I wish Pop OS would tackle KDE. It's a much better DE (particularly if you like to customize), but there are very few (if any) distributions which have an opinionated tuned experience out of the box.
KDE would be superb if it weren't so buggy. KDE is aimed in the right direction, trying to do and be all the things a desktop environment should do and be. But unfortunately the implementation is frequently deficient. Even seemingly basic things frequently break, like re-applying mouse preferences when you unplug and replug your mouse: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435113
A couple more recent annoyances, of many: Plasma looks great but frequently my panels go missing and don't reappear until I restart plasma shell. Dolphin has all the functionality I want and looks great, but frequently fails to watch directories for new files, forcing me to F5. Lots of little things like this turn into death by a thousand papercuts.
That might be the case, but is there an alternative with a similar feature set?
The latest GNOME versions are even buggier, and when it does work, it feels like a toy project compared to KDE. It's baffling to me that it's been years since the v3 controversy, yet the project still doesn't feel as mature and polished as KDE Plasma.
All v2 forks also feel like someone's hobby project to bring disparate tools together, rather than a cohesive desktop. I'm sure some MATE and Cinnamon fans would disagree, but IMO the modern desktop experience has moved on since 2010.
Similarly with LXDE, Fluxbox and a myriad of others. These are great for certain environments, but none of them can compare to the polish that KDE has, let alone something like macOS.
To be fair, I'm not bashing on minimalistic or window manager-only setups. I've been using bspwm on Void Linux for many years now as my main working environment, and wouldn't change it for the world. But when I want to stop being productive, consume content, and not have to troubleshoot issues on my machine, I prefer to use a more featureful environment with a friendlier UI. Since macOS is out of the question, and Windows is purely for gaming (and even that is going away, thanks to Valve), KDE is pretty much my only choice on Linux. Which I've been enjoying for a few months now on NixOS.
But I do wonder if there is really a DE that can compare to it. AFAIK more ambitious projects like elementary OS, Deepin and Solus are still experimental, to the point where I don't even keep track of their updates.
> The latest GNOME versions are even buggier, and when it does work, it feels like a toy project compared to KDE.
This is an interesting viewpoint. My ideal DE is one that is "invisible", so to speak, and I've found that GNOME comes closest to it. I want to launch whatever program I'm using and focus on it's window. KDE has too much chrome, too many elements, so many options. It feels too "busy" to me. Ditto its apps, e.g. comparing okular to evince. Too many buttons, too many UI elements (I know I can remove them, but I don't want to have to, and all the functionality they expose I can do on evince using keyboard shortcuts), and all I'm interested in is the document I'm reading.
To each their own, I guess, I just wanted to put forth the alternative viewpoint.
That's fair, I can see how KDE is busier. But if I wanted to use a DE that's "invisible", I wouldn't pick GNOME either. All the animations, for one, would be too distracting, though I suppose you can turn these off.
Like I said, I use a WM-only setup for productive work to avoid any distractions, but when I want to consume content, connect peripherals and prioritize ease of use over efficiency, then I prefer to use a more polished DE. I enjoy KDE precisely because it gives me all the options to customize it however I like, so I prefer having access to all the knobs to do so, which GNOME purposefuly hides. Other features like desktop widgets are a nice bonus.
KDE is not perfect; it sometimes freezes on me, which might be specific to my hardware or due to an unrelated driver or Xorg issue. This is why I wanted to know if there are alternatives with the same feature set. GNOME, unfortunately, isn't it.
I'm afraid I don't have a great answer. Right now I'm using LXQt with Kwin as my window manager; LXQt replaces Plasma and solves a lot of my problems with KDE, but isn't as slick as Plasma when Plasma is working. I replaced Dolphin with PCManFM, which isn't quite as slick either but it's adequate and seems to reliably watch directories for updates. I've stuck with some KDE applications, like Okular which has never disappointed me.
Yeah, hence my wish that somebody with strong opinions, financing and some energy would adopt KDE as the main DE for their distro.
There are some very prolific people involved in the KDE project, but from my understanding some of the largest KDE distros, e.g. Kubuntu, are conservative and slow to contribute anything.
My prediction is that Gnome is gonna leave KDE in the dust.
GTK 4 along with Gnome’s decision to limit customization is a massive step forward IMO.
Gnome will be able to build a consistent and stable desktop and developers building apps using GTK will not be bombarded with bugs caused by random user customizations, which are usually hard to reproduce, hard to debug, hard to fix, affect a small number of users, and are likely simply frustrating to deal with for devs.
But, maybe that’s not the right choice. Great thing about Linux is that if that’s the case Gnome will wither away and KDE (or other DEs) will quickly surpass it.
I'm myself using cinnamon because I find gnome 3+ too different of what I'm used and KDE too clunky. I like my software to stay simple and not overwhelm me under thousands of option
