I haven't touched KDE in maybe 15 years. I just always defaulted to Gnome when I'm on Linux desktop. But this looks more macOS like. Just curious, is there any reason I should try KDE today?
KDE dev here. From a developer perspective, something I really love with Plasma (the 'new' branding for KDE) is that it's really modular by design. Everything on the screen is pluggable with a very simple api and can theoricaly be be swapped out or experimented with. This includes the widgets but also the visual effects. For example, Marco (a prominent Plasma hacker) just worked on a new basic tilling extension and with a public api that allows other to build more advanced tilling scripts: https://notmart.org/blog/2022/10/kwin-and-tiling/
From an user point of view, I often try to not change too much default settings, but there are some really nice feature I enjoy. kde connect is particularly nice for the media player integration with my phone). Yakuake is a nice dropdown terminal. The wayland port is really smooth, there is a lot of features everywhere and I often make use of a big percentage.
Oblivious if you are fine with GNOME, this is also fine. We have some different vision on how a open source desktop should look and behave but we do share a dream to someday be a good replacement for Windows for a large part of the population (not nerds).
> From an user point of view, I often try to not change too much default settings, but there are some really nice feature I enjoy. kde connect is particularly nice for the media player integration with my phone). Yakuake is a nice dropdown terminal. The wayland port is really smooth, there is a lot of features everywhere and I often make use of a big percentage.
The overwhelming majority of the people I know who use KDE also try to not change too much from the default settings, but the settings we change are all different.
It's similar with the bells and whistles in Plasma; I probably use a single-digit percentage of them, but they are probably different set from what other users use. I am grateful for those who maintain these features, because I'm sure both that developing would be easier with fewer features and there is probably nobody who uses all of them.
To be fair, I believe KDE is already a better desktop than Windows explorer. My fave features are "Wobbly Windows" effect and "Animated Hue" wallpaper. But I'm a nerd, so my needs are likely different from majority of the population, I guess :)
I don't know if I'm a "normal", but I kinda hate this trend to stick everything in tabs.
For example, I hate having to jump through hoops to disable tabs in Firefox. Which means using a janky extensions that usually is able to split the tab into a new window. Doesn't always work. I also have to go and manually tweak the browser chrome to hide the tab bar.
The way I see it, tabs and whatnot are a window manager's job. I don't want to have several levels of window management, each being handled differently by a separate app.
If you want to provide tabs, go ahead, but please don't force them on me and let me disable them. I'm OK with having to modify some obscure config file if you insist on removing preferences from your UI. Heck, if I could compile firefox with a special feature flag, that would still be better than the current situation.
Also, FWIW, the latest win 11 22h2 update brought tabs to the windows explorer.
What window manager are you using? And how many windows can you comfortably manage with it? On my current machine (KDE on 1366x768 screen), after 10 open windows their titles disappear, leaving only window icons. And "comfortable" number for me is even lower - no more than 5 windows on a single virtual desktop.
But I'm a tab user, and would like to hear about other approaches.
I use i3 (standard, no gaps), so the tabbing mode works particularly well as a replacement for window tabs. I can probably go up to twenty windows open on a given virtual desktop in tab mode with no issue. I usually use a 24" 3840x2160 screen in 100% mode and zoom in the content. This works well enough even on my 14" 1920x1080 laptop, but I avoid doing "serious" work on it, since I don't like being hunched over and the screen is a bad joke.
Yes, when there are many tabs open, at some point, I can't distinguish them easily anymore, especially on the laptop. But the same happens with tabs. At least I can scroll my mouse wheel to change between them, which didn't use to work with tabs.
My coping mechanism is saving the tabs I want to keep for later as bookmarks. Getting back to them has the same kind of probability as when I used to use tabs. But the win of this approach is that I don't have open webpages hanging around eating resources.
I've also found that there are basically two ways I use my computer:
1. I'm just randomly browsing, and I am going to open a zillion tabs (say while browsing HN) but then I'll read them and close them sequentially. No jumping from one to another, so the tabs being small is not an issue.
2. Having several windows open that I all need while working. In this case, I'll set them up in some tiling setup, usually an editor / terminal where I work on one side of the screen, and multiple browser windows in tabbed mode on the other. I then jump back and forth between the two sides. If I need to access a specific browser window that's not visible and there are too many open to know where to click (which does happen, but rarely) I'll just use the jump to window function of rofi in fzf mode where I type in a part of its name and press enter. This isn't perfect, but it works well enough for me. Since i3 doesn't have an included "go back to previous window", I had to hack this on my own [0]. This could also be implemented by using window marks, though I've never tried that.
> Also, FWIW, the latest win 11 22h2 update brought tabs to the windows explorer.
Ah right, I remember reading that and noting that they always seem to playing catch up with KDE Plasma’s features. I doubt I have this update yes, but someday my work’s IT will thrust it upon us.
This is one of the thing that (surprisingly, to me) I miss on other operating systems. Yakuake manages to be featureful, stay out of my way, and integrate perfectly with the default terminal emulator for my environment all at the same time.
I'd come to take the availability of such a dropdown terminal for granted on Linux, but it turns out that most dropdown terminal solutions are quite clunky, slow, or not well integrated compared to good ol' Yakuake.
If there are any Yakuake or Konsole contributors browsing the thread: thank you for your work!
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I'm mostly a Windows user and terminal Linux user, but at odd times I find myself on Linux desktop. I'm currently fine with Windows 10, but since I have my task bar at the top of my screen - for accessibility reasons - I don't want to update to Windows 11. So IMHO my Windows future is unsure, that's why I'm looking at alternatives whenever I can.
I was just very curious and was hoping that someone like yourself responded to my question. You have peeked my interest and I will try and play with KDE in the near future. Thanks!
I've always had a soft spot for KDE but haven't actually used it much in the last decade because I kept running into show-stopping bugs.
But this week I decided to try out the latest KDE plasma release on Debian testing and it's all going quite well so far. I love having the ability to configure things how _I_ want them to be, while adhering to a more traditional desktop experience.
The easiest way to try out the latest KDE release is to download Neon (https://neon.kde.org), flash it to a thumb drive, and boot it up.
If you like MacOS, you might be presently surprised with the direction KDE has been heading over the past few years. Many apps support a global menu (eg. Mac-like menu on arbitrary panels/docks), and the trackpad support with Wayland is almost 1:1 with MacOS (only missing Force Touch). I'm very happy with how things have been headed recently, and have been using it ever since GNOME 40 dropped.
I love the look and feel of macOS and other Apple things, mostly because they just work and seem polished. Also since Apple moved to ARM, I'm having a hard time convincing myself to start something like an Hackintosh. That's why, when looking at some screenshots, KDE has really peaked my interest. It looks like the team has gone in the same direction.
On AMD/Intel hardware, you can expect near-Apple levels of stability and polish on Wayland. Nvidia hardware is still getting brought up, but I'd totally recommend checking it out if you're interested.
KDE isn't perfect but it's nice. GNOME is like some project that wanted to be like the Mac but nobody ever used it, they just saw pictures of it and they worked off that.
Modern KDE is closer to the experience and usability of GNOME 2 than GNOME 3 is. (And that’s a good thing.) If you prefer a traditional desktop with some configurability over iOS, it’s worth a try.
They're different beasts. In fact, they're different enough that they have their own niches. Gnome is the boring, serious, stop-fiddling-and-get-things-done UI. KDE is the quirky uncle that lets you play with his porcelain figures.
These days I prefer KDE, and I accept quirky behavior like losing a widget panel from external monitor 1 if you unplug external monitor 2, because I know it will come back after reboot/relogin. In exchange for that, I get different wallpapers for each monitor, custom/extra panels, several alternatives for application menus and taskbars, lots of widgets, and a few small QOL perks I can't remember right now.
If KDE becomes too quirky, I can always go back to Gnome, but right now I'm happy with KDE.
Gnome as DE is extremely poor in a "non-windows management" software. Native file manager has no two panels mode, no tabs, thumbnails are too small to be useful. Pdf reader is nothing in comparison with Okular. Terminal... terminal is outdated in comparison with Konsole (no ligatures, for example).
The all good points about Gnome are in windows management. KDE's WM is very flexible, of course, you can tune it as you want, or not tune it at all, but Gnome has some hard explained _cuteness_ of windows management. But no more. Because we need more applications than a cute windows management :(
Last time I tried to Gnome I had to copy a file to `/opt/`, but that location wasn't listed in it's file manager, Nautilus. Clicking on the current location didn't work and I couldn't find an address bar anywhere. On a whim I've tried to CTRL+L, which worked, to my surprise. Something like that makes your product feel extremely unpolished to a novice user. While it was probably made that way with a reason.
