I recently installed KDE Plasma to my Debian system after using Gnome my entire life. I still quite enjoy gnome, but I think that its workflow is better suited to a mobile system like my laptop.
Using Plasma on my desktop system has been revolutionary - there is a stupid amount of functionality in here. In particular, widgets, themes, and activities are just so well implemented for the most part - I really feel like I can tailor the GUI to my needs and wants, and I think this is an enormous part of what is making Linux a truly modern OS when compared to proprietary alternatives.
The more I tweak things, the more the system feels truly like MY system - something that I don’t think I could make work with proprietary software.
I was not a big fan of the splash screen until I found out that, of course, it can be disabled or customized as well - so now I find myself making vector graphics to customize that as well haha.
My only real regret is that having been on Gnome originally, some Gnome stuff can get in the way (though I do still kind of like using GDM instead of SDDM). Whenever I should do some big update/upgrade I am for sure installing plasma from the get go.
As someone who is new to KDE overall, and particularly with a system that has Gnome still partially installed, if there is anything I should know, I would appreciate it. Furthermore if anyone has any favorite widgets and whatnot, I would love to hear about them as well.
Thank you
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Avoid comparing and/or disparaging various desktop environments, distros, and/or other FLOSS projects. This instance is for discussing the KDE community and the software it produces, and not about pointless flamewars between open source projects.
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Oh come on. He’s just stating his preference.
No problem with stating your preferences. Well-reasoned, respectful, compassionate and well-researched criticism is also okay.
It’s a warning for the rest of you. People who start banging on how they hate X, Y or Z or how P, Q, and R sucks will have their comments removed. Sorry.
Bonus advice: if you find a reproducible bug (i.e. it always happens in the same or similar circumstances), don’t whine about it here. Go and report it so our volunteer developers can solve it for you and others. That is what taking control looks like: you get to contribute to improving the software.
Alright dude. If that’s the way you think it should be. I think your tone is off, not the other way round.
Sorry.
The tone is that of a… er… dude who has to moderate this and 4 other forums day in and day out, while few people bother to read the sidebar to learn what the rules are and then complain when their stuff gets erased 🤷 .
Because that’s totally same thing as a desktop environment?
@Thaurin
No, it obviously isn’t… or this is how it seems. But for some (fiery) people, their opinion on everything (doesn’t really matter what) has a tremendous importance, and it 𝗺𝘂𝘀𝘁 be made clear to the others🥊This is a KDE community. I would expect discussing desktop environments would be on topic here, including comparing them to others. Starting a political discussion here would be off topic.
@duha @Thaurin @Bro666 nice, thanks duha for unsuspending.🖖
Hmmh, I’ll keep it personally dormant for the time being, tho until I make up my mind if I really want to participate in the forums again. In the end being reported and getting suspended was a highly demotivating experience.
I 'll be here on the :runbsd: BSD side of the fediverse, enjoying oldskool Demoscene stuff, and will post about my experiences with daily driving kde plasma on FreeBSD.
Anyway, thanks for the effort, and sorry about the hassle. Keep up the good work.👍
Yup! Running Gnome on my laptop is dreamy, but on my 6-screen desktop it’s a mess - ends up feeling like a huge phone. KDE handles the desktop perfectly, tho!
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I followed a similar path. When I was on Gnome I hated plasma. When Gnome 3 dropped I tried a bunch of stuff like Cinnamon, Budgie, Xfce, Lxde, etc. and settled on Plasma which has only continued to be great over the hears. I value the tweaks and the fact that it can be configured 100% desktop centric without a bunch of touch/convergence stuff getting in the way.
Yea and at that, if you do want touch capability, Plasma is also pretty good for that as I understand it as well haha.
I learned that the least you customize it, the less you’ll have problems. But that goes with anything in Linux, really.
I agree about SDDM, it’s an unexpectedly sore point for Plasma. I hear that they’re working on an in-house replacement for it and it honestly can’t come soon enough
I don’t use it myself - I’m more a keyboard guy, and use lightweight tiling WMs - but my wife’s laptop is running KDE and Plasma. I have to say, whenever I go into the machine to do maintenance, I’m surprised at how far KDE has come. It looks polished, professional, and attractive; there are no glitches or weirdness (that plagued Plasma in the early years), it’s smooth, and just… really nice. Really nice. I wouldn’t hesitate to install it on any computer for friends or family, distro choice notwithstanding. Not sure how it would run on a resource starved ARM micro computer; I might still think twice about that, but given that you can get a reasonably powerful, 12-core AMD mobile CPU-based mini with 16GB RAM for, like, $300 on Amazon, I can’t imagine why anyone would try to run a desktop on Pi anymore anyway.
I had the same feeling - I still disregarded other choices in favor of XFCE on my little home server since I mostly interact with it over ssh anyway and didn’t need all the other functionality others have for it.
Welcome to KDE Plasma land 😀
I am particularly happy that you’ve mentioned activities! 😁
They are a somewhat under appreciated (or misunderstood?) feature that I personally find invaluable and it is great to see someone else feeling the same way
Yea, I happened across it when browsing the settings and was pretty fascinated - it adds a really cool extra layer of modular functionality to the system to make widgets actually super useful for specific cases and on the fly - or if I just want to instantly have a different feeling for the desktop.
Aww, thanks.
I friggin love Plasma!@golden_zealot
Yes, Plasma is unbeatable.
Customization is almost everything for a DE. Customization is the most important this is why I try to use as customizable as possible software (not forgetting about privacy, sure), like #VivaldiBrowser , #linux and anything else like that 🤩Yes, I agree - I am also using Vivaldi for very much the same reasons.
I love plasma and now daily driving it for every system except games… Do agree I wish they’d make the splash screen more attractive, but like you said can kinda change it however you want so I just deal. Not a huge fan of the very pink lockscreen and I did change that. Once in a while it doesn’t catch the change and I end up with the default again for a session.
When I first installed it I was a little worried because I thought it broke my games, but then I quickly realized that Valve had updated their Proton release so all I had to do was roll back 1 version and everything started working again.
Proton is AMAZING! My issue was the window manager because I have dual monitors with different refresh rates I could just never get it to work right.
The other thing I ran into was that I couldn’t find anything that worked quite as well as Voicemeeter.
So until I get those two things figured out my gaming rig is still on Windows. I am amazed at how far we’ve come though. Even my work applications are compatible with linux now.
Ah yes, I also had to leave Voicemeeter behind when I switched. I’m aware that there are some softwares available that purportedly fill that gap (JACK Audio Server was one if I recall correctly), however I don’t think I could figure them out. Voicemeeter was really quite good as far as simplicity went.
I’m not sure if its my hardware or if I’m doing something wrong but I’ve tried Plasma several times and its just so buggy I end up going back to Gnome.
The most recent attempt I had a plasma process that kept kicking off by itself and maxing out my CPU.
What sort of hardware are you running? I’ve been converting some old computers at work in our “Business Centers” to Linux with Plasma and have not experienced anything like you’re describing. They range from pentium dual cores from like 2011 up to 6th gen i5s, and all of them have been working great.
Its a Lenovo Legion with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800h and a NVIDIA 3070 GPU.
Ive had issues with wayland memory leak on old nvidia gpu. Worked fine under x11.
I use Plasma now, but I miss the cohesiveness provided to developer by Gnome’s Human Interface Guidelines, the result is a vastly unified design language across core, circle and some other 3rd party apps. Plus, I appreciate that their design language is very simplistic and easy on the eyes. While Plasma tends to be more condensed and explicit even for non primary features, while on GNOME, secondary features tend to be hidden from plain sight.
That said, Plasma has been faster to adopt some gaming and design related features due to their collaboration with Valve and from what I’ve read in the fediverse, they are more open to other people’s opinions.
There were a few Figma mockup leaks that looked FREAKING amazing in these regards, but that mockup has been taken down by KDE and is no longer public. I can’t even find screenshots now. If that mockup ever becomes real, I won’t miss GNOME at all.
That said, GNOME is freaking amazing, I had an awesome time with it, and it’s a perfectly valid option.
I feel the same way about Gnome. But I really hate the path they took for the change in the desktop paradigm. It feels very much limiting and empty. More fit for a tablet, as others mentioned.
I didn’t feel that way at the time. What I perceived was that they expected me to make more use of my keyboard. I can totally understand why that can look more mobile centric when some features are not overly clear on how to interact with them with a mouse.
Regarding the UI, the padding between elements and overall simplicity or clear space is definitely not for everyone. But it sure is for me. However I understand how other users might want to make more use of their screen real estate. In my case, I just want the UI to focus on the main things I use.
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