We now live in a world where KDE looks nicer, more professional, and more consistent than the latest macOS. I don't know how that happened, and KDE isn't even particularly nice looking, but here we are.

For many years now KDE has focused on polish, bug fixing and "nice-to-have" improvements rather than major redesigns, and it paid off.

Add me to the list of people happy with KDE. I tried every desktop environment under the sun over the past fifteen years. I even wrote off KDE foolishly many years ago simply because I thought it looked gaudy.

After Plasma 6 dropped, I decided to try it, and it quickly became my favorite Linux experience. Coming from GNOME, I was pleasantly surprised that many GNOME extensions I would rely on had equivalent feature functionality built into KDE (things like a Dock, Clipboard Manager, KWin Scripts, Tiling/Fancy Zones, animation configuration). I can pretty much echo everything said by the blog author here. (EDIT: Not to mention that so many of my GNOME extensions would break in between upgrades, or crash regularly, meanwhile KDE has been rock solid for me these past 9 months).

I still think GNOME is slightly prettier, but KDE is infinitely more usable for me.

Just switched over from gnome. Overall, I'm happy.

Gnome is configurable, but in a way that isn't really well integrated. It seems buggy to me, but I think it's because my preferences aren't standard.

For instance, I like having my dock on the left, and I like top bar stuff to be in the dock, so the dock is the only thing that can take up screen space, and I like the dock to disappear when I'm not using it.

Simple, right? Can't do it in the regular configuration. Can do part of it in tweaks, which is a separate configuration app, but then some of it requires extensions. So, that's 3 places to go to

What's it called when hiding complexity makes it more complex?

So, that gets me there, but then the dock fails to hide half the time on zoom calls. And when I unlock the screen, I can see the empty space where the top bar used to be for a quick flash before the full sized app window goes back to where I left it.

So far, I don't have those issues with KDE. I don't like the annoying and krappy branding with the launcher icon and more than half the apps having a K in the name, but you can change the launcher icon and use whatever apps you want.

KDE has been crazy good for me.

It's a very complete package, it has a quick launcher that's good, a good screenshot tool and very very nice window management features.

When combined with libinput gestures, you can get macOS style three finger swipe between desktops. And not just a swap, but a nice swipe animation that pauses when you do on the touchpad.

On a laptop, this is such a big timesaver.

Its bottom bar icon handling is very good, customising is easy, and the settings panel is very clear. Everything is just so polished.

Then there is kde connect as well, it integrates so effertlessly. Kde is truly a software powerhouse, well done.

I just find it ugly vs Gnome or Mac. Inconsistent padding, font sizes, colors. Admittedly, this was maybe 5 years ago. Has that improved?

These days, I daily drive Niri and love it. I love the workflow of a scrolling WM. I love that I can configure it via a single text file in the standard configuration directory, I love how lightweight it is. It’s just about perfect for me.

Haven't been a Linux daily driver in years, but I love that KDE continues to have such an impact.

Reminder that its built-in browser Konqueror debuted the KHTML rendering engine circa ~1999, which was then forked to become WebKit, and now (including all subsequent forks) powers something approaching 90% of web views globally. Pretty amazing!

I’ve been using KDE as my personal daily driver for a few years now. At work I have to use MacOS, and it feels like a serious downgrade. Just about everything is easier and more intuitive on KDE. It’s the single best desktop I’ve ever used.

KDE has a ton of bugs that I don't like, but it's the DE that I always choose when using desktop Linux because it treats you like an adult. The ability to customize it is unparalleled unless you're building your own DE with a tiling window manager or something.

One killer feature is KDE Connect. Saves me from having to grab my phone when I need to copy an SMS OTP code. It's similar to Phone Link on Windows, minus the privacy violations.

I tend to prefer gnome's simplicity and its desktop metaphor, though I'm a niri guy now. But KDE is excellent. It's fast, pretty, customizable, and enjoyable to use. My gripe with it is that the sheer number of options and their constant presence in the UI does not play nicely with my gently spectrum brain. It's not even that I can't resist the urge to fiddle--I can, no problem--but that the presence of all the options causes anxiety. (There are also a few, to my eye, inelegant spacing quirks, but nothing I can't ignore.)

Having said that, it's a marginal difference. KDE is on my kid's computer and I use that from time to time without imploding in a ball of emotional-intellectual panic.

I see these posts a lot, but this really does not match my experience. I find I run into many more bugs in kde than in gnome or other desktop environments. This bug made kde absolutely unusable for me: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=365255

(I think this bug is still present in X11, but I've moved on to Wayland.)

The other bug I run into constantly is that "exposé" sometimes makes all the windows invisible. The only fix is logging out and logging in again. I've seen this across a number of different distros. Gnome is mostly boring and just works for me.

I have been using kde for 15+ years, except 4.0, which was painful, everything has been mostly a smooth experience.

> However, KDE considered my TV the primary desktop and put the task bar only in that monitor, and even disabling the TV didn't add the task bar to my monitor.

You can order the screens however you want; the first one will be considered primary.

Not just the Plasma desktop, there is a lot of KDE software that works well even outside of the KDE desktop, and some of it is really excellent. I find Kate to be a criminally underrated editor for example. It never comes up in VSCode vs vim/... discussions, but I think it's an excellent VSCode replacement if you're looking for something more familiar. Currently my favorite editor hands down.

The main reason it took me so long to use Linux as my main OS on desktop was because Gnome is the default DE on the Debian based distros I tried.

The day I discovered KDE is the day I switched to Linux as my main OS on desktop.

It works, it's functional, it's a bit _nerdy_... Exactly what I want in a DE.

Meanwhile, Gnome always felt like a low-cost version of MacOS.

I'm glad we have options so everyone can find what they are looking for!

I'm just mad at myself for not finding out about KDE before. It's 100% on me.

KDE is not just more configurable, they pack incredible innovation, like KDE Connect. Not to mention their semantic desktop ideas, which have been watered down post Nepomuk, nearly 20 years later still ahead of its time. It's the best of open source and user choice to have this international and often quite different source of new ideas and abilities.

I avoided KDE after first experiencing several bad dates with Gnome. Skipped straight to xfce or a tiling wm. Years later, decided to try KDE again because someone made an arch linux joke about it. I don't remember the joke, but it screamed "I use arch btw". That's when I realized KDE and I had something going on.

In fact, my Gnome-fearing worldview was reinforced just last month by my construction of samba/s3/sftp windows NTFS-LFS FUSE netshare vpn on my Proxmox server to solve this issue of multiple desktop environments for the last and final time. Compatibility with everything? No issue.

I achieved a monumental 2kb/s transfer speed, slower than the modem speeds I experienced in my childhood on dial-up. My 2kb/s supercomputer environment was remarkably consistent across all protocols. Thanks to the Gnome community, I was glad to hear that the speeds I was getting were apparently a major improvement since the last release.

Surprisingly, nobody has provided me with any file access architecture memes from the thriving Arch Linux PDP-11 community. Needless to say, having the choice of a desktop environment is great. And KDE is just happy I showed up with a cool ride.

edit: less neg

I hadn't really kept up with the development of KDE until I got a Steam Deck and booted into desktop mode. Once there, I was quite surprised to find a really performant, attractive, easy-to-use desktop environment. My previous KDE experience was probably a decade prior to that and I didn't really enjoy it that much, so it was a refreshing experience.

Now it is definitely my preferred Linux desktop environment as well.

I love KDE, I wish it was the more common and popular Linux desktop over Gnome. It's really usable and efficient, works great.

If it wasn't for Mac laptops insane battery life, performance, quality of build and trackpad, and amazing wake/sleep handling. I'd be on a Linux laptop using KDE.

As an outsider, it is impressive to see the incremental, "chipping away at problems piecemeal" approach KDE has been taking since their Plasma release a decade ago. Slow, steady and intentional. To think that almost all of this is volunteer work makes it so much more heartwarming.

KDE is truly incredible these days. I'm running Plasma 6 + Karousel[1] for scrolling window management and some custom kwin scripts for incredible maximalist experience. It does everything and does it beautifully https://i.postimg.cc/nznZwg44/Screenshot-20250918-213910.png

1 - https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel

XFCE or LXDE anyone? Honest question - If you use XFCE or LXDE or similar minimalistic DEs, are you happy with the choice? or do you feel somethings are missing that are available in KDE, MATE and the likes?

I moved from Gnome to KDE around 2 years ago. I just got tired of Gnome extensions breaking all the time, Gnome not being customizable, no support for AppIndicators, etc.

In my opinion, Gnome's UI feels more visually polished than KDE, but that polish doesn't matter when functionality takes a back seat to it.

One extremely minor complaint I have about KDE is that I wish they'd rename "Dolphin" to something like "KFiles".

I agree. Significatly better than Gnome. I don't know why so many distros use Gnome by default. The only thing I can think is that it looks a bit nicer. They definitely have better artists.

I've had Asahi installed on my M1 since I bought it, but only just switched to it as my main development workhorse (upgrading to Asahi Fedora remix 42).

I have to say I am really impressed with KDE, and the large selection of decent applications. I'm new to linux desktop, but I already hope that nothing changes, because to me it already seems complete.

The best part of the experience is feeling like I own my computer again.

I've used Linux laptops for work since 2013. I finally switched to Linux on the desktop earlier this year, after getting a laptop and experiencing Windows 11.

The laptop isn't running Linux yet, I'm not confident the battery lifetime story is great.

But, I settled on KDE as well. Gnome just wasn't configurable enough. There were a number of rough edges that I couldn't find a setting in Gnome to fix, so I switched over.

I'm running zfs on root, so I can have snapshots (every 5 minutes) and incremental backups to my NAS, also running zfs. Using zfsbootmenu. Which was interesting to set up, I learned a lot more about UEFI, framebuffer drivers, kexec kernel handoffs etc. than I ever expected to.

KDE has been phenomenal since the days of KDE 3.5.x. I wish that I could use it more than I'm able to (limited selection of desktop environments at work etc.). The KDE 4.0 release has given the project an unfortunate lasting bad reputation that stuck around despite the fact that it was really just a single bad release that got fixed very quickly.

I love the KDE ecosystem except for one very specific bug in kdeconnect in Linux where media of any kind in chrome, firefox, etc. are stopped after being paused for a while, so i have to refresh pages constantly, and pray the previous timestamp was preserved.

Apart from that, the DE and configuration options are miles away from windows 11 to be honest, and will probably go the KVM+passthrough route when I upgrade my desktop to keep Windows for CAD work, etc. Even Windows' Explorer is egregiously clunky nowadays and will break features like previews on its own and hang all the time.

I've been a happy KDE user for years, but I recently discovered that Gnome is surprisingly good on a tablet. KDE is usable, but feels about as touch-native as Windows does. Gnome is easily as good a tablet experience as an iPad.

There's only one fly in the ointment: Gnome's onscreen keyboard is both terrible and difficult to replace.

I've been using my steamdeck as my personal computer for more than a year now. It's desktop mode is a polished KDE experience that anyone could use.

KDE has been my preferred desktop environment since I started playing with linux sometime in the KDE 3 days.

I'm glad the wobbly windows desktop effect has stuck around too: absolutely unnecessary, but it's silly and fun.

My biggest complaint has nothing to do with KDE itself, but the fact that GTK apps are so ugly by default. QT apps look fine in GTK desktop environments though. (At least KDE has easy built-in settings for handling GTK theming these days...I remember it being more of an issue a while back)

I haven't run into many issues with KDE, and I really like some of the "built-in" KDE apps. For instance, KDE Connect is amazing, despite some bugs, it usually works very well. I also use KWrite and Konsole daily.

KDE's Dolphin is an incredible file manager in terms of usability and speed. I held this sentiment 10 years ago, and now recently rediscovering it, my opinion hasn't changed.

I love that KDE is filling a niche that Gnome has left. I love Gnome too and their direction is valid as well, but I think it's UX philosophy has contributed to KDE's popularity.

Really the main reason KDE wins for me is the flawless fractional scaling support that no other distro comes even close to.

I have a terribly uninformed question. Ive been using i3wm ever since I learned it exists. Ive always had old machines and used to run Lubuntu, and at some point moved to i3wm. Its super fast and light which is what I care about the most.

I dont feel like Im missing anything, but then again a lot of people dont know theyre missing things which they cant imagine (before cars if youd ask people what they wanted, they wouldve said faster horses, etc etc).

So: What am I missing by using i3wm instead of for example Gnome or KDE? I dont care about pretty and shiny and animations. What else? Surely the whole holabalooba cant all be about pretty drawings and animations...?

(Sure, I probably would be able to find out by myself by trying these things but... since my starting point is the belief that Im not missing something, why would I be looking at these things...?

KDE has been the best overall desktop computing experience available on any platform for a few years now. Even later versions of KDE Plasma 5 smoked macOS, GNOME, and Windows.

I'm sad because I am stuck with the requirement that all my computers can be accessed via remote desktop (e.g. RDP) in addition to SSH. And I also have to have 3-4 monitors per machine, so I can only use Wayland.

Thus, I am stuck with GNOME on Linux, because no other desktop environment (including KDE) yet has functional remote desktop on Wayland. (Where by functional, I mean equivalent to Windows/macOS where you can log into the same session that may or may not be already running locally.)

I know only 1-2% of users have my problems (^_^) but I just mention them in the hopes that KDE will keep developing krdp and make it work well enough to compete with GNOME and Windows on that axis...

Hi folks, author here. Happy to answer questions.

I returned to Linux when Microsoft started aggressively pushing Windows 11 and phasing out 10.

I admit I previously had only a vague idea about KDE's existence - mostly through my know-it-all friend claiming that the Windows Vista/7 look was inspired by it.

Anyway, I installed it as GNOME is not to my taste and indeed it was the Windows experience without the Windows issues, save for some weirdness like e.g. Open In Terminal taking its sweet time to actually open.

Initially I was missing HDR, but Plasma 6 supports it and both Chromium and Firefox (though the latter in developer edition only and behind a flag at that) appear to have shipped their implementations, though I haven't managed to get it to work yet - the important part is that there's no indefinite delivery timeline any more.

I want to like kde, I really do. I've tried running it on my main beefy PC for a few years now and it's always so much slower (like UX of random things like opening windows and moving things around). On vm's it's just horrible and has known issues

I recently gave up on kde and went back to Ubuntu/gnome and damn it's nice

Just to stress how much I want to like kde, I've contributed quite a bit to kde open source apps.

The polish of kde vs gnome is noticeably missing but the performance is what kills me the most. I've tried it on multiple devices and I was determined to make it work but after years I'm going away for it for a few years

Love KDE. Can others share their experience of using the same desktop environment across distributions? Is there a difference? I have only used KDE on Fedora and it's great but getting the itch to try out something new. Void Linux maybe.

KDE is going to take over the world. It already took over the browser world (yay konqueror), with the SteamDeck leading the way it's going to take over the consumer peripheral world as well.

Absolutely my favourite too. KDE Plasma is the best all around desktop environment. Very flexible and customizable so you can tune it to emulate any other desktop environment, or just make it into something completely of your own. Also packed with features and nice little thoughtful things no other desktop has. Absolutely love the powerful window management features (although i still miss some tiling features and I miss tabbed windows ala BeOS). Activities features to separate environment for work [projects] and home is also nice and would love to see it extended and supported in more applications. Despite all these powerful features and configurability it is still one of the most light-weight desktop environments, very efficient. And the KDE community is also one of the most if not the most friendly I have encountered. Great job and thanks to all.

FWIW, the few non-techie people in my life that I care enough to administer their notebooks and provide support all run KDE on Debian happily.

While I had some reservations about acceptance when I made the switch from Windows 7, it turned out that it was one of my better choices of my life, and resulted in much less work for me compared to what Windows caused for me previously. And GNOME just did not work out well for most of these people and the workflows they are used to.

I've used dwm forever, switched to kde and realized i’d been maintaining my desktop more than using it. Drivers worked, screens behaved, no audio/mic hickups.

I have recently replaced COSMIC by KDE + Krohnkite on the newly released Debian 13.

After some tweaking of the key bindings, I managed to make it behave very similarly to COSMIC.

I always "wanted" to switch to KDE for good, but I never managed to because of instability issues and random crashes, but this was ~6 years ago. Today I use it as my daily driver and I'm immensely satisfied. I've been using it for a few months now (since March according to my pacman.log) and haven't had a single problem. Kudos to the developers for the amazing work!

I've been feeling guilty for not switching to KDE for years now, because I hate fiddling with desktops. I like the defaults to be boring, and basically to be Windows XP. KDE always struck me as annoying, but 1) MATE is bad and buggy, Caja most of all; and 2) as a Redhat and a Gnome hater, I really have no right to still be using it.

Is there an easy way to get the Windows XP/Gnome 2 experience out of KDE?

It would be magic if there were a Debian package called "I don't care about my desktop, it takes me months to change the wallpaper from the default."

I do not care about beauty, I only care about stability (i.e. my desktop from 30 years ago.) If I could get WinXP out of XFCE, I would switch to that, but my attempts have been disappointing ergonomically. All of the webcruft and sparkle in Cinnamon is also very offputting, although I've been happy to recommend it to others who don't have the same irritation triggers as me.

Same here for the last couple of years. KDE Plasma is by far the best computer desktop environment and getting even better fast. Complete opposite to closed corporate desktops on Windows and macOS which are quite bad these days and getting even worse. Corporate desktop ensittification is in full swing for years now. I am so glad for the wonderful KDE Plasma desktop (and GNU/Linux oprating system in general), which still respects my basic human rights like freedom, privacy and does not try to push that Annoying Idiocy down my throat. Thanks a bunch to all free software developers for making all this possible.

I like KDE, just not the defaults which I think are horrific. I had my fair share of ricing linux in general, and have done my rounds through all kinds of window manager and desktop environments and theming engines and desktop effects.

Unfortunately, what I found was once you added plugins and themes and this and that, there was too many breaking changes when considering the whole UI system. This is not really a technical fault of KDE devs themselves, but it turned into something akin to managing a node.js project. Yes I know it you use less plugins it's better, but I want both: plugins as well as pixel perfect consistency.

I found similar issues in gnome, where it's even worse since the DE itself pushes tons of breaking changes. Note that I consider even a settings menu reorg as a breaking change.

I finally settled on XFCE, where for years now, nothing has changed. Not even one pixel. The menus are the same, the search results come in the same order so I have muscle memory like "<text> arrowkey arrowkey enter".

That's my expectation from a DE. I basically have the entire desktop byheart. And this culture seems to extend to the plugins as well, for example the various xfce4-panel plugins I use have all been pixel-perfect equal for years now. My themes and what not have never broken on me either.

Windows up until 10 also had similar properties, I had a crap ton of plugins with rainmeter, 10k+ LOC AHK scripts, etc, and nothing ever broke.

I also like that the shared library disease isn't that high in XFCE-land, in KDE installing something needed too many common k-* packages. I understand KDE gives a whole suite of apps so it might be necessary, but this also meant that I cannot use KDE apps even the ones I liked, on another DE without also getting... kwallet or something iirc.

The thing I miss the most from KDE is wobbly windows. I would kill for that feature, but unfortunately, I don't think I would tolerate breaking changes for that feature.

I like KDE (definitely better than Gnome), but their Wayland migration in KDE6 removed features that could still be implemented. e.g. I get why they don't want custom lockscreen programs now, but running custom scripts on lock/unlock was removed. That's rather unfortunate.

I have been a KDE user since KDE 1.x in Red Hat Linux 6.2, back in 2000, and used KDE almost exclusively for my Linux desktop since KDE 2.2. Right now using Plasma 6.4.5.

In all that time, I was quite disappointed to see major distro after major distro (and even Sun Microsystems back in the day) choose GNOME over KDE/Plasma as their default desktops. How could they choose GNOME when KDE/Plasma is/was (in my very subjective opinion) way better? Go figure. Still until today, and with the exception of Steam Desktop, it's disappointing to see that Plasma is not the default/preferred desktop environment in (almost?) all major distros.

So, it's really refreshing to see posts like these. I like when someone finally "gets it" and realizes the advantages and potential Plasma offers.

In case you can't use Plasma, I'd recommend (in no particular order) LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE or XFCe as adequate options. But if you haven't, try Plasma, and customize it to your heart's content. More often than not, you'll end up liking it quite a bit.

KDE 3.5 was the best Linux Desktop by far. Then they messed up with 4.0. Good to know it's back at the top.

When I finally switched fully to Linux a few years ago I decided to go with Kubuntu and overall I've been satisfied. It's customizable so I can make it look and feel pretty similar to Win98 (always my goal :-) and works pretty smoothly. There are occasional hiccups but I had problems with Windows too. It's pretty amazing how full-featured KDE is.

Just experienced KDE for the first time myself, and sent this in Slack a couple weeks ago:

hadn't used linux in a desktop environment since college, but installed KDE Plasma on my old laptop today. It's so good

might be enough to finally make me take the time to at least dual boot my desktop

One thing I'm happy with in KDE is that the main menu is still a thing. At least there is an option in many apps, such as the file manager, Dolphin, to show the menu. Unlike Gnome which is very inconsistent about hamburger menus and open buttons, KDE just sticks to the old-fashioned menu bar. In this it is like MacOS, (although if you don't use a Mac you mightn't be aware of the universality of the main menu, because screenshots of apps often don't include the menu)[1].

[1] e.g. see the screenshots at https://zed.dev/

I've tried to run KDE Plasma for years, but it's just so unstable and buggy (I also think it looks bad, but that doesn't really matter). I recently had a friend that said "KDE Plasma is great now, give it a go!" so I did, and instantly broke it by installing a theme via the official themes manager, and I had lots of smaller issues, like the Steam notifications appear above the taskbar and the Steam Friends List being slow to open. I told my friend and he said "Oh, that's KDE Plasma and not just Linux being weird?" and he ended up switching desktop, realizing so many minor issues was due to KDE Plasma.

I would have been a very satisfied Aeon user had it not been for battling gnome. If you look at my comment history, I have described the issues I have had. After about 7 months I used KDE on a friend's computer and switched the same day.

I think the best thing is that I don't have to install anything to make it work like I want, and as such there are no incompatible plugins that leaves me with a broken desktop functionality for a week or two every time there is a new release.

That is an annoyance, but the most annoying things are all the small things that just don't work. Focus issues. Multiple screen issues. Date format issues.

I've recently switched to a Windows 95-themed LXQT desktop (Chicago95) and have been having a pretty good experience. KDE is cool too. I used GNOME3 for years but tbh it's sorta just ok. Functional, polished, and slow.

During my college days (2000~2004) KDE (I think it was Fedora/RH 8) was hands down my favourite desktop. After that when I joined the corporate world, I lost touch with Linux. Few years ago (thanks to a ton of dark patterns in Windows), I moved back to Linux. This time I chose Linux Mint with Cinnamon / XFCE. When Linux Mint (officially) starts supporting KDE, I would love to try it again. Until then I am really rooting for YOU KDE developers, I have really fond memory of your tools (especially Konqueror browser/file manager it was way ahead of its times then!)

I can agree to that, KDE is very good. Sadly my hardware has some persistent issues on Linux.

Also, while ScreenTime on MacOS is very unpolished, at least it exists. I do not think something similar exists for Linux or KDE.

I have been happy long time with the Moksha Desktop.

https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/

I used to tinker with a bunch of different Linux desktop environments and had a hard time deciding on which one to standardize on because there is something to love about all of them. I suffered from major analysis paralysis as a result. In the end, I went with KDE Plasma across all of my devices because it's the most well-rounded and allows for customization without too much fuss. Fedora's Kinoite is perhaps the best KDE Plasma edition out there in my view.

Plasma 6 has come up a few times recently as pretty awesome. I havent touched it since Plasma 4 eons ago.

I'm pretty happy with budgie though. But I think I will have to give KDE a try some day.

Used KDE for years now. It is stable and just works.

It's not important enough, but I wish there was a function like in macOS that switches between applications fully on Alt-Tab, where all windows would show (I have it half-way there, "show one icon per application" in System Settings). macOS's function I think reflects old Classic macOS functionality.

I’m a Linux user since 2001, I saterted with KDE 2.2 or something. I stopped using it in favor of Gnome, XFCE and recently fluxbox over the years.

A few days ago I decided to give it a try again and I have to say I’m impressed. KDE has reached a level of sophistication I had never seen before in any other Linux desktop environment. For me the experience is almost on par with macOS and slightly above windows.

> Even compared with macOS in my MacBook Pro M2 Pro (that is of course comparing Apples and Bananas),

Missed opportunity for "comparing apples and penguins!"

I continue to be dumbfounded by programmer articles (and project pages for that matter) that would benefit immensely from leading with screenshots and videos but instead bury or omit them, opting for "a thousand words" that fail to deliver.

You're writing about desktop environments. Show pics.

> I am now using KDE as the desktop environment for my gaming rig

Any particular benefits for gaming? Wouldn't it make more sense to use whatever SteamOS and derivatives use? I'm guessing for gaming you'll want a launcher app, wine/proton config and troubleshooter apps, chat apps, apps with game controller support, and the like?

I like KDE, but every time I use it as a daily driver, I again run into all of those little issues that make it frustrating over time. Little breakages, weird Qt dependency hell, the works. I came to Mint because Cinnamon really has been built with being bomb-proof as the highest priority. The details are sweated, and the feature set is lean, so they can really focus on quality.

It's been years since I used KDE. I do recall that it had this cool feature where if you logged out and/or restarted the machine, when your desktop came back up the terminal (konsole) had the same tabs open to the same directories you were working in before. Haven't seen anything like that in Gnome world.

Funny thing is, I showed KDE to a Windows user a few months ago. She loved it, she stuck with windows for now due to "change and all".

But I am sure I could move her over to Linux once Windows does something real bad to her. She is no the fence now, but I do nor what to end up as permanent tech-support :)

FWKW, if I am ever forced into Wayland, right now I would use KDE.

I really like KDE and use it as my daily driver, but I'm really peeved that the "close" button isn't at the very top right of a maximised window. Instead, I have to hit the top right (extremely easy) and then go a bit down and to the left to actually hit the button. For all its crap, Windows really got that right since 95.

Why blur what's almost guaranteed to be RFC1918 private network info? My IP is 192.168.1.56, come and get me hackers.

"I actually can't find much difference between KDE and my Sway setup to be honest"

Can windows be arranged as tabs, i3/sway style? This is my favourite layout at the moment. I disabled tabs in my browsers, since they are redundant if my window manager provides the tabs.

I'm in the apparently small demographic that wants both a full fledged desktop environment and automatic tiling. kde used to support swapping out the window manager for xmonad but something in the upgrade from kde5 to kde6 broke that, and I ended up just switching to cosmic.

I run with XFCE for work to drive a mix of GTK and KDE apps. Personally I find the base system is slower, but the apps themselves are better than the GNOME alternatives in terms of functionality and visual appeal.

XFCE > KDE > GNOME > MacOS

For my Steam machine, it's all KDE and works beautifully.

It's been a decade since I last tried it. Before that, a lot more regularly, starting in the late 90s. I always ended up writing it off as an unimaginative Microsoft Windows clone that primarily focused on adding more settings/buttons.

This makes me want to try it for the 8th time or so.

I came back to KDE on Fedora after sticking with Pop!_OS for quite a while and boy am I happy with the move. A lovely and seamless experience. KDE team if you are reading this, please keep up the incremental and pragmatic improvements and fingers crossed, don't mess this up.

I miss good old KDE1/2 desktop :)

It would be hilariously fast nowadays and totally usable, all under like 64mb of RAM :)

The only reason I don't use KDE is because it takes too much RAM out of my PC (i work with 2gb ram)

I've been using it daily since I installed Corel Linux, which included KDE 1.

Even during the difficult transition from KDE 3 to KDE 4.

I really like it. Complete customization and control.

A few months ago, I added some basic features to Gwenview; for the first time, I was able to give back to the community.

KDE is amazing but one annoying issue is that not every ux is equal.

To be fair, mac OS x is the worst or most miserable once you venture into the areas that are either more advanced or obscure.

Windows there wins, only sysadmin tools tend to be painful to use.

Not surprised. I also switched from sway.

After half a year I'm still not as fast as with sway, but getting there. Things that were hacky with sway and macos (external monitor, screen share, Bluetooth, vpn) just work out of the box.

But yeah, it's not as pretty as gnome or macos.

I’ve been afraid to switch from GNOME to KDE because of what I’ve heard about instability on Wayland as well as Qt being more unstable than GTK. Are these concerns overstated? Should I bite the bullet and switch? I’m on Debian but considering switching to Fedora.

> For example, the network applet gives lots of information that in other operational systems are either not available or difficult to access.

On macOS use option-click on the Wifi indicator in the top bar to get a "debug" version of the menu, with all the same data.

FreeBSD will offer an option to install KDE in the base installer when 15.0 comes out soon.

> stealing up the focus. However KDE has this "Window Rules"

Cool feature, but can it block focus stealing only for slowly starting apps if you've switched to another app before the slow main window appears?

I realized I really like tiling better than floating windows and I like to manage them with keyboard mainly. Hyprland has been very good for that. Everything fits neatly, I can switch desktops and I don't have to move windows around

this is one of the most unsubstantiated claims and blog posts I've ever seen. How something can be presented as a "favorite desktop" with this little justification, and a heavy focus on a few features which provide such little value to most of the population, is absurd to me. This is not a useful feature comparison for 99.999999% of people. However, it seems to have sparked some good discussion here so I guess that is valuable!

KDE is great but for someone who wants to truly develop their desktop manager, Hyprland has been really exciting to work with. I was using KDE Plasma for the longest time until discovering Hyprland.

I’ve been a long term XFCE used(20 years) and although KDE was my first love, I stopped using it at v3? When it became a total resource hog.

I’ll give it a try on my next laptop.

Last time I used kubuntu ~5-6 years ago and it was pretty buggy. Has that improved? I'm on pop os and would probably just apt install to try it out. Is the kde version on pop os lts buggy?

I was super happy with KDE, until I found that i3 has a better paradigm for what I want. I tried Gnome on Fedora for a while now on my laptop; i don't mind it but KDE beats it in usability.

Haha, remember me my first experience with Linux through Knopix, runnable from CD. :D

Currently gnome provide my favorite UX, but I might have a look back.

I use KDE but I setup my desktop with two panels…the default launcher panel on the bottom and I add an extra panel atop with the clock and icons for applications I use the most.

switched to kde neon this year, sometimes I forget windows exists.

Just incidental (KDE is indeed great), but in case anyone is wondering, you can see similar wifi information on macOS by holding option while clicking the icon in the menu bar.

Kind of fascinating to see that "KDE is now my favorite desktop" is getting ~780 pts while "Gnome 49 Release" announce has a grand total of ... 9 pts.

So few actually really care about Gnome it's depressing to see. And seeing the release is appalling, I mean... "Totem’s aging GTK 3 base" replace by Showtime "Evince’s older GTK 3 foundation" What's to understand ? That GTK 4 needs YET AGAIN a full rewrite as porting from GTK 3 is too hard and old ? All that to impose a touch design that the majority of desktop apps devs DON'T want to follow ?

Gnome project lost itself and keep digging. Mate is decaying, I can't believe I'm writing this but KDE might be my next desktop.

Coming from GNOME, the big surprise was “no extensions needed.” Dock, tiling-ish, clipboard manager… all there out of the box.

Why not Gnome? Been my trusty pal over a decade. Can't go wrong with either, but any reason you chose KDE instead?

Would be nice if we could run KDE on MacOS

KDE is great. It's my daily driver.

I have been using KDE as my primary desktop for 15 years. I love it, it's intuitive, polished and simple.

I was using KDE, but with Debian 13 upgrade kwin crashes with every alt-tab. Had to switch to cinnamon.

I run Ryzen 3200G.

I agree, very happy KDE user, wish I was able to use it on my mac too(no, Asahi does work good enough for me).

I got a 5 year old Lenovo Thinkcentre for free and tried multiple desktops. The only desktop that had great scaling at a 4k screen was KDE. Gnome was okay with 1x or 2x scaling, but 1.3x ... big nope. Did not work out, performance was very bad.

With the end of Windows 10 support, I installed KDE Neon on my parents computers. Works fine, they can use it. Even on the Surface Pro 5 touchscreen, KDE works great.

In the past I was using Gnome (or Ubuntu's Unity) and never was a fan of KDE, but right now (especially because of the great 4k scaling), I really like it.

KDE is excellent, but these days all you really need is a nice terminal and a browser.

Could someone relate KDE to PopOS or Ubuntu for me?

I've been on Ubuntu and PopOS for the last 15 years.

KDE is awesome, ever since the plasma changes matured a few years ago its been excellent

I dont get the hype. Installed it at my Framework laptop, instead the usual xfce. Imho, it tries hard to be too smart, and second guess my intentions. Basic stuff like alt f4 doesn't work for some reason. I just couldn't bother to learn another desktop environment, so here goes xfce again

I always wanted to use KDE but found a dependency hell kind of situation. I am a bit compulsive with keeping a tidy system, and with KDE there's so much that if uninstalled, drags the whole of KDE with it.

Every time I give it another chance, usually on a new install, I find the same, that a bunch of applications, sometimes conflicting, cannot be removed.

Mate was my favorite for many years, but it seems neglected now. Therefore I stick with xfce, which my primary complaint for is having an arbitrary, unmodifiable grid arrangement for desktop icons, which I find very irritating.

I think, but can't recall with certainty, network-manager (or network-dictator) is one example of an application that can't be uninstalled without taking the whole KDE with it.

Edit: at the predictable risk of being silently stoned to death as happens every time I criticize Network-Manager, which I will always despise from here to Elysium, I love wicd. Please bring it back.

Jeeesh i said the same almost 20 years ago

I have tried to use Linux for my gaming PC, but I always run into issues. The Finals refused to run, for example.

So, I gave up and just use Windows for gaming. Sigh.

KDE is great!

After Windows 7 I jumped to various Linux distros but the desktop UX/stability always felt like a downgrade until I ended up with Manjaro+KDE. It just works and gives me peace of mind.

Once I was on a long-distance train and worked on my laptop when some businesswoman sat next to me. She also had a laptop but became visibly enraged over time. Turns out she was fighting with Windows 11 network settings, constant virus scanner popups, cloud sync problems in her office suite and whatnot. This was when I realized how much superior the Linux desktop experience already is.

kde is the best DE. only time I don't use it is in headless environments

> By the way, the crop and blur from that screenshot above ....

I just want to mention that blurring secret information is not secure. Use black bars instead.

I like Xfce with Chicago95.

it has been my primary DE since plasma released.

Favorite? Or least unfavorite?

For a second I thought this was submitted by DHH and I was ready to grab some popcorn.

"After using KDE for about a week I can say that this is the first time that I really enjoy a desktop environment on Linux, after all those years."

Wow! (about) A whole week!