I have been using KDE for ~eight years in one capacity or another and it almost continually improved with every update. Regressions were quite rare, even during the KDE4->5 move.
I like that KDE applications are at least somewhat consistent in their UX and in the way they organize basics. For example, the way settings and shortcuts are handled is identical across all apps. Kparts makes embedded viewers consistent and good across apps. Support for GTK theming reduces the visual annoyance of the rare GTK app. KWin works very well, has a broad selection of useful shortcuts and has been the most stable compositor I've ever used (AMD/open source).
On the other hand, KDEPIM/Akonadi seems like it is quite powerful, but for some reason I kinda didn't became comfortable with it. Not sure why, exactly. I used KMail and KOrganizer for quite a while, though. Decent tools, but some rough edges when it comes to first-time setup, e.g. the wizards could really use some polishing.
There is a surprising number of useful and powerful utilities in KDE.
Completely agree. I am a long term KDE user and I like (and use) the PIM stuff in general but since a few years the quality continues to degrade. Akregator (RSS-Feed Reader) has reached the point were it destroys its feed list every few weeks, and doesn't even fetch updates anymore (completely useless). Akonadi tends to become an unresponsive process with 100% CPU usage every week or so. And when I remember the Kmail 2 migration... Oh god. It was supposed to be a 'no action required' upgrade and it ended with complete recreation of every account on every machine.
So yeah, while the core concepts of KDE and Plasma are great, the development doesn't look as active as it once was and once great packages seem to degrade over time.
One of my favorite features of the past years is the Dolphin-Nextcloud integration. That way you can simply right-click a synced file and 'share with Nextcloud' it via link or other users, works great :-)
I am pretty sure you mean 3->4. KDE5 was so smooth, that you were wondering why they were talking about a major release.
The problem with the KDE4 was that people were adopting it too early. I started to use it with the first alpha and saw a lot of bugs during that time, but I always knew that I was using incomplete alpha software. KDE4 wasn't stable enough for every day use until 4.3 or so and many people started to use it with 4.1 which was just the first version which claimed to be usable at all (most basic programs had been rewritten, but many more advanced programs still weren't ready).
> The problem with the KDE4 was that people were adopting it too early.
Yes, but this problem was caused by the KDE release team botching their announcement. They had an alpha release, a beta release, and then a big 4.0 release. Then, it turned out that their '4.0 release' was really what everyone else would consider alpha/beta, and they didn't want people actually using it for production environments yet. They screwed up communication royally, sending mixed messages about whether the software was actually ready or not.
source: I maintained some KDE-related packages on arch and the 4.0 release was horribly botched.
It was all mixed up due to library frameworks and application suite being released as one big "KDE" package. Kdelibs5 4.0 was ready and stable, but the KDE desktop wasn't. They tried to communicate that since the beginning, but not nearly hard enough.
> The problem with the KDE4 was that people were adopting it too early.
True, it also meant that distributors were replacing KDE3 too early and the system wasn't receiving much updates anymore before KDE4 was usable. I ended up using mostly XFCE, Gnome and macOS the years after. ;) Might give KDE5 a shot though.
Well, the way I remember it, there were a lot of people telling you to skip KDE 4.0 and wait for 4.1 at the time of the 4.0 release and I was pretty sure that there was some warning in the release notes. So I took a look at them again:
But I can't find there any warning what so ever. So even if the people who were actively engaged with the development knew that this software wasn't ready for prime time, they didn't mention it and therefore I have to agree with you that this move must have been done on purpose. :-/
KDE4 was also terribly bug ridden. I used to advocate for KDE heavily but after suffering through bugs in KWin and KMail/Akonadi that went unresolved for years I gave up and moved to Gnome.
There was a KWin bug that filled the task bar with graphical artifacts over time so that you couldn't tell anymore which taskbar "button" was for which window. They kept blaming the video drivers until someone proved to them that they had a resource leak in KWin.
The KMail/Akonadi bug that I still remember vividly as it was very annoying and long lived was one where you would get messages duplicated.
One of the issues with KDE 4 was that their '4.0' release is what everyone else would call and alpha or beta, and their '4.1' release is the true '4.0'. Is there any chance the bugs you encountered were for 4.0.x?
I'm always updating to latest greatest KDE since 3.5 and I think you mean KDE4 instead (which actually was more of a PR fiasco than anything technical).
KDE5 really was terrible for a long time. I tried it multiple times after it was launched, but always quickly downgraded until my distro dropped support for KDE4. At first it did not even handle multiple displays properly. In fact, some areas, such as locale support are still much inferior to KDE4 [1].
Strange to see this, maybe it's the target audience that makes this the result? At the office there are about 40 Linux desktop users, none of them use KDE. Most remote users I've worked with (~100) aren't using KDE either. This is of course somewhat anecdotal, but I suspect that the Linux Journal Readers are a specialised group.
Most systems (out of a pool of about 200) I can query run:
And those are minimally managed systems, all they have to run is orchestration software and IPA, so they choose their own distro and DE and everything else.
Gnome 3 is everywhere because it is the default in all the major distributions but this doesn't mean people like it. I personally think it actually is the weirdest DE ever and only popular for political reasons.
Strange, according to the queries I did on the package managers, only about 35 of the Gnome 3 installs are default, all the others were manually selected (and often don't have the distro-specific extensions installed like those from Ubuntu and Debian). Most of the users in the pool I can query with Salt and OSQuery are developers/ops/engineers.
Strange indeed. Maybe they are using some kind of Linux tablets? Gnome 3 seems an amazing DE for a tablet. Or maybe this is just a habit - perhaps they had to use Gnome 3 in the past and just don't want to change anything.
I suppose most of the use is because they don't use the DE itself that much, it's mostly just a launcher for the stuff they use. It's mostly full-screen IDE on one monitor, browser and terminal on the other.
Experience tells me that they probably simply don't bother and choose the DE that's either default or they're already familiar with. Most of the time you could switch them their DEs and they almost wouldn't notice.
What does Gnome 3 have in common with macOS at all? I use a MacBook every day yet every time I've given Gnome 3 a try it seemed a way too bizarre to me. It doesn't even have a traditional dock (unless you install one).
Compare OS X Lion's mission control[1] with gnome 3's dash[2]. By the time I switched to Linux, I never used the dock, instead launching applications with Alfred/spotlight (and switching with some combination of cmd+tab, mission control, and spaces track pad gestures). Gnome 3 maps super+tab to alt+tab which was great for my muscle memory since my super key was where my command key used to be.
What I found annoying about gnome 3 was the persistent useless panel at the top of the screen (I still use gnome at work and I use the dash-to-panel extension[3] to make it slightly less useless).
I see. Thank you for explaining. As for me macOS is just the dock, the global menu (both replicated and enhanced nicely in Unity, as well as in KDE though KDE global menu works with Qt apps only and Unity global menu works with Gtk apps only) and a BSD terminal :-) As for Mission Control - I have never used it on Mac but on KDE moving the mouse cursor to the top left corner of the screen shows all the windows in the manner looking a lot like the screenshot in the Wikipedia article for Mission Control. As for the Gnome 3 top panel - I agree it is the most pointless part of it, I wish it could host the application menu the way it does in macOS and Unity. The problem is Linux apps seemingly lack a standard for this so it wouldn't work with all the apps, that's why I've came to the conclusion I don't need a top panel at all.
By the way, isn't there something like this for launcher icon based indicators? Many apps show some status (e.g. number of unread messages, operation progress etc) as an overlay to their icons in the Unity launcher panel. Many apps (e.g. Krusader) do the same in KDE. Some (e.g. Chrome) do this in both the mentioned DEs but many non-KDE apps (e.g. Telegram) fail to do this in KDE.
Well, I've installed the gmenu-dbusmenu-proxy-git package from AUR, enabled the global menu panel and restarted the computer. GTK apps menus still won't go to the panel. How do I turn this proxy on?
By the way, out of pure curiosity (by no means I intend to question your DE choice, quite contrary), have you tried recent KDE? I'm just curious if it actually misses some good parts Gnome 3 has and if these can be added to KDE eventually.
KDE is excellent.
Always seemed it got a lot of negativity from people that only perceived Linux as an operating system that should be run on a 5 year old laptop.
There's also the folks who end up having to use Ubuntu LTS (16.x) for various reasons, and if they ever try KDE on it will be doomed to inevitably hate it... Hope the story doesn't repeat with their next LTS version.
(Maybe the KDE foundation should dedicate manpower/resources to the Kubuntu project before their LTS releases or something, as they'd massively increase their usage base this way...)
Curious, for what reasons am I supposed to hate it? What am I ignorant of?
I use KDE neon which uses a mildly stripped-down Ubuntu 16.04. I surf, do some web development, attempt to learn Clojure, and make my desktop look very pretty. So far (couple months) I've had the "it just works!" level of experience.
Edit: Actually, I suppose that is distinct from the LTS Ubuntu release /with/ KDE.
...then why TF don't people promote like even a little bit?! I didn't event know this KDE Neon existed. Really, WTF, it's not event on the page listing Ubuntu flavors https://www.ubuntu.com/download/flavours and being a KDE project it's not even on the kde.org homepage.
Do some people still live by "build it and they will come" nonsense? I mean, nobody expects dedicated marketing campaigns for an open source project, but at lest some links in the places where people could see. Event on the neon.kde.org page I see the crucial information that this is based on Ubuntu LTS burried in a big wall of text I wouldn't have ever bothered to read if I wasn't actively digging for details.
I'll wait for a version based on Ubuntu 18 LTS when that comes, and definitely try it, but boy, it's like whoever works on this took great effort to keep it stealth or something...
Well, there is reasons for it not being promoted by KDE itself that much.
1) They don't want to run a distro. KDE is distro-agnostic. Maintaining their own distribution would imply that this is the KDE distro, where you want to be to get the best KDE experience. (Hint: It's actually not.)
2) They don't consider it a distro. "Distribution" implies that someone spent some time to put together a collection of software which works reasonably well with one another. So, it would mean that they do integration testing. KDE does not do that with Neon. It's just Ubuntu with KDE smacked on top. The Ubuntu-part is tested, the KDE-part is somewhat tested, but the combination of those happens to function most of the time out of pure luck.
3) Many people looking for Ubuntu with KDE on it are (reasonably) new to Linux. If you're more skilled, you'll probably go for openSUSE or Manjaro. There's of course reasons why you might prefer Ubuntu even as an experienced user, but it is still the case that many noobs look into KDE Neon. And KDE Neon is not for noobs. The Ubuntu-part is stable, but the KDE-part is not, it's bleeding edge software. Often not really tested, so things might potentially explode there. The lack of integration testing adds to that. And then as the grand-grandparent comment hinted, KDE Neon does not come with a whole load of software. It misses lots of software that you'd expect in a full-featured operating system, which is also in particular bad for new Linux users.
As for waiting for a version that's going to be based on Ubuntu 18.04, I'm not sure, if that makes so much sense.
Presumable, or hopefully, Ubuntu will fix that hot mess themselves with 18.04. The most recent version of KDE is an LTS release, so they'd be hard-pressed to choose wrongly there, and they previously had such an outdated version of Qt, because they used that outdated version in Unity 8, which they've stopped developing, so they should not fuck up there either.
So, unless you actually continuously want to see the latest development in KDE, using KDE Neon won't make that much sense anymore after Ubuntu 18.04 is released.
Also, Ubuntu 18.04 is released in 2018 in April, hence 18.04, it's <year>.<month>.
And they usually release in April and October which is why you usually XX.04 and XX.10, with every second year in April being an LTS, so 18.04 is going to be the version number of the LTS. For smaller fixes, they add a number behind that: e.g. 16.04.5.
Absolutely true. At work, we use 16.04 and Plasma in the version that shipped with it is very unbecoming. A stark contrast to what actually maintained, recent versions of the DE bring to the table.
openSUSE offers the premium experience. Long-standing friendships between the teams and openSUSE does a bunch of testing for KDE, for which KDE gives back by scheduling their LTSs to align with openSUSE releases, well, and by probably actually fixing those bugs that occur on openSUSE even if they might not necessarily appear on other distros.
Then Manjaro is also solid, mainly because KDE is at least no second-class citizen on it, like it is on most distros.
And if you want something Ubuntu-based, then KDE Neon is the way to go, even though there's essentially no integration testing between the KDE software and the underlying Ubuntu base.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, in my view. That way you get all of the new goodies soon after they’re released, and thanks to the automated testing there’s usually no significant breakage.
I would agree, but Plasma still using up to 400-500MB RAM for me with no obvious reason since I use pretty much default panel with 6 saved app launcher icons. While it's not problem on 32GB machine it's the part of KDE with most memory usage of all KDE apps that I use.
You should look into using heaptrack instead, it's much much faster than valgrind and has a very efficient UI - the memory flamegraphs in particular are fantastic. It's built by folks at KDAB so works fine with KDE / Qt apps.
I am still on KDE4, my setup works fine for me so I don't dare to change it, the problem was in the begining with KDE4.0 and the next few years, the transition from KDE3.5 was rough.
Just out of curiosity, how does KDE compare to XFCE feature-wise? I am using XFCE for it being lightweight. However, I'd be willing to give KDE a shot if it has some nice features that can enhance my productivity while remaining lightweight.
KDE's search, called KRunner, is pretty nice, too. It searches applications and files, mails and calendar entries etc. (if you use the KDE Kontact suite), can calculate things and convert between units, allows you to jump to windows that you have open and many more things.
It's also got autocompletion and acts intelligently to a limited degree (basically it remembers that when you typed in "Fi" last time, you wanted Firefox, not Filezilla, so it puts Firefox at the top).
Of course, this does use up more CPU cycles than the pretty basic search in Xfce. You can turn off some of those search features, if you don't think you'll need them.
And here's some random examples of the features that KDE has:
I do some webdev, so I need a color picker every now and then. I have one of those in my panel.
I also have a little button in my panel that I can click on, which pops open a list of the most recently modified files in my Downloads-folder, effectively acting as a direct access to my downloads.
Lastly, you might want to play around with turning off compositing in KDE's settings. That does limit some features, but should speed things up quite a bit, too.
> I also have a little button in my panel that I can click on, which pops open a list of the most recently modified files in my Downloads-folder, effectively acting as a direct access to my downloads.
Hah! This is amazing! Never thought of using folder view applet like this!
One offer: Instead of turning compositing off, you can set animation speed to instant.
That means you get nice things like transparencies, but there's no animation.
The file manager, dolphin, is nice. Open up a shell in the window for that directory. Second best for manager I've ever used after Mac+default folder x
I really can't understand why people would want to use something as dumb as dolphin (created to be as dumb as nautilus) when you have the great and awesome Konqueror at your fingertips.
It's the same kpart, just in a different UI shell. Dolphin has some overly simplistic defaults, but you should get the most (if not all) that you can get with Konqueror out of it.
I have hardly ever used a computer less than 5 years old. All the computers I've used (except the most ancient) had built-in graphics. Yet I have never seen a single sign of slowness from KDE ever. I totally don't understand people saying KDE is slow or resource-heavy.
I use KDE because the window manager is easily configurable to do what I want (even if it is weird).
When I moved from running CTWM to a real desktop environment in ~2001, I submitted patches to both KDE and Gnome to add support for my oddball WM config (basically mapping move/resize/iconify to alt+mouse button press). KDE merged my patch. Gnome closed my bug request, saying that what I wanted to do were against the their design guidelines. So I've been using KDE for most of 2 decades..
Let's just hope the next Ubuntu LTS version doesn't pack up a "doomed to be buggy and perpetually outdated except security fixes" version of KDE :| ...
Choosing to use Ubuntu 16 LTS, I gave up considering KDE as an option after trying hard to put up either with the official repo one or a newer unofficial one (both were buggy and unstable, and lacked essential features to me like Win+<number> task switching shortcut that is available in latest KDE, and especially combining this with drag-and-drop freely reorderable taskbar entries to actually enable my "standard" worflow that I can use fine in Windows 10, Unity, or Xfce+custom dock).
Hope the Kubuntu guys take care not to shit the bed with the LTS release (because their non-LTS one were always fine, like in not just up to date as expected, but waay more stable too!)...
It doesn't handle dependencies very, some software becomes installable because you can get package conflicts. Fedora KDE spin is better but doesn't run as good on laptops unless you tweak it, both are unsuitable for new Linux users. Is there a good KDE distro that can be recommended to Windows or Mac refugees?
I am extremely happy with Manjaro. The only problem is it doesn't include a WiFi driver to support 2013 MacBook Air, you will have to install it manually if you have this model.
"Totally configurable, which is ESSENTIAL for new users who want their Linux desktop configured to emulate the exact rendering of Windows (XP or 7)"
Funny argument after Windows 8. So KDE gets marketed as ressort for confused windows xp users?
I enjoyed customizing my workspace for years. Now I use gnome shell, I relax and don't waste brain cycles on irrelevant stuff like which icons show up here or there. I don't use my desktop to do work or anything meaningful.
Configuring KDE and apps is more then GUI customization.
The file manager has many options that anyone that does any work would be useful, like tabs, splitting the screen, icons/list/detailed view of files, opening a terminal inside the file manager,previews, FTP integrations and all of this is an option, including that you can configure the toolbars to show/hide buttons.
Other example(maybe other DEs have this too) I can have tabs in the terminal app (konsole) and in the tabs that I am SSHed in I use different color scheme(with red on black) so I am aware and not run dangerous commands on a remote server.
My point is that a KDE user is not one that chooses KDE over Gnome due to UI but is more about functionality.
At what costs wrt ressource usage & startup time do you get these features? IIRC KDE comes last in all tests about DE performance. I could become potentially interested in KDE if this had changed over the years.
You can hardly tie ressource usage and startup time to the number of features a DE has.
Take Windows as an extreme. Slow as all balls, around 1.5 GB RAM usage and essentially no features that go beyond the basics.
On the other hand, take Enlightenment. It's got fancier graphics effects than KDE, nearly as much customization and I'd say about half the features (which is still a lot more than Windows, GNOME, even Xfce),
and it starts up in the blink of an eye, has extremely little lag compared to other DEs, and only uses about 150 MB.
It's also really buggy and not really a complete, polished DE, so despite all its advantages, I would only recommend it, if you really feel comfortable with desktop Linux and don't mind a bit of dicking around to get things working the way you want them to.
And GNOME clocks in at around 1 GB RAM usage, making it the most heavyweight Linux DE, despite it lacking tons of features that pretty much any other DE has.
(KDE nowadays clocks in at around 600 MB, Xfce at around 350 MB.)
Startup is not important if you start the DE once a day, it is like saying Notepad is better then Visual Studio for coding because it starts faster.
As of CPU and memory use KDE is not the most bloated DE, This is a myth so you should recheck things with latest versions of KDE,GNOME,XFCE and the others.(use what is better for you but you should not stay away from KDE because of memory or CPU usage)
I agree that a WM will have less features and eat less memory so if you do not need the features of KDE use a WM.
Also you can disable some of KDE features like compositing, akonadi if those are the things you do not need.
Interesting,I can't find the link where I seen a benchmmark where KDE used less RAM then XFCE and Gnome3 ,it may differ for different people since Gnome is leaking memory for some people but I also seen reports of plasma leaking(it seems to be more rare)
I am running an older version of KDE and my plasma uses less then 230MB in total(including shared memory)where only one instance of Chrome uses 450Mb and Xorg uses more then plasma for me (it may differ for other versions and configurations)
I've got chrome tabs taking more RAM+CPUA than kde. As for startup time, for <1 sec I don't care. If I'm using a graphical app, it's because the command line equivalent is slower to use (e.g. multiple file selection where regexs don't help) so the additional functionality is worth it.
I’ve been using Gnome Shell for the last several years, but recently got annoyed enough to switch to KDE/Plasma for a while.
Gnome Shell is okay if you buy into the exact configuration/vision it presents. If you want anything slightly different, the extension system is a clusterfuck, as an end user. Extensions crash, don’t work with updated versions of Gnome Shell, etc. And several simple functional needs such as hide window title bars (to save screen space) were a pain to get working correctly.
If you really enjoyed customizing your desktop environment for years, you would have graduated to a tiling window manager. And if you had been smart about it, you would have chosen one with a stable API. And if you had done so, you wouldn't need to "waste brain cycles" configuring your environment because it would be a solved problem. But since your example of desktop configuration is "icons show up here or there", I assume you never graduated to a real window manager.
Many people recommend i3wm to start out on, because it has good documentation.
Personally, I'll run away screaming from reading any sort of manual on how to use software, rather than just dicking around with it, so I only really managed to get into tiling WMs with AwesomeWM, which is still relatively graphical.
that seems to be a common theme with kde and to a lesser degree gnome. they moved to 'features and innovation first' years ago and it shows. sure its nice that Linux is becoming more accessible for 'normal' people but for me both kde and gnome are getting in my way more and more while stability is suboptimal. i switched from kde to gnome around 2010 then xfce in 2012 and finally i3 in late 2013. for the rest of the apps i'm always looking for the leanest and least sophisticated solution that has enough features and suit my needs. these also tend to be pretty reliable.
like you said, if i really needed all those fancy features and eyecandy I'd rather switch to apple or microsoft.
I'm still taking a look at kde and gnome once a year or so, especially since kde5 looked really clean and nice, but it just isn't there yet..
i agree that 5 is much better. ever since my kde fanboy coworker upgraded to 5, the amount of cursing about different things (mostly akonadi and kmail) was greatly reduced, but akonadi still seems to be a troubled child.
You can not use akonadi or kmail, I did not had a good experience with them either on older KDE so I do not used them, I use Thunderbird for mail and akonadi is off.
Can you give examples on how KDE is in your Most of the time there are options to configure things so make the KDE as you like.
As an example a feature I like but you may not like(and you could disable it) is plugging a photo camera, I get a prompt and I can chose to import the latest pictures, in a simpler setup with just a WM I would have to use the file manager, find the right subfolder in the camera SD card, find the recent images or select all, navigate to my image library,then copy paste them . I like this feature because it saves me time, but since is KDE is configurable.
Other must have feature for me is the zoom feature (I have bad eyes), the ability to customize keyboard shortcuts(in Windows I can't change the zoom app shortcuts), the ability to move the panel and notification to my preferred side or corner (is important if you have a bad eye to put notifications to the side of your better eye though some designers think they know better and not let you move them)
I'm with you as far as desktops go, KDE is pretty awesome and has all the eyecandy you'd need from an apple/microsoft clone..but i3 is just beautiful in it's simplicity, and with proper keybindings and use of tabbed windows, I find I don't miss having a true desktop environment and all the clutter. mod+d to open rofi for app search is all I need to launch apps.
Not sure I'd ever go back to KDE or Gnome or XFCE now that i've gotten accustomed to i3wm.
Your opinion is a perfectly reasonable one to have, but I don't understand why you seem to have hard feelings about GNOME and KDE.
There's hundreds of lightweight, no-bullshit options in Linux land. GNOME and KDE are the only ones that stick out from the crowd. No one forces you to use them and especially they have every right to exist, even if they don't suit your taste.
If you need stability, but still modern desktop try MATE, they added hi-dpi support recently. Also it's super fast compared to KDE. For me it has been more stable than XFCE even.
Since Unity became the default in Ubuntu, I've been using KDE. Was very happy with the 4.x, but not so happy with the bump to 5.x. I've been using 5.x daily since the beginning. Mostly it works really well, though I still have to restart plasma or desktop effects daily. I'm not sure if it related to a bug with Nvidia. I also have an issue with framerate drops with Dota 2. But except from those minor issues, it works really really well, but I still feel that the latest 4.x was more stable than the current 5.x
Then you be happy to know that Unity is no more on Ubuntu, it got canned when they ended their phone/tablet plans. The new default is Gnome, which has grown into a fantastic distraction free DE
If anything this survey shows how hopelessly fractured the GNOME desktop community is. Add GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE, and Unity and you get 41% (vs KDE's single 35%).
I'd say that -unfortunately- the DE/WM world is irrelevant these days. We need decent UIs & OSes for the mobile world; Android and iOS need competition. The latter is proprietary, the former partly FOSS but data hungry.
Well, there is a reason why GNOME is so fractured. The lack of configurabilty and consideration for the community's opinion in GNOME. That is an argument for KDE being a better desktop environment.
Not surprising at all, with GNOME 3 being what it is. Configuring, getting help, discussing and contributing to Plasma is a breeze. In contrast, GNOME camp feels like a bunch of very opinionated people that just know better how their users (and other DEs too, when it comes to interoperability) should behave.
Protip: Use krunner (Alt-Space) to launch applications once you know their names. It has autocompletion and many neat features such as web shortcuts: Type gg: or dd: <search terms> to open a tab in your configured default browser with Google or DuckDuckGo search. Not very discoverable but very convenient. You can also create your own web shortcuts in KDE system settings.
krunner also supports opening Kate (the KDE editor, roughly similar to Sublime Text) sessions directly.
GNOME Shell on Ubuntu 17.10 is eating >1Gb RAM, I think it might be a good time to try KDE (unfortunately, it didn't work to just apt install kubuntu-desktop, so I'll have to do that via clean install sometime later).
Thanks, I'm quite an experienced Linux user (>10 years). The problems I've had are way beyond this (bootloop, black screen, freezes, had to do a recover from a liveusb etc. etc.)
I started with Cinnamon, then switched to KDE. Mostly because it was more intuitive for me, 2% because I liked the new Konquii branding enough to try it that first time.
Now when people want to try "that Linux thing" I hand them Debian KDE if they are a Windows user since it is closer to Windows start menu out of the box, at least for my purposes.
Really trying hard to not sound biased here, but I have a feeling starting off with this, is not gonna help it:
Compared to Cinnamon, KDE is pretty much better at everything. It's a thousand times more configurable, it's more feature-rich and the default applications are more powerful. The search in KDE, called KRunner, is also something that many people love.
Where Cinnamon is better:
- Not making your eyes bleed over when you look at the settings screen (because KDE really has a lot of settings).
- Less incompatible options. In KDE, you sometimes dick around with one setting and it invalidates another setting. (Usually nothing important, though.)
- Less features usually means less confusion for less technically inclined users.
- Its keyboard shortcuts are quite similar to those of Windows. KDE deviates in places from that.
- It uses probably like 100 MB less RAM and presumably a few less CPU cycles. (In the default configuration, that is.)
- It's somewhat more stable. KDE has gotten a lot better at this over the last couple of releases, but it's still not yet quite as rock-solid and probably won't ever be.
- Cinnamon is better at being Cinnamon. In KDE, with how configurable it is, you can rebuild most desktop environments in it and Cinnamon is very similar to the KDE default, too. But if all you want is exactly Cinnamon, then just using Cinnamon is cleaner.
As for Awesome:
+ It's a lot lighter than KDE.
+ It works better independent from the distro. I don't think there's any distro where Awesome is not good. With KDE, I'd consider openSUSE, Manjaro and KDE Neon good. Fedora and Debian are not terrible. Ubuntu is often garbage.
+ There's some keyboard shortcut in Awesome to unminimize windows in reverse order of how you minimized them, which I was quite fond of.
+ It has tiling.
There's some scripts that you can use in KDE to also make it tile its windows, but those are more limited than the tiling you have in Awesome. They are also somewhat laggy and sometimes just bug out.
You can use bspwm or i3 inside of KDE, which is also somewhat hacky, but it does work well enough that I use KDE+bspwm as my daily setup. If you want a quick guide on that, let me know.
Benefits of using KDE over Awesome:
- KDE has lots of smaller and bigger features that Awesome doesn't have. I for example do some webdev, so I have a color picker widget in my panel. I could live without it, but I'd also just rather not. And again, the search of KDE is just really good. Awesome doesn't have anything like that.
- Again, the KDE default applications are really good. Having those preinstalled rather than needing to hunt everything down yourself is worth something. And even if you don't end up using the desktop environment, lots of these applications are considered best-in-class by many people, so you could end up incorporating them into your Awesome workflow.
- The KDE applications + the desktop environment also form a whole. They work well with one another, work similar to another and are thoroughly tested on that desktop environment.
- KDE is a desktop environment, not just a window manager. So, it can handle volume, notifications, screen brightness, power management, connectivity etc.. With Awesome, you need your own custom solutions for many things.
- Partially as a result of that, KDE is also more compatible with the outside world. Quickly hooking up a second monitor or a projector to Awesome is not necessarily something I'd feel confident about. And just in general more of these sort of edge cases are tested against and implemented in KDE, because the user base is much bigger.
GNOME 2. Although I started with a lovely KDE with Open SUSE 10.1, GNOME (with Ubuntu) was my tool of choice.
I mostly use headless Linux these days, but when I have a GUI at hand, I always miss the old GNOME. I heard there are some continuation project, haven’t looked into them yet, though.
The name you're looking for is MATE desktop. I've been using it for many years because I never liked Gnome 3 (constant churn, breaking plugins, themes etc). I'm using it on Debian but there's also Ubuntu MATE and Fedora & Opensuse spins
Although MATE does not technically use GTK2 now, but it is pretty good in sticking with the look and feel of a traditional customization desktop. I pretty much recommend Ubuntu MATE
Do anyone except Elementary OS users use Pantheon? Seem extremely niche. There's other DEs missing too, like Budgie, XMonad etc., but nobody's complaining because the focus is on the most popular ones.
Anyway, I really hope something like Budgie or Pantheon takes over Gnome though... distro integrators seem to prefer GTK-based DEs almost exclusively nowadays (probably have their reasons), but the flagship GTK DE Gnome 3 is not something you can recommend to anyone doing anything other than "sysadmin + coding" work, and even some of us developers are not that fond of it...
It seems to me that "Voted best DE" in the article is more like "Has more users that are willing to vote for their preference" than "Evaluated different DEs based on X criteria and Y seems best" so the DE with the largest user base is equal to the best one, at least as I understand the article.
Then I agree with you, tiling managers are probably way more productive and better than every single on of those DE, but it's about the amount of users, not the one with most innovation or creativity.
I see it's written mostly in Vala - I must confess I have a deep prejudice against Vala, mostly because it seems silly and complicated and just wrong to me to take a programming language and then compile it to C and then further compile it to machine code. We have that situation in Javascript land but at least there it was kind of unavoidable for a very long time.
That said, I may take Pantheon for a spin - I've been a happy KDE user for many years but I never mind trying new things and perhaps learning something new. Everything I've tried so far made me return back to KDE but one must keep an open mind.
> I see it's written mostly in Vala - I must confess I have a deep prejudice against Vala, mostly because it seems silly and complicated and just wrong to me to take a programming language and then compile it to C and then further compile it to machine code.
You mean like Objective-C, C++, Eiffel, Scheme, Nim?
Compiling to another native language is a shortcut to avoid implementing a complete compiler backend.
With C being the best option as target language on UNIX systems, given its ubiquity.
C++ first compiler that actually generated native code without going through C was written by Walter Bright sold by Zortech, which then sparked the race from all other compiler vendors.
Objective-C started as a macro processor for C, hence the [ ] syntax and @ prefixes, to make it easier to find them.
Nowadays the macro processor is gone, but at assembly level Objective-C code still gets translated into a bunch of objc_msgSend() and similar calls.
Again, the point is that Objective-C started as macro processor generating C code, which gregopet states it is silly for Vala devs to choose the same path as Brad Cox and Tom Love decided for their language.
Also, GHC for a very long time would only generate C code and IIRC even bundle GCC in the Windows builds; it's still available as the -fvia-C option in current versions.
GNU Common Lisp comes to mind as well (not to be confused with GNU CLisp, which is an interpreter implemented in C).
Compiling to C is actually an advantage. It seems to me that for most people the aversion to it is mostly a feeling, with very little objective reason for it. Have you tried a language that compiles to C? If not then don't knock it before you try it.
If you have experiences that prove why its a disadvantage then please do share.
I have used tools like lexer or parser generators which generate C code. Debugging is a painful due to the indirection.
Writing a LLVM backend is not harder than generating C code in the long run. The only advantage of the C code option is portability, so if you target some crazy microcontrollers C is fine.
There is more than just that advantage. By compiling to C you can easily take advantage of C++/Objective C features and allow easy wrapping of libraries written in those languages.
FWIW I never had any issues debugging Nim (a language that compiles to C or C++ or Obj C)
For Vala, generating C is more appropriate than LLVM, because its whole point is to integrate with the GObject object system, and that is defined by C headers that contain lots of C preprocessor macro definitions.
Vala is a strange beast, but it's type-safe and expressive enough that the code for most Pantheon apps is pretty easy to navigate. Compared to dealing with Apple's frustrating bug reporter or Ubuntu's launchpad system, reporting or even fixing a Pantheon bug on GitHub feels like a breath of fresh air.
That said, the current Loki (0.4) release is in maintenance mode already; I'd wait for the Juno (5.0) release.
KDE is great. One reason for the votes might however be that GNOME has been alienating both users and developers for a while now with idiotic ideas, and people are fed up with it.
Exactly, they managed to irritate the users and developers of the other DEs and WMs, the GTK changes made some important apps(like wireshark, Subsurface) and DEs(LXDE and Budgie) to switch to Qt
I like that KDE applications are at least somewhat consistent in their UX and in the way they organize basics. For example, the way settings and shortcuts are handled is identical across all apps. Kparts makes embedded viewers consistent and good across apps. Support for GTK theming reduces the visual annoyance of the rare GTK app. KWin works very well, has a broad selection of useful shortcuts and has been the most stable compositor I've ever used (AMD/open source).
On the other hand, KDEPIM/Akonadi seems like it is quite powerful, but for some reason I kinda didn't became comfortable with it. Not sure why, exactly. I used KMail and KOrganizer for quite a while, though. Decent tools, but some rough edges when it comes to first-time setup, e.g. the wizards could really use some polishing.
There is a surprising number of useful and powerful utilities in KDE.