| ▲ | lifetimerubyist 4 days ago |
| KDE has come a long way but I still find it just too buggy to be usable as a daily driver…which is unfortunate because I don’t really like Gnome either but it’s the least worst of all the real options at the moment. Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day just doing regular things but I can’t even remember the last time Gnome crashed on me. The ghost of KDE4 still haunts me. |
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| ▲ | monegator 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| I don't know man, i have a bunch of computers, the oldest one is a 2012 macbook, then various laptops from different brands (hp, dell, lenovo), an intel nuc from 2016 and a minisforum using a ryzen 7 that i bought just before the ram craze (phew) all these machines run debian trixie with KDE and i think i only ever seen glitches once, or twice in only one of them. I think the macbook. Granted, all devices run from the internal GPU, intel or AMD. The only time i saw kde "krash" a lot was when i was demoing arch in a VM, to see what the fuss is all about that distro. But i don't know if it was virtualbox, or arch. |
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| ▲ | smetj 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This has not been my experience at all ... I run KDE + Fedora or Ubuntu on laptops for years as my daily driver doing professional work. Its an absolute joy to work with and stable. If there's a hickup then its because some unrelated process is consuming all memory or hogging all CPUs (Slack, Teams I'm looking at you) which would crash any desktop. |
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| ▲ | setopt 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I get regular "crashes" on the newest Fedora KDE on a new Thinkpad X1 (from this year). I say "crashes" because it’s not the window manager or Wayland session crashing but some non-essential component of the Plasma desktop (don’t remember which one right now), so it doesn’t affect my work at all. From my point of view it basically just causes a crash report popup every 1-2 hours and says whatever service crashed has been restarted. | |
| ▲ | yonatan8070 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | For me it happens when I forget Wireshark running for a bit too long... |
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| ▲ | weberer 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day just doing regular things This is not normal. Do a RAM test to see if you have a hardware issue. |
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| ▲ | xobs 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s normal if you use the Nvidia proprietary driver. Every notification leaks one fd, so if you get a lot of notifications it’ll segfault once or twice per day. This was apparently fixed in version 590 of the driver which was released only recently: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/fd-leak-with-explicit-... | | |
| ▲ | vrighter 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | So that must be why I'm not affected. I have a gtx1080 which can't use that driver. Good to know. |
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| ▲ | cogman10 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | RAM or the GPU is faulty. Definitely not normal. I've been running plasma for over a year, there was like 1 crash during the 5->6 transition, it's otherwise been perfectly fine. | |
| ▲ | diath 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It is normal for KDE. KDE is mockingly called KrashDE in Linux circles for a reason. We're only 4 days into 2026 and there's already dozens of crash-related bugs filled in the bug tracker: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_... Even things as basic as handling the wallpapers was crashing users' desktops up until recently: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6.5-Crash-Fixes | | | |
| ▲ | marginalia_nu 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I have the same issue, only on KDE, never anywhere else. Does KDE use RAM differently than every other software? | | |
| ▲ | fooker 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, KDE aggressively caches and indexes things by default whenever you have free RAM unless you disable this behavior in multiple places in multiple applications. For example, in Okular you can tune it to choose how much of a pdf you want to keep rendered in memory, if you have a tonne of memory, this makes it the smoothest pdf viewer I have ever used. It has become reasonable graceful in giving it back when you you need it nowadays. | | |
| ▲ | marginalia_nu 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The Linux kernel does this too, yet it does not crash like KDE. At any given moment, most of your free RAM is used to cache stuff by the kernel, unless you've recently rebooted. | | |
| ▲ | fooker 3 days ago | parent [-] | | No, what the Linux kernel does instead is randomly kill user processes :) It's kinda infamous for that, and had held up Linux adoption for a decade or so. But you sort of missed the point, I think. The comment chain was about speculating why KDE could possibly crash if there was faulty RAM while other software would be fine. And the kernel absolutely crashes when there's faulty ram. | | |
| ▲ | marginalia_nu 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Right, yet it's KDE that is crashing with extreme regularity, and never the kernel. |
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| ▲ | fooker 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day You are doing something really wrong, I haven't seen a plasma crash for years. |
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| ▲ | sho_hn 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | (Plasma dev here.) I don't think it's something the user is "doing". A crash is never the user's fault. I will say it's atypical though. We measure session uptimes in months. There is probably a very specific cause that can be addressed or mitigated. | | |
| ▲ | lifetimerubyist 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If it means anything, I always make sure to send in a report when it crashes. I use Opensuse tumbleweed and update compulsively so I should have the newest package versions with all of the latest fixes too. | | |
| ▲ | small_scombrus 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Not to it works for me, but I'm on tumbleweed and can't say I'm even crashing once a week | | |
| ▲ | yjftsjthsd-h 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I'll do you one better: I daily-drive Kalpa (so effectively tumbleweed packages) and I can't recall it ever crashing. |
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| ▲ | com2kid 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Plasma doesn't crash for me but it definitely bugs out and I need to log out and log back in to fix things. That said I'm running a shader as my desktop wall paper on Nvidia drivers so I don't feel like any of my complaints are all that justified. :D | | |
| ▲ | dpacmittal 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Have you tried killing plasmashell and restarting it? That way you won't have to close your apps and logout |
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| ▲ | addy34 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm guessing this doesn't capture manual restarts? I have the same experience as the commenter below: Plasma requires a restart a few times per day for me, as the panels disappear and one monitor's (of two) desktop goes black - usually after wake from sleep. This occurs on both machines that I run it on (only common component is Radeon graphics). That said, it's a single command and not a big deal, and it's a great DE, so thanks for your work. | |
| ▲ | tonyhart7 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | could you fix when ram is full and DE would always hang/freeze in there????? (rust analyzer and java eat all my ram) |
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| ▲ | lifetimerubyist 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Editing text files (code), executing simple programs in the terminal (work is done on my Mac Studio, not my personal desktop), browsing the web with Firefox and playing the odd Steam game. I use the stock Opensuse Tumbleweed panel setup and don’t even tweak the animation speeds or configured effects. So I don’t think I’m holding it wrong. My hardware is old-ish (Ryzen 1800x and a Vega56) but I’ve had no issues in literally any other environment, use stock drivers with no customizations, no custom kernels or anything, and only with packages from the official repos, so I don’t believe I should have many major quirks. Heck, I don’t even have Bluetooth or wifi enabled. | | |
| ▲ | terribleperson 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Are you certain the Vega56 is still healthy and stable? It's possible it's just KDE, but it's also possible KDE is triggering hardware issues. RAM is also always one to check, especially on an older machine. | | |
| ▲ | ahartmetz 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Might be a driver issue, too. I remember Vega as a sort of short-lived in-between generation with especially many driver problems. Actually, early Ryzen 1800X also crashed under certain workloads on Linux, especially compilation and downloading games on Steam(!) IME - another KDE guy and me were some of the first world-wide to communicate about the problem. AMD had a hardware replacement program, maybe it's still active. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ryzen-Segv-Response should get you started. People made special software packages to trigger the hardware problem in a minute or so. There was IIRC another problem with early Ryzen, something about transitions from idle power causing instability, fixed by essentially raising idle power consumption a little with a special BIOS switch and / or playing with load line calibration. That one crashed the whole computer, not just the offending program. (Actually, crashes while downloading games on Steam might have been that one.) And yes, do run memtest (from the boot menu) for a couple of hours or over night, too. | | |
| ▲ | terribleperson 4 days ago | parent [-] | | The bootable, free memtest86+ is excellent for memory testing (not to be confused with Passmark's memtest86). I concur on the driver issues. To my understanding the Vega driver situation is actually better on Linux than on Windows (or at least it used to be), but it's never been well-supported hardware. | | |
| ▲ | dvdkon 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Vega GPUs should be very well supported, especially for basic desktop stuff, since Ryzen mobile CPUs shipped with Vega cores for many years after the dedicated GPU line. | | |
| ▲ | ahartmetz 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, I had one of these, but I suspect that the hardware is quite different. |
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| ▲ | fooker 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > So I don’t think I’m holding it wrong. I think you are. As an experiment, try a fresh VM of your distro and see if it still crashes. Rolling distros are not an exact science. They can can get stuck in weird inconsistent states because of some local modification or stagnant dotfile or configuration that is not forward compatible. That sort of thing is more likely with complex software, it's usually not a bug unless upgradeability is a seriously supported thing. | | |
| ▲ | yjftsjthsd-h 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I mean, that's still not the user holding anything wrong, it's fundamentally a distro problem. | | |
| ▲ | Oxodao 3 days ago | parent [-] | | "holding it wrong" is a reference to Steve Job's conference on the iphone 4. It was a design flaw that made the phone problematic so that's more of a way of saying "I think I use it properly" rather than "I think I use it as intended" |
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| ▲ | Propelloni 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Hmh, I'm running Tumbleweed on a Ryzen 5 7600 and an AMD Rx 7800. Like you I don't fiddle with the defaults and this is my gaming rig (I'm working on starting just into Steam). I just have default KDE Plasma to launch Steam and play my games, I do my work on a Debian Trixie laptop. I have set up TW two years ago and only DUP-ed it since then. Actually, it is more stable then the Debian machine :o I know, this is not helping you in any way. I only encountered weird instability with Linux when my RAM was not OK. Maybe check your RAM? |
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| ▲ | zenoprax 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Reminds me of when people praise the efficiency of their car: "It's great, $30 lasts me all month!". Tells you nothing about the car and hardly anything about the person using it. I have crashes on a monthly basis but I'm also pushing it pretty hard with 4 Activities, 5 Workspaces, and 3 Screens. That's 60 desktops for it to manage (granted, only about 10-15 in total actually have anything on them) with my tiling window management scripts on top of that. Plasmashell and Kwin take up 20% of my CPU on average which is unfortunate but that's the cost for my setup I guess. | | |
| ▲ | wolvoleo 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Activities are really great though. It's a wonderful idea. And I love the flexibility in workspaces too. | | |
| ▲ | vladvasiliu 4 days ago | parent [-] | | How do you use them? I used to daily drive KDE up until shortly after the 4 switch, when I moved to Mac. I've moved back to Linux starting in 2018 but went with i3. I installed KDE around Christmas to try it, and while I'm mostly impressed with the general polish (except that firefox doesn't react the same way as other windows to clicking on the frame), I have a hard time figuring out what activities are and how they're different from multiple workspaces. Speaking of workspaces, is there no way to only have it show a small rectangle per space in the taskbar instead of a big wide one (I'm using multiple screens)? That's just a useless waste of space. | | |
| ▲ | zenoprax 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Activities function best as "context domains" (the classic split is "Personal" and "Work") while preserving your existing Workspaces. I use workspaces to group apps/tasks/programs functionally (eg. "Active Projects", background stuff like music or a long running terminal task, no tiling). Some things like Obsidian or Spotify are open on multiple Workspaces and multiple activities at the same time but only require a single instance. | | |
| ▲ | vladvasiliu 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Some things like Obsidian or Spotify are open on multiple Workspaces and multiple activities at the same time but only require a single instance. Oh, you can do that? My first impression was that the activities were somehow completely separate, somewhat like profiles in firefox. Since I actually have stuff that isn't exactly context-related, specifically spotify, I thought it would be a pain to have to switch back and forth to interact with them. | | |
| ▲ | zenoprax 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Speaking of workspaces, is there no way to only have it show a small rectangle per space in the taskbar instead of a big wide one (I'm using multiple screens)? That's just a useless waste of space. I missed this one. Yeah, I have the same problem and couldn't fix it but I use a tiling window manager so I didn't need that space for anything else. I've come to appreciate the overview actually and you can drag-and-drop windows between workspaces without having to jump around. I think the best way to describe Activities is that they filter "what" is available whereas Workspaces filter/select "where" it goes. Spotify automatically chooses my "Background Tasks" Workspace when it opens and it is available on all my Activities. My task manager always shows up in my main workspace but not in my "Gaming" activity. It's a really powerful feature once you understand how it works (eg. notifications from other activities can be muted; separate file and folder views; email accounts hidden in Thunderbird, etc.) Edit: You could probably get total isolation by using the other TTYs! A fully separate user and different desktop environment even. You just need to use Alt+F{1..9} to cycle between them. For a specialized workstation this could actually be a clean way to handle it. |
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| ▲ | wolvoleo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I have one for general stuff, one for when I'm working, mainly to minimise distractions, and one to do 3D work. Each activity has 9 virtual desktops because that's what I use in the main profile. And yeah Firefox is a bit different, however you can select an option to get the regular KDE menu bar back! I've done this. And I configured my workspaces in a 3x3 grid, that way it doesn't take so much space (and also it's much easier to navigate them than 9 in a row!). This grid function is really one of the big things that annoys me in macOS (it used to have grids but they killed it when mission control came out), windows and Gnome. I need a grid, especially because I switch with hardware keys. |
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| ▲ | srjek 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Or they are just simply not on the happy path. For example, my laptop has been running KDE just fine for years, but my attempts to switch to Linux on my desktop today have turned into a project, as plasma, steam[1], discord, and sometimes kde_powerdevil[2] are crashing every time my monitors turn off. [1] Might be https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5984 [2] https://github.com/rockowitz/ddcutil/issues/556 | | |
| ▲ | Kon5ole 4 days ago | parent [-] | | >Or they are just simply not on the happy path. I believe this is a very good point! Linux as an OS is so fragmented that the number of paths are basically innumerable. Many of them are "happy" but they can be hard to find and also change from year to year. I have a machine that has run Debian 11 and 12 with no issues but 13 hung before launching the UI. Fixable from the terminal but still, super un-happy path! KDE on SUSE vs on Debian vs on Kinoite and with various sound demons, file systems, file browsers etc will surely differ in ways that are beyond the direct control of the kDE devs too. |
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| ▲ | subjectsigma 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Literally today I dragged a file to the trash widget on a panel and it crashed the entire WM. If you don’t have at least one story about this after using KDE for a year then you’re lying | | |
| ▲ | tapoxi 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I mean, what version of KDE is this? I've had a handful of crashes since 2024, but all of them GPU driver related. | | | |
| ▲ | yjftsjthsd-h 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | People can have different experiences without lying. | | |
| ▲ | subjectsigma 2 days ago | parent [-] | | True, up to a certain point. Until recently I used all three major OS almost every day for work, school, games, servers, etc. I’ve seen really bad bugs in all of them. Just spend some time looking around the Internet, Linux and KDE crash constantly. There’s also people regularly slobbering over Linux for a variety of reasons. What’s more likely, this guy won the equivalent of the computer lottery and never experienced a single bug, or that he’s one of the many Linux fanboys infesting this site? I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but no I don’t believe your shoes are made of gold just because you said so. | | |
| ▲ | yjftsjthsd-h 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Well, I'm not quite to a full year on my main KDE box, but I don't recall it ever crashing on me. Calling me a liar doesn't make your argument more compelling. Also, you're trying to move the goalposts. The progression has been: > Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day > I haven't seen a plasma crash for years. > Literally today I dragged a file to the trash widget on a panel and it crashed the entire WM. If you don’t have at least one story about this after using KDE for a year then you’re lying > What’s more likely, this guy won the equivalent of the computer lottery and never experienced a single bug, or that he’s one of the many Linux fanboys infesting this site? Nobody said they hadn't experienced a single bug until you tried to make a straw man. I've seen bugs on every desktop OS I've used for any length of time. I don't see crashes on KDE. | | |
| ▲ | subjectsigma 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Bugs in your WM can cause crashes and often do. You’re trying to pretend this is some ridiculous foreign concept when it isn’t. The two are closely linked. If KDE works for you, great. It crashes often for me. I find it exceedingly hard to believe it hasn’t crashed on you at least once when that’s such a common experience among me and my peers. I put more stock in my own experiences and the experiences of people I know than random internet commenters. I don’t know what else to tell you. |
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| ▲ | wolvoleo 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hmm I get a crash once a week or so. No biggie because it restarts itself immediately. More annoying is that gwenview often hangs my entire system somehow. |
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| ▲ | MegaDeKay 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I get into situations roughly that frequency where I can't interact with anything on the desktop. That's when I switch to another VT and systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell
All my apps are there where I left them and I'm back in business. | | |
| ▲ | wolvoleo 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Oh for me it happens automatically. And my OS doesn't have systemd so that wouldn't work for me. But in this case it's not needed to restart something manually anyway. |
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| ▲ | IshKebab 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | A crash once a week is terrible. If Windows still crashed that regularly people wouldn't be saying "no biggie". | | |
| ▲ | floitsch 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | When Plasma crashes, all programs keep running. The only noticable thing (to me) is that the order of my apps in the task bar is different. | | |
| ▲ | wolvoleo 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Huh that's funny for me that doesn't happen. Though I guess I do have most of them pinned, maybe that's why. |
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| ▲ | wolvoleo 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It just means the task bar disappears for 2 seconds and then it pops back because it relaunches. Everything else stays in place just fine. In fact the same happens on Windows a lot when explorer.exe crashes. People often don't even notice it. | |
| ▲ | speedgoose 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I experience similar windows crashes regularly on my old asus laptop. It’s likely from the asus drivers. The screen gets black for a fraction of a second and the explorer.exe restarts. | |
| ▲ | NooneAtAll3 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | you mean windows that's well known for its BSOD? that one? |
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| ▲ | throwawee 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There's other desktop environments. XFCE has worked flawlessly for me for years, though its Wayland support is still experimental. |
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| ▲ | voidfunc 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I love XFCE but I've had a hell of a time getting it to work nicely with multiple high DPI monitors. I finally gave up and went to KDE which.. just works. Unfortunate because the minimalism of XFCE is way more my style. | | |
| ▲ | pjerem 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yep. Unless you have really good eyes, XFCE is unusable on a 4K screen. On the same screen, KDE at 150-175% is glorious at providing both more real estate than 1920x1080 while being crispy. | |
| ▲ | fooker 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Try LXQT :) |
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| ▲ | shmerl 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I use it as a daily driver. There are bugs, but nothing deal breaking lately. |
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| ▲ | spiffytech 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is my experience too. Tried again just this week. Zero issues with Gnome or Cosmic (so likely not hardware issues), but an-least-daily Plasma crashes. |
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| ▲ | flohofwoe 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| FWIW Plasma 6 is running stable and fast for me (via vanilla Kubuntu on a somewhat recent Intel Meteor Lake laptop), best experience I had with desktop Linux all the way back to the late 90s, and especially on a laptop (the touchpad finally doesn't suck anymore compared to Macs). It's also the first time where I think the overall experience is vastly better than running Windows on the same machine. |
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| ▲ | Zardoz84 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| ????
I have using KDE plasma as mainly driver for years.
I remember having big issues in the KDE 4 era.
KDE 5 ran smooth and KDE 6 + Wayland it's amazing. I don't had any issues or problems like you described. |
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| ▲ | Kuinox 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Coming from windows and starting to use KDE 6 since a few days, I wouldn't call it amazing.
It's usable, but far from amazing. |
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| ▲ | thaumaturgy 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah, I've been running Plasma as a daily driver (and without a fallback OS) for around 8 years now without this kind of trouble. I routinely run for months between reboots, and when a reboot happens, it's usually because I did a dumb. I helped someone else earlier today with an unstable Linux laptop, it turned out there was an amd/gpu/drm issue that was crashing Wayland in the background. My first bet would be that you've got something similar going on -- a hardware or device driver problem. You've crawled through journalctl and the like, I assume? |
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| ▲ | dman 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| What distro, what distro version and what hardware (ie gpu, ram etc)? |
