KDE Plasma 5.20 Beta Released With Better Wayland Support

[cynical]

This forum is full of people stuck in 1995, so criticism is harsher towards user interfaces that don't look or behave like Windows 95.

KDE vs. GNOME is essentially churning out lots of untested customization options vs. few and better tested settings. KDE isn't manned for what they're trying to achieve, and the "community" that praises it so much seems unwillingly to test and report bugs, so things will stay the way they are despite the sterile "criticism" directed towards either one.

Yeah, you nailed it. I think both DEs are great, but it makes sense that if you have fewer features, you can spend much more time on polish instead of preventing things from breaking.

And who cares if their DE uses 250MB, 500MB, or even 1GB of memory? Even budget laptops these days come with 8GB as standard, and having something as critical as your system UI use 1/8 of your memory seems reasonable.

If you have a desktop with 16/32/64GB, wouldn’t you rather have a DE that uses more memory but crashes less because some parts are written in a managed language?

[skeevy420]

This forum is full of people stuck in 1995, so criticism is harsher towards user interfaces that don't look or behave like Windows 95.

KDE vs. GNOME is essentially churning out lots of untested customization options vs. few and better tested settings. KDE isn't manned for what they're trying to achieve, and the "community" that praises it so much seems unwillingly to test and report bugs, so things will stay the way they are despite the sterile "criticism" directed towards either one.

KDE has another downside over GNOME related to being manned and that's the amount of distributions that support it in a quality manner. Most all Debian/Ubuntu and based have horrid at best support usually due to a combination of Debian's update policy and Ubuntu focusing on GNOME. There goes 2/3s of all Linux users with substandard KDE support giving bug reports that might as well not matter. From there, what do we have that's mainstream and focuses on KDE? Manjaro, OpenSUSE, and KDE Neon. That's it. And I'm pushing it with Manjaro since XFCE is their primary edition. Sort of with OpenSUSE since they're split with one OS using the LTS version and another OS using the up-to-date version.

And that brings up another possible downside to KDE -- they have less manpower combined with having two versions so they have 4x the work when compared to GNOME devs that have more people and are funded with IBM's wallet.

And I'm not that stuck in 1995. I'd actually like it if KDE would adopt a hybrid SSD/CSD interface with a dynamic topbar or taskbar widget to hold the traditional app menu (File Edit Help). What GNOME/GTK3 does with the CSD style doesn't look that bad, I'm just not the biggest fan of how they use icons for everything or all the space they waste with padding.

[aksdb]

And who cares if their DE uses 250MB, 500MB, or even 1GB of memory? Even budget laptops these days come with 8GB as standard, and having something as critical as your system UI use 1/8 of your memory seems reasonable.

If you have a desktop with 16/32/64GB, wouldn’t you rather have a DE that uses more memory but crashes less because some parts are written in a managed language?

I care. I would hate that. I like my software optimized. Wasted RAM means I can open one, two or three programs less. I don't want to constantly upgrade my hardware just because developers get more lazy (looking at Electron here).

The desktop environment is a means to an end. I need some interface to interact with the computer, but I only need that to start and manage the programs that perform my actual tasks. So the DE should be as small as possible while offering as much assistance as possible. KDE currently hits that extremely well. It's small (in regards to resource usage) yet has VERY MUCH to offer.

[motang]

I have changed my windows decorations by installing a decoration called Windows-K10 so I can have big rectangle-shape windows control buttons like in Windows because I don't like the default small round ones too much since I'm slower to click them.
Does this change mean that from now on some badly written GTK programs like Remmina and Wraith Master for example will stop changing the windows control buttons to the default small round ones and display the ones that I have chose like all the other apps ?

Yes. Take a look at this.

[gbcox]

KDE has another downside over GNOME related to being manned and that's the amount of distributions that support it in a quality manner. Most all Debian/Ubuntu and based have horrid at best support usually due to a combination of Debian's update policy and Ubuntu focusing on GNOME. There goes 2/3s of all Linux users with substandard KDE support giving bug reports that might as well not matter. From there, what do we have that's mainstream and focuses on KDE? Manjaro, OpenSUSE, and KDE Neon. That's it. And I'm pushing it with Manjaro since XFCE is their primary edition. Sort of with OpenSUSE since they're split with one OS using the LTS version and another OS using the up-to-date version.

And that brings up another possible downside to KDE -- they have less manpower combined with having two versions so they have 4x the work when compared to GNOME devs that have more people and are funded with IBM's wallet.

And I'm not that stuck in 1995. I'd actually like it if KDE would adopt a hybrid SSD/CSD interface with a dynamic topbar or taskbar widget to hold the traditional app menu (File Edit Help). What GNOME/GTK3 does with the CSD style doesn't look that bad, I'm just not the biggest fan of how they use icons for everything or all the space they waste with padding.

I can't speak for any of the distributions you listed but Fedora is definitely a mainstream distribution and it has decent KDE support and an active community that reports bugs. I use KDE heavily every single day and haven't noticed any issues. Has been working perfectly fine for me. Does that mean bugs don't exist?, of course not, but I would venture to guess that most people aren't experiencing issues. As far as the previous comment about the Windows like interface... to state the obvious... that is what the vast majority of people like and use. I haven't spoken to anyone who likes the default Gnome interface, and the people I know that do use Gnome install a bunch of extensions to make it look like... wait for it... KDE or Windows. The Gnome designers jumped the shark with their interface "vision". Many years later and now they're trying to fix the extensions Frankenstein monster they created to keep the villagers from storming the gates. Good luck with that.

[andreduartesp]

SDDM in a window bug:
- You log out
- KWin crashes while logging out and somehow it survives (rather than being killed by SDDM restarting)
- KWin restarts itself and the magic cookie is ignored
- KWin takes over the X session (which runs SDDM) and turns SDDM in a window

I'll post a video of the issues later

Have you reported this bug to developers? Complain about bugs in some random forum will never help to it be fixed, mainly in a post about another software.

[angrypie]

KDE has another downside over GNOME related to being manned and that's the amount of distributions that support it in a quality manner. Most all Debian/Ubuntu and based have horrid at best support usually due to a combination of Debian's update policy and Ubuntu focusing on GNOME. There goes 2/3s of all Linux users with substandard KDE support giving bug reports that might as well not matter

The issue here is "opinionated" distros patching everything and introducing bugs rather than KDE itself. They can't control that unfortunately, but you can always file bugs against the distro and try to stop them from ruining stuff for you.

Years ago, when I tried openSUSE for a while, their KDE 4 had some weird bugs that I couldn't reproduce on Fedora, a distro that (mostly) avoids patching stuff all over, and when they do it's a small modification like adding "Konsole" to a context menu for the desktop.

[angrypie]

I care. I would hate that. I like my software optimized. Wasted RAM means I can open one, two or three programs less. I don't want to constantly upgrade my hardware just because developers get more lazy (looking at Electron here).

The desktop environment is a means to an end. I need some interface to interact with the computer, but I only need that to start and manage the programs that perform my actual tasks. So the DE should be as small as possible while offering as much assistance as possible. KDE currently hits that extremely well. It's small (in regards to resource usage) yet has VERY MUCH to offer.

How much RAM does a web browser use nowadays? About 1-4GB depending on the browser and how many tabs you have open and extensions you installed. You should also account for VRAM since they're all GPU-accelerated (I've seen 1GB from browser usage alone). A DE using 800MB is a drop in the ocean.

[skeevy420]

I can't speak for any of the distributions you listed but Fedora is definitely a mainstream distribution and it has decent KDE support and an active community that reports bugs. I use KDE heavily every single day and haven't noticed any issues. Has been working perfectly fine for me. Does that mean bugs don't exist?, of course not, but I would venture to guess that most people aren't experiencing issues. As far as the previous comment about the Windows like interface... to state the obvious... that is what the vast majority of people like and use. I haven't spoken to anyone who likes the default Gnome interface, and the people I know that do use Gnome install a bunch of extensions to make it look like... wait for it... KDE or Windows. The Gnome designers jumped the shark with their interface "vision". Many years later and now they're trying to fix the extensions Frankenstein monster they created to keep the villagers from storming the gates. Good luck with that.

I mean distributions with KDE on their front page. Fedora's KDE support is extended to their Spins which is why I didn't include them. I didn't notice any major bugs on their implementation of KDE last time I used it around 5 or 6 months ago. On a personal level, I'd be more keen to using Fedora KDE if Fedora wasn't Red Hat Beta.

As for the interface...yeah, that's what I do to GNOME too. I'm not really into the mobile based appearances for a desktop. Mobile includes laptops with 13" screens that are better suited to full screen programs versus multiple floating windows.

angrypie
That's why I've always been partial to Arch. Just enough patching to make things work together.

[gbcox]

I mean distributions with KDE on their front page. Fedora's KDE support is extended to their Spins which is why I didn't include them. I didn't notice any major bugs on their implementation of KDE last time I used it around 5 or 6 months ago. On a personal level, I'd be more keen to using Fedora KDE if Fedora wasn't Red Hat Beta.

As for the interface...yeah, that's what I do to GNOME too. I'm not really into the mobile based appearances for a desktop. Mobile includes laptops with 13" screens that are better suited to full screen programs versus multiple floating windows.

angrypie
That's why I've always been partial to Arch. Just enough patching to make things work together.

Yeah, the spins are really all about initial installs and to try it out with the Live images. You can easily add any supported desktop after the fact with a simple DNF command. As far as being a Red Hat beta... it's indisputable that Fedora has an upstream role to RHEL, but the term beta is really an incorrect generalization. There are many things that Fedora implements which will most likely never land in RHEL and vice versa. Fedora has it's own separate organization and makes it own decisions. Fedora tries to stay on the leading edge without being the bleeding edge - and if you look at the mailing lists you'll see many internal discussions about various implementations. GNOME has turned into a case study of what happens when someone refuses to accept they made a bad decision and then doubles down.