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.

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BoxOfRain 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

KDE is my daily driver at home and work now, it really is fantastic!

One minor thing I love is how the old-school wobbly windows, desktop cube etc are still something you can toggle easily.

	▲	zepolen 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		"old-school" ... I remember when they were the hot new thing...

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pndy 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Coming from GNOME, I was pleasantly surprised that many GNOME extensions I would rely on had equivalent feature functionality built into KDE

Recently I changed distro along with DE and ho boy, my initial customization and polishing in KDE was way shorter to anything I did before in Gnome or Xfce. In order to have a "regular" desktop paradigm workflow there I had to get variety of extensions to revert back or patch up doubtful design, usability decisions.

The only place I was satisfied with Gnome was on laptop - there it surprisingly fit perfectly. Not the vanilla version of course because it still needed some extensions.

Looking across the years, I don't know what's the big masterplan of Gnome devs but it seems it's not building a desktop environment for users but some weird convergence solution that they probably aim at corporations. Not sure for what purpose tho. People here mentioned on a few occasions how hostile that team is against users, their suggestions and complains.

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ktpsns 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is exactly also my story. Was a long term XFCE user (this was long before lxde became popular) because Gnome/KDE felt too heavy for my old computers. These days, KDE still has the silly loader window (no other DM has it) but oh boy the features you get once it is running are outstanding.

This is not only plasma, but all the applications are top-notch quality. Just to name a few: Krita, Kate, the office suite.

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yjftsjthsd-h 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Was a long term XFCE user (this was long before lxde became popular) because Gnome/KDE felt too heavy for my old computers.

Apparently, recent KDE versions are actually one of the lightest resource DEs available, which has been great.

	▲	baobun 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		IME[0], that's only true for the X11 session, which is snappy, while the Wayland flavor feels sluggish and uses more CPU. Some distros are switching to Wayland by default so might be worth trying both and see what runs best on your machine. [0]: Possibly hardware-related? Older Intel mobile 4c here.

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encom 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>silly loader window

I'm not sure what you mean, but if you're referring to the startup splash screen (which I also hate), you can just turn that off in system settings.

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foresto 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Another echo here. Xfce was my beloved desktop until Gtk 3 started transforming it with design elements that hate me. Plasma is my new home, and after some tweaks, I'm pretty happy with it.