcos
> Sure 4.0 was stated as a Beta and every distro put it out (When KDE stated
> it wasn't ready for that) and everyone Nuked KDE till about 4.7.

KDE put it out, everyone complained it was terrible, unstable and not ready,
then KDE called it a beta.

