Big thanks to Niccolò Venerandi all his work on this video! www.youtube.com/@niccoloveslinux Also, to WonderShare for making this possible. Try EdrawMax For Free: bit.ly/3Y9D43P
@@adriancoanda9227 it depends on what kind of problems we're speaking about. Most of what I was reporting about is not that KDE as a desktop environment wasn't functioning at all :) none of that kind. It was more about glitches, smaller bugs, UI/UX issues in different K software
@alx8439 ah trully y saw some forums regarding those issues, but somehow, together with my hardware software setups, y never experienced any sort of bugs, and y always run bleeding edge maybe some folks messed with config files and inserted unsupported commands but yeah you are right it is wery actively maintained
Me as well! I reported some smaller bugs that were affecting me and I was really positively suprised that they well pretty much gone the next version in. Most of them related to stuff like fractional scaling and PLASMA_USE_QT_SCALING which i always prefer to use and would love to be turned on by default (which seems to be the goal)
KDE is probably the least toxic online community I've been a part of. They are welcoming and there are a lot of helpful people who'll guide you when you have a big problem, a small bug or a new idea. Just this is a huge reason to choose KDE over commercial software.
I like that things work as they should in a straight forward way out of the box. I don't know how many times I have switched to gnome and basic things were way too complicated or just didn't work.. split view in dolphin is one thing I feel like I have to have now,, lol
That’s both an advantage and a deficiency, I.e. the Open Source community will sometimes force changes on people. A company I know used used a popular Open Source Unix variant. It supported 32-bit operating systems. The world changed to make 64-bit systems predominant, and the claim was the 32-bit OS would work seamlessly. It did not work on 64-bit systems. The init process had a bug that would make the system randomly crash after being up a while. A bug was filed. It was ignored. People were told to upgrade to the 64-bit system. This meant a major port of the product. It also would force users with new computers to upgrade their operating system, and thus Lise all their current installations. And, so companies, and commercial users, often avoid Open Source, because it’s risky. A commercial company will agree to support them, at least some companies do that. The bug I mentioned wasn’t fixed for years. I expect it never got fixed. I do support Open Source, and even have released some Open Source code. It will just never replace some commercial code anytime soon because there’s no guarantee of support.
@@technowey That’s nothing inherent with open source though, but more with (lack of) commercial backing for those particular projects. Community projects will not replace commercial ones for enterprise solutions, I agree with that one. But there’s no reason why open source wouldn’t work for commercial software. (Except for the fact it’s very difficult to sell open source software, unless you’re in the business of selling official support to businesses)
I love KDE and if I hadn't become a huge tiling WM / build your own desktop fan I would be using it. I do have two major gripes with it though. It's fragile. It's very easy to get strange behavior that you just can't get rid of, especially when themeing. Which leads to really my biggest gripe with it: Resetting it back to complete default settings is nearly impossible. Settings are all over the place and even trying to exhaustively delete all of them often doesn't get you there. All settings (including KDE apps) should be in a structure under one single folder so it can be removed, so it regenerates. Or a pre-built function to do it.
Same ID be using it if I didn't get into i3 gaps.. Putting icons on the Taskbar is a bit weird like I don't remember what they're called but like you have to mess around do you want the one that doubles when you open it or the one that doesn't and you don't know until you try. And then if I start using i3 on the same install and change things with lxappearence or whatever it'll mess up a lot of stuff in kde. I still use a lot of the applications tho despite the amount of dependencies
@@morganb900 me either, I put clock center bottom in "long format" an italic font for clock and that's about all I do, I am happy with it as-is.. but I would probably use tiling if it was included out of the box and had a easy to use quick menu in system tray about like popOS..
@@B5152g Plasma 5.27 got new tiling features with predefined and customizable layouts. It's not feature complete yet (no keyboard shortcuts yet, for example) but it's on its way.
I've been using KDE for over 12 years now and the first thing I do if an OS doesn't come with it is install it. I don't see how anyone wouldn't absolutely love it just as much as I do lol. Maybe it's overwhelming for some people or something. This video was amazing, I learned stuff I didn't even know after all this time. Long live KDE!
you are exactly right, for people in certain situations it is overwhelming, as many people, myself included, do not have the time or the need to make pretty customizations, etc. But for customizing KDE is king!
Like anyone who gets into Linux, I played with all of the major DE flavors and a few odballs. Along with tons of distro hopping. In the end I have found myself defaulting to KDE regardless of the distro. I just like it better than most others. Mostly for the reasons given in this video. Right now my laptop is running Fedora with KDE.
Same, I'm quite new to the Linux world as I only recently switched after taking a Linux programming course in college. Fedora (or more specifically Nobara) with KDR Plasma has made the switch to Linux really nice as the very customizable environment has been so much better than Windows.
Was using gnome with fedora a year ago it was pretty good but changed to opensuse kde and I have found the perfect distro and desktop environment for me kde serves me the best love it
I've been using KDE Plasma for a few years now and you pointed out features I never even noticed. I'm going to have to make use of some of those (like vaults). Also thanks to KDE and everyone who's contributed to the project for their amazing work I've noticed like 3 bugs in the whole time I've used their software. (I'm literally typing this on a machine running KDE Neon)
I have 3 computers and two run linux with KDE plasma. The only windows PC is used for gaming and runs mostly KDE apps like kate and okular. I absolutely love KDE and how customizable it is and i'm contemplating switching my last windows pc to linux as well.
Having used Linux exclusively for gaming for the last couple years...I haven't looked back. In fact I had a lan for my staff just this last weekend. Linux+KDE was used due to the various hw setups. We just cloned the image to multiple SSDs. We had no stability or performance issues, just had good clean fun. Good luck doing that with Windows. The other reason we chose Linux was that we had limited internet speeds so chose linux as it's more bandwidth friendly than windows' apps all phoning home - not just MS but virtually everything you install (updates/telemetry and who knows), now multiply that by all the staff and gaming would have sucked.
I was a hardcore GNOME user for many years because GNOME is also the main Fedora desktop. And actually my philosophy is to leave everything as it was intended by the developers. Simple, clean and minimalistic. I also never "pimped" the GNOME desktop with extensions or anything like that. Then yesterday, on an inexplicable whim, I post-installed KDE on my Fedora Linux, played around with it for a few hours, and was thrilled! My last attempt with KDE must have been over 10 years ago or more, and so much has changed. And it's a real satisfaction visually. With GNOME, everything is so clunky and chunky. With KDE, I can create a very fine look, with a few clicks, nothing more - which looks so much better than GNOME on my 35" 1440p monitor. It makes working much more fun again. Today I have therefore downloaded the KDE spin from Fedora and installed my system completely fresh and clean. Even if this is not quite in the sense of the Fedora developers, who fully rely on GNOME, I think I'm becoming a KDE fanboy.
Unix-Viking, my journey was: GNOME 2 → Unity → GNOME 3 → Unity → KDE SC 4 → KDE SC 4 & GNOME 3 → KDE SC 4 → KDE Plasma 5. I've also used Enlightenment a bit. I've been exclusively using KDE for 10 years now, and I'm very happy with both, built-in functionality and my own, pretty extensive customization. I also follow news about other DEs and WMs as well, but I can't imagine myself using anything else ATM.
@@GioGziro95 Mine was WindowMaker for like 10 years -> some openbox for a year or so -> then I didn't use desktop linux for 6 or so years -> I've been on dwm for the last 3 years. But I've always checked on KDE from time to time, and used XFCE in some cases where I needed something that would work quickly. KDE is great though. I'm not really recommending dwm, there are a lot of good minimalist options if that's what someone wants. If I had to settle on one full desktop environment it would be KDE. When I need a file manager I use dolphin actually, definitely one of the best ones, and as far as I know the only one that supports ACLs.
@@demarkz I have tried openSuse + KDE each year for a week or so for the last 10+ years. I must strongly disagree that it's the "best" KDE distro. For me it doesn't even feature, I find it clunky old and mix of new and antique looking apps (like Yast). It feels like I'm using QT+GTK apps due to the lack of consistency. Neon, Nobara, Arco, Manjaro, Kubuntu all given better KDE experiences imo. To be fair I haven't tried OpenSuse KDE in 2022 - YET. Last was Sep 2021. I'd be excited to learn a few nevermind "all aspects" where OpenSuse KDE is better.
I appreciate how up to date this video is in terms of research of what the most recent plasma versions have to offer. Also you really managed to condense all of the benefits of this platform into a short video. Great job!
@Watcher Why would that be your default answer? Better that he pays a professional to do it like every other product in the world. This is the way forward if you want quality work, not amateur crap.
@Watcher Why is nobody attempting it? That seems like the real problem. In general Windows or macOS (modern) design is much better looking and usable than kde. I'm sure the market thinks so too.
I always like GTK desktop and apps more... but in recent years I pretty much switched to KDE, since is mature in many ways, functional, friendly and customizable, I can't fight gnome anymore
I've always preferred KDE to GNOME. I use KDE Connect on my Windows desktop to wireless transfer FLAC music to my Android phone whenever I rip a new CD. It's pretty great.
Ant the international with your android device like the windows phone feature where you can operate your phone on the pc even lauch the phone apps on the pc ( works only with wayland)
Yup I agree so much with this. Best desktop environment of them all. 💙⚙ Nothing comes even close. I love it how customizable everything is. And not only looks but also feel and behavior. So it is the only desktop environment that enables me to make the layout and behave like nothing else there is, or just emulate any other desktop environment if I want. Also it has so many powerful features and awesome applications. And with all this it is still one of the most lightweight environments. uses about as much resources as XFCE did but offer couple of times more stuff. And maybe the most important of all yeah the community is the best I have come across. Very knowledgeable and very friendly and accepting. Really awesome people.
The only way Plasma can consume as much resources as XFCE is when you remove Akonadi with its MariaDB server and as the result entire KDE-PIM, plus disable baloo file indexer. However if you want entire KDE experience with KDE email, calendar, contacts etc, it will bring the entire SQL database... I know sqlite3 is an option for Akonadi, but according to the KDE developers sqlite3 isn't stable and not recommended.
I absolutely love KDE, but for me it is terrible for productivity. I feel like I always get lost in making everything pretty rather than productive. (This isn't a criticism on the DE, I know this is my own fault). For now, Pop OS 22.04 is the way to go for me.
Same here, when I'm on KDE I always end up browsing for more theme, I'm always moving my plasma desktop layout around, cloning some macOS & Windows look, etc... I find myself more productive on Gnome. But to each their own I guess
But with Kde, once you set everything, you won't need a command line at all and on mobile if you intend to use linux on arm64 kde with wayland ist awesome
Thanks for the video, an amazing one like always. I switched from GNOME to KDE years ago (I’m a developer and GNOME is simply a cancer for my work and home use imho). I’ve always been extremely happy with KDE. Very stable and always up to date. Lately I just wanted to test out the new Ubuntu and I can confirm I’ll never can go back to GNOME again. Going from KDE to GNOME is like going from freedom right in the arms of limitations.
I wonder how all of the users of KDE (and all other systems, which provide enormous possibilities for customization) handle the next things: 1. New desktop/laptop setup 2. Cases when they have to work on computers which do not belong to them 3. Cases when someone has to work on their 'highly customized' computer. Sometimes, unification is not a bad thing. :)
KDE is so customisable, it's great! And the default settings are pretty good. A lot of the apps are excellent but a few are very poor, a basic/intermediate image editor for example. My biggest problem is that there are a few annoying bugs. No show-stoppers but some days I get tons of pop-ups telling me of problems that I can't seem to figure out the cause of.
I’ve recently been getting more into Linux and as a Mac user I have gravitated towards Gnome since it looks the most “Mac-like”. But the other day while making a Linux VM for something I decided to give KDE plasma a try and was honestly impressed at how intuitive it was to use and how nicely it flowed. It might be my new DE of choice
Been using KDE Plasma on my Kali Linux install for months, and I've always favored it over other DEs like Gnome or XFCE for its flexibility and easy customization, and I clicked on this video hoping I'd learn something new, and I did, particularly about all the additions I can get to customize the gui even more!
14:56 (*NOTE*: See reply by Nicco below) Missed the opportunity to talk about Latte's current dormancy (because the developer quit). It's might still work now, but there needs to be someone working on it to make sure that it works on subsequent Plasma releases.
I used latte dock for almost a year and a half but recently it hasn’t been updated and is abandoned and buggy so I switched to GNOME with Fedora 37 and so far I’m loving it
11:59 ... wow that's awesome 😄I'm not surprised, but providing such a transparent way to audit what it sent back is a great way to help earn your users' trust. Lots of other apps can learn from this.
While KDE may does an exceptional job there, the fact is, that most FOSS projects 100% respect their users. Which is one of the main reasons I love Linux in general. You just prefer the way Gnome or any other DE looks and feels? No worries; your data will be safe. Use Windows instead and the only way for you to have controll over what leaves your Network is basically to yank out the Ethernet Cable.
It's the most gorgeous and productive desktop environment in Linux world. If you want even more beauty, just install the Layan KDE theme and your DE will look even more beautiful. I don't get when someone says Gnome is the most productive DE when we have KDE.
I always hate when peps think free app means cheap or something. They should learn from this awesome community why free & freedom have so much in common.
For me KDE's customization is its biggest detriment. Out of the box it's dated - like Windows 95. I don't think many people (think Windows users) actually customize much of anything. KDE's default layout IS a Windows layout. Rather than giving the user the ability to change everything under the sun, wouldn't it be better to give us a bunch of different pre-rendered layouts like Zorin. If we want to customize them further they would make a great starting point. And please make it more modern looking out of the box. They can start with rounding all four corners on each window. Then, don't default with a menu-driven start-like button, use the more modern overview function.
I’ve always liked the versatility of KDE, however every time I’ve tried it I’ve had stability issues regardless of the distro, such as the system freezing up etc. Seems to be an issue on my NVIDIA system as well as my AMD system. I tend to stick with XFCE, as I’m able to make it look quite nice with the right modifications, and I’ve never had an issue with it.
Only one question: How on earth do you make a taskbar at the top and file menu bar directly below it? KDE just throws them on top of each other and it becomes a real mess.
Plasma truly *is* the *K* oolest *D* esktop *E* ver. Practically whatever you want your DE to be, you can do it. There are tasks where you prefer tiling, while you generally prefer a full DE? Well, there's a bunch of tiny scripts right there, and soon it's going to be an ootb option. And KRunner is legendary. 12 out of 10 stars for Plasma.
Just started using kubuntu. The configurations and notification updates is mind boggling. The system is secretly seducing you to know it better. Brilliant. Plus each application comes with a help offline manual.
Gnome is useless without its extensions, and extensions breaks with every new Gnome release. It's alright for someone who like to tinker with the system or wait till extensions will get fixed, but not good for someone who want reliable system to make the work done.
@@MarcoMissere and that's totally fine, though when Gnome 43 was landed on SuSE Tumbleweed few days after the release there was pretty much no working extensions for the next few weeks, which made the entire Gnome desktop a potato. Even Arch postpone recent Gnome adoption due to exactly that reason. In addition to that not all extensions kept maintained by their authors and getting updated accordingly.
I've always liked KDE, used it for a while as my main desktop back in 3.5, but even with newer plasma I still find myself trying it out for a while and going right back to XFCE, pretty much all the customization of kde with the widgets, custom bars, custom window layouts/etc, but just that little bit snappier/lighter weight with the UI in general being less busy/less animated. Personally, I always turn all that stuff off anyways, I hate window animations/transparency/etc. Plasma desktop actually reminds me a LOT more xfce4 than even previous versions of KDE, just everything more animated, which for some people might be great but honestly, I'm not a fan. since the pinephone was talked about in the video, I assume you mean the pinephone pro? I have the original pinephone and plasma lags like crazy on it, it does run but everything is on about a half second delay from when you actually tap the screen, I had to switch to phosh on mine which sadly is far, far less capable as far as the apps it supports goes (it's messaging app is honestly pretty bad, where plasma's is pretty good) but it at least doesn't lag on the original pinephone. I'm honestly pretty hit and miss on the pinephone in general though, it's a nice little pocket computer but honestly...not a very good phone, it's reception is bad, it's speakers are bad, and the only apps with full support for media messaging/etc in the US only run on plasma and lag like crazy.
Yeah I agree. I use dwm, but xfce is my go-to DE when I don't have anything else setup. Though if all DEs and WMs except one were going to be deleted, and I had to choose the one environment that everyone would use I would pick KDE. It's pretty quick, and customisable enough to mostly satisfy both the eye candy people and the minimalists like myself.
@@clintquasar well that's just not true at all, they idle at roughly the same usage but XFCE uses less than 2/3 the memory and considerably lower cpu utilization under actual use, all those windowing features of KDE come at a cost that adds up as you have more windows open/tasks running. There's also considerably less video card utilization, which makes a world of difference on older or embedded systems.
@@entelin Probably measuring on clean startup, w/ full compositor, XFCE allocates more resources up front and handles more worker threads, plasma doesn't until you start opening windows/running tasks. Technically true but means nothing on actual use, it's extremely easy to see the difference on stuff like the r-pi, you literally get stutters on windows opening.
My Pop_OS! kept freezing so I switched to Manjaro KDE because I've had enough of Gnome. It's gotten butterfly smooth and I didn't experience as many freezes as when I was on Gnome.
Since I have to use a Windows machine at work, I use KDE Plasma on my Linux machine at home. Thankfully I can customize KDE to look and operate almost exactly like Windows. It's a bit of work to customize everything, but it's worth it to me to have a consist workflow across all my devices.
KDE Neon Score: 1 out of 5 - How I as a VIsually Impaired evaluate a product: 1. Does it enable a Dark Theme by default? 2. Can it be switched to a Dark Theme? 3. Are the Text/Icons/Pointers large and readable? 4. Can the Text / Icons / Mouse Pointer/Cursors be changed to a very large size? 5. Does it maintain the Dark theme and large text/icons/mouse pointer througout all applications? For me, trying to read black text on a white background (in a dialog box) would be like you staring into the sun. NOt only is it painful, you see absolutely nothing inside it. I see the world like you would see the world thorugh a frosted car Window on a cold winter day. It's very bright and blurry. If someone held a STOP sign up to your window, you could read it, but as they moved further away, it would blur to a red smudge and then disappear into a world of blur. Final verdict: FAIL> UNUSABLE I was able to change to a Dark Theme with black background. No support for large mouse pointers. Installation was very painful. Does not maintain the Dark Theme throughout all applications.
KDE gets a lot of flack for being bloated when compared to other desktops but as someone who works as a level 2 tech support agent supporting windows 10 machines, my PC running arch and KDE plasma only using 1.4gb of memory is still something that makes me smile.
KDE is hands down the best. My only complaint is Discover. I really hope they put some work into that, granted I'm glad it's the least of their priorities. :D
I used to use KDE years ago, not I can't even attempt to use it because it's so bloated with so many unnecessary things. Gnome keeps it clean, simple, stable and usable
I use both DEs, having KDE on my gaming laptop and GNOME 43 with lots of extensions on my other personal laptop, and as a user of both who is familiar with both, its the little things that are hard to do on GNOME that make me like Plasma way more if honest, the kwin window rules that let you start apps automatically minimized, on another desktop, and so on is sooo good because some apps do not let you start minimized i find GNOME's workflow to be quite decent, it being REALLY REALLY NICE for laptops and touchpad users, the overview that GNOME uses is amazing, but idk KDE can just do more? likee it has more customization. Both are excellent DEs.
I like the desktop for all the reasons described but I just wish it worked better with Mint. It just seems a bit unstable and slow. Would be nice if the two groups worked together to come out with a mint option using KDE. I guess that's up to the linux mint people?
They stopped maintain a mint KDE version because they didn't have enough people that wanted to maintain a KDE flavor. I guess you could say it is up to them...or KDE fans that have the skills required to maintain it for Mint.
I love KDE But the biggest downfall is because its extremely customizable which means you can break it to hell changing a few settings. And there is no way to reset the settings back to default. That's why I prefer Gnome with Tweaks added because if something breaks you can toggle the setting off.
KDE team does great work. I realize it's not for everyone and you can spends weeks and still be learning things and tweaks. As mentioned, they do an excellent job with their app development, all of which you can use on other environments.
If on the next update, touchegg and bismuth are pre-installed on KDE Plasma, that would gonna be a dope move. So far i'm using Linux, those two feature are essential to be impelented for taste a modern desktop experience.
KDE is easily the best desktop environment, even comparing to MacOS and Windows, and QT is the only serious UI library that is multi-platform. The downside of KDE is that the KDE team will constantly chase the QT library team that is developing it as a commercial product. And also the quality of themes and plugins is really mixed. But compared to the Gnome project, KDE is levels above...
Ciao, i'm using KDE since Version 2 in 2001 or so, and right now KDE Plasma 5, waitin' for Plasma 6 in Feb.2024.. many greetings from brunswick in germany and please stay safe 🙃
KDE is great but I found that it struggles with multi-monitor support, which for me can be a deal-breaker if my setup requires it. I found Manjaro Cinnamon to be a decent substitute so far.
Hi, KDE developer here. We are aware of that, with some setups and hardware multiscreen is ok-ish, with others has big visible problems. We are putting a lot of work to change a bit how multi screen is managed hopefully fixing many broken cases. Most of that work should come to fruition in the 5.27 release.
@@MarcoMartin cool. Ya I would immediately switch if I could. I prefer KDE pretty much on every other measure. I even find the config to be more portable to new installations.
My favorite thing about KDE? The unique naming scheme is so cute! Who knew that just changing one letter in common names can create such a unique and cute naming scheme? Lol jk that's not my FAVORITE thing, I love customization and KDE just makes it easier. The naming scheme is awesome though.
Why does everyone say "Guh-nome" and not "nome"? "Gnu" is the name of an animal. Gnome is a fantasy creature. They don't have the same pronunciation structure.
I found the energy conservation works better on KDE than XFCE. That's probably something I could have fixed with applications, but KDE just-works in that respect.
I use Linux Mint with the Kubuntu desktop which is KDE. I like this one the best because KDE has the most customisation options. Also as an ex-Windows user I like that you can customise the desktop with start up and shutdown sounds and other system sounds. Something we had on Windows but only seems to be on KDE. Although other Linux Desktops do have the option of adding a start up sound but not the shutdown sound. I don't know why that is. KDE seems to be the only one that does have system sound settings apart from Cinnamon which also does. Though KDE is much nicer as it has really beautiful themes. I now run KDE as my main desktop in Linux Mint.
Hi! For 2 days I have been testing in VirtualBox Linux Mint (I am a beginner). I used Ubuntu 6 years ago for 2 months. I'm thinking of giving Kubuntu KDE a chance as well, possibly Neon KDE as well. Should I stop thinking about all the distros belonging to Ubuntu (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc.) and use KDE Neon? I really like KDE, it looks good and is very customizable. Thank you!
@@AndyTurcu I think Kubuntu is a good one to start with or Linux Mint with the Kubuntu desktop which is what I use. Debian with KDE desktop is also another option but not as user friendly as the Ubuntu based distros. Because with those you get everything including drivers out of the box but not always with Debian.
Hi, thanks for the video. If I remember correctly, latte-dock is abandoned and it's not possible to customize the mouse gestures (I guess you're referring to the ones available ONLY in the Wayland session, aren't you?).
I recently switched to KDE Plasma from Cinnamon. They are very good products, but KDE is more than a notch better. The modularity is impressive, for instance.
Once you set it up and check how powerful and how much resources it save by being modular, we'll it will use resources only if those tools are also used if not and dolphin file manager has the most services a file manager ca dream you can convert media files within the file manager vs code plugin, cloud storage like gdrive, next cloud even ondrive, and it is also compatible with windows systems, realy git integration
Alright... I run old equipment. Not ancient, but a decade behind the times (but very well maintained :-). So XFCE was always my goto given its low overhead. But I'd certainly tried all the major DE's over the years. And while I always liked KDE style, it never ran smooth on my iron. But alas... this last pulse of Plasma has made its way from my test machine (the least among them) onto all my little minions! And I'm f'n lovin' it! Spent the afternoon building out my keyboard shortcuts, and then rcp'ing them to the crowd.
Wooow, I only used Gnome and Cinnamon, KDE only for a short while with Mandriva, not since. That's really impressive, I have to try it. Thank you for this great video!
Great video, thank you. I have been using linux as a hobby for a while but am considering making the move from Mac permanently. Truth is I feel a KDE Plasma desktop environment is the best option for me but can't settle on which one to commit to. Any views or advice gratefully received and considered.
I think I’m finally moving back to FOSS operating system, away from macOS. Thanks KDE, I’ll pay a regular donation to keep this evolving system strong and competitive on all fronts.
Didn't know KDE was the UI on Steam Deck - suspect that augers well for the future of KDE. I've tried KDE, Gnome, Mate and xfce and agree, KDE is the best.
May I to add the most important reason for me, at least? It's paradigm is the one where I and most of us grew up with from the mid 90's to date. Oh, well... Even MS cannot go out of its own, even though, if my memory doesn't fail, this paradigm is a derivative from the IBM OS2 times!... People want what they better know...
Yeah, as a former Windows user, I also prefer a taskbar workflow. With the ability to minimize Windows instead of closing them. But Gnome has its own merits in its clean and uncluttered appearance and way of function. (I just wish there was a better way to change the workflow, without having to deal with broken add-ons.) I hope for cosmic, do this balancing act. Cause it's already in a good track so far.
I was on KDE for a few years, and then l tried Gnome and haven’t gone back. My other env. is DWM. I do remove some bloat that comes with the Gnome distro. I remember KDE was a bit loose back then, and Gnome seemed tighter. I don’t like spending much time on ricing.
i love your content, and i am a frontend developer and thinking about moving from windows to Linux and i wanted a recommendation on the best distro for that purpose some suggested distros but wanted to hear from ya'll too.
Depends what kind of experience you're looking for. Since it sounds like you're an intermediate user, if you're comfortable doing package management for your OS from the terminal I'd highly recommend EndeavourOS. It's Arch-based and sticks very close to what Arch does while being just as easy to install as any other distro. You can choose from basically any desktop environment, so that way you can figure out which one you like best. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking the distro is what you should be choosing for, but it's really a combination of things including the distro, and EndeavourOS gives you a lot of freedom in this respect. One important note is that EndeavourOS is rolling-release, meaning there are no fixed version numbers and when you update you will get the most recent stable versions not just of your apps, but of any of the packages that make up your OS. This is why it is often referred to as a "bleeding-edge distro", which generally requires occasional manual intervention to keep stable. Another recommendation is Fedora, which is more concerned with stability and is geared towards developers. Manual intervention is basically never necessary, since the OS itself is not rolling-release like EndeavourOS, but they treat most of the developer tools and apps very similarly to a rolling-release distro so you'll still be up to date on everything. Fedora refers to itself as a "leading-edge distro", since they are generally just behind bleeding-edge distros in terms of recency. If you want to use GNOME they're extremely stable, they also have KDE and XFCE options but I've heard they're less stable though they do have their own dedicated communities. Fedora is specifically tailored towards developers, and has many tools to make the developer's life easier, while EndeavourOS is more of a power-user distro (though Fedora is still reasonably accommodating of power users). From what I've seen online, EndeavourOS should also be better for gaming, however in my personal experience both distros are a pretty similar experience for gaming. Apart from the release cycle, since both of them generally have the same desktop environments available, main thing to consider is the difference in package management. EndeavourOS's package manager (pacman) is the fastest out there and will get packages that are slightly more recent than Fedora, but Fedora's package manager (dnf), while being quite a bit slower, has more features, many of which are geared towards developers, such as being able to search for packages based on what libraries they contain. Fedora also does not need to run as many updates as EndeavourOS, since it does not need to update OS packages as often. Both will require terminal usage for installing dev stuff, however for regular app installation, Fedora has very good support for GUI app stores like GNOME Software and KDE Discover, while EndeavourOS's support of them is unstable and could potentially break your OS so you should probably stick to the terminal for everything for them. This means that with Fedora, you will by default get update notifications, and you can set it up to automatically update stuff for you in the background, and your software center can even update dev tools that you've already installed alongside everything else, all of this is customizable. With EndeavourOS, automatic updating is not supported and you will have to do all updates manually. So with Fedora, you can get automatic updates, notifications, or you can just do it manually or through the terminal, with EndeavourOS you are stuck with doing it manually through the terminal for everything, but it's much faster. TL;DR for package management: Fedora runs updates slower but is much more customizable with how they are done, has a ton of advanced functionality for package management, and is easy to automate. With EndeavourOS it is much faster at updating, but it's less customizable, and everything must be done manually through the terminal, and updates are available more frequently which may be a plus or minus depending on your workflow. These are my two main recommendations, since in my experience both of these distros tend to be pretty good developer distros. I would recommend trying them out in a VM before installing, maybe try out some desktop environments as well to get a feel for it.
Shots fired. Let's talk about KDE's mixed DPI support why don't we... Oh wait, it doesn't exist in Xorg and the Wayland support is still pretty janky. "Janky" is KDE in a nutshell. You can massage the jank in to a usable desktop, but good luck with updates or if you have to plug in an external monitor sometimes. I love KDE, but it does have issues. Gnome is far from perfect too.
Xorg is on the way out. Wayland is still fresh. It’s that weird situation where committing resources to fixing the xorg version isn’t worth doing, but wayland is too new to be stable enough. Both gnome and KDE are facing the same conundrum. Thankfully Wayland is getting close to fully usable on a standard desktop so once nvidia completely sort out their drivers I expect these issues to dissipate over time.
Gparted, Nemo are better than the KDE versions of these apps> Cannot yet make personal storage of our KDE preferred customizations? Some of the extensions and add-ons are not very flexible.
Which part are missing on both those software ? I didn't find any missing feature on KDE Partition Manager and to be fair I would even consider Gparted sometimes buggy while trying to deactive LVM partitions. So better in which regard ?
Its been a while since using KDE, like 6 months. But my last experience was great, for the first few days. Then everything fell apart, icons from the main menus disapear, things get stuck, icons dont resize properly. Then I just end up going to GNOME. I would prefer to use KDE, but need better stability and consistency. Looking forward to it actually getting better.
There's a dolphin extension that lets you do root actions. And in the beta versions right now you can use the admin:// shortcut just like with Nautilus.
@@fotnite_ You have nailed the problem: It's an *extension* . And this is only because KDE thinks their users are too stupid to handle the tool (they used different words, but if you don't include a tool by default because you think it's too powerful you don't trust the user base and don't think they can handle it). Nemo for example has no problem with this. And I don't think their usebase is (statistically speaking) considerably smarter. The beta of which version (5.27 or 6)? I'm running on 5.26.4 at the moment.
@@KuruGDI Makes me wonder what DE you use if even KDE doesn't have enough built-in functionality for you. To be clear, I don't even use KDE myself, I'm not some blind fan of it or anything.
@@fotnite_ I don't know if Dolphin really counts as _built-in functionality_ - I would say YES and NO. YES because it comes with the Plasma DE. NO because if you (or the distro of your choice) doesn't like Dolphin, you can replace it. It's exactly what I do not understand: You have KDE as master of configurability which does not even offer you a config setting to enable such a basic function. It is not build into Dolphin, because the developers see it as too dangerous (of course a terminal build into dolphin where I can break by whole system with removing essential system files by using commands wrongly is not a problem at all). I like KDE and it's configurability. I use KDE so it's not a dealbreaker for me either. It just bothers my right to the bones that other file managers give you easy access to such a tool.
They say that KDE is the most customizable Desktop Environment. How do I adjust the size of the icons on the panel? I can't find it. Change the size of the panel by one step instead of only two? I can't find it. Full transparency of the panel? I can't find it. I can on Xfce. When I change the icon of the start menu, I've noticed that the icon is not in the middle exactly like the others (I'm a bit of a pie exactly😭) That's how I noticed it. And I must log off to change the cursor theme and when I change the fonts. Not so on Xfce. I'm not here to bash KDE because I like it because the theming is so much better. My two favorite themes, Arc dark KDE and Fluent dark theme look so much better on KDE compared to Xfce.
Size of icons on the panel: you can change the margin of the plasma theme to change the size of the stuff that's inside of it! Increase size to odd number: that would mess up icon alignment! We only allow even panel thickness for good reasons. Full transparency: you can edit the plasma theme or use one of any of those on the store!
Big thanks to Niccolò Venerandi all his work on this video! www.youtube.com/@niccoloveslinux
Also, to WonderShare for making this possible. Try EdrawMax For Free: bit.ly/3Y9D43P
Thank you so much for having me :D
top player!
hey techhut theres someone pretending to be u in your comment section
@@mytiamos Thank you, got it all removed
I know I am a year late however, doesn't kde have worse performance than gnome?
I've heard this from my friend but I am not really sure.
I can confirm that. I raised quite a number of bug reports to KDE team and all of them were actioned. KDE dev team is awesome
Awesome! Thanks for sharing. FOSS communities thrive thanks to contributing people like you 💪
Depending on the platform, debian and kali y never had any problems
@@adriancoanda9227 it depends on what kind of problems we're speaking about. Most of what I was reporting about is not that KDE as a desktop environment wasn't functioning at all :) none of that kind. It was more about glitches, smaller bugs, UI/UX issues in different K software
@alx8439 ah trully y saw some forums regarding those issues, but somehow, together with my hardware software setups, y never experienced any sort of bugs, and y always run bleeding edge maybe some folks messed with config files and inserted unsupported commands but yeah you are right it is wery actively maintained
Me as well! I reported some smaller bugs that were affecting me and I was really positively suprised that they well pretty much gone the next version in. Most of them related to stuff like fractional scaling and PLASMA_USE_QT_SCALING which i always prefer to use and would love to be turned on by default (which seems to be the goal)
KDE is probably the least toxic online community I've been a part of. They are welcoming and there are a lot of helpful people who'll guide you when you have a big problem, a small bug or a new idea. Just this is a huge reason to choose KDE over commercial software.
I like that things work as they should in a straight forward way out of the box. I don't know how many times I have switched to gnome and basic things were way too complicated or just didn't work.. split view in dolphin is one thing I feel like I have to have now,, lol
That is true.
That’s both an advantage and a deficiency, I.e. the Open Source community will sometimes force changes on people.
A company I know used used a popular Open Source Unix variant. It supported 32-bit operating systems.
The world changed to make 64-bit systems predominant, and the claim was the 32-bit OS would work seamlessly.
It did not work on 64-bit systems. The init process had a bug that would make the system randomly crash after being up a while.
A bug was filed. It was ignored. People were told to upgrade to the 64-bit system.
This meant a major port of the product. It also would force users with new computers to upgrade their operating system, and thus Lise all their current installations.
And, so companies, and commercial users, often avoid Open Source, because it’s risky. A commercial company will agree to support them, at least some companies do that.
The bug I mentioned wasn’t fixed for years. I expect it never got fixed.
I do support Open Source, and even have released some Open Source code.
It will just never replace some commercial code anytime soon because there’s no guarantee of support.
Khats krue
@@technowey That’s nothing inherent with open source though, but more with (lack of) commercial backing for those particular projects.
Community projects will not replace commercial ones for enterprise solutions, I agree with that one. But there’s no reason why open source wouldn’t work for commercial software. (Except for the fact it’s very difficult to sell open source software, unless you’re in the business of selling official support to businesses)
I love KDE and if I hadn't become a huge tiling WM / build your own desktop fan I would be using it. I do have two major gripes with it though. It's fragile. It's very easy to get strange behavior that you just can't get rid of, especially when themeing. Which leads to really my biggest gripe with it: Resetting it back to complete default settings is nearly impossible. Settings are all over the place and even trying to exhaustively delete all of them often doesn't get you there. All settings (including KDE apps) should be in a structure under one single folder so it can be removed, so it regenerates. Or a pre-built function to do it.
Same ID be using it if I didn't get into i3 gaps.. Putting icons on the Taskbar is a bit weird like I don't remember what they're called but like you have to mess around do you want the one that doubles when you open it or the one that doesn't and you don't know until you try. And then if I start using i3 on the same install and change things with lxappearence or whatever it'll mess up a lot of stuff in kde. I still use a lot of the applications tho despite the amount of dependencies
I really wish KDE would add a tiling manager almost exactly like popOS's I like the whole task manager simple control menu..
@@B5152g ik there's a way to do that I've seen it on reddit but I don't ever change, the look of kde very drastically.
@@morganb900 me either, I put clock center bottom in "long format" an italic font for clock and that's about all I do, I am happy with it as-is.. but I would probably use tiling if it was included out of the box and had a easy to use quick menu in system tray about like popOS..
@@B5152g Plasma 5.27 got new tiling features with predefined and customizable layouts. It's not feature complete yet (no keyboard shortcuts yet, for example) but it's on its way.
I've been using KDE for over 12 years now and the first thing I do if an OS doesn't come with it is install it. I don't see how anyone wouldn't absolutely love it just as much as I do lol. Maybe it's overwhelming for some people or something. This video was amazing, I learned stuff I didn't even know after all this time. Long live KDE!
you are exactly right, for people in certain situations it is overwhelming, as many people, myself included, do not have the time or the need to make pretty customizations, etc. But for customizing KDE is king!
Like anyone who gets into Linux, I played with all of the major DE flavors and a few odballs. Along with tons of distro hopping. In the end I have found myself defaulting to KDE regardless of the distro. I just like it better than most others. Mostly for the reasons given in this video. Right now my laptop is running Fedora with KDE.
Same, I'm quite new to the Linux world as I only recently switched after taking a Linux programming course in college. Fedora (or more specifically Nobara) with KDR Plasma has made the switch to Linux really nice as the very customizable environment has been so much better than Windows.
@@coolbrotherf127 Nobara is more bloat then anything you can get plain fedora to look and act like it in less then a hour...
Was using gnome with fedora a year ago it was pretty good but changed to opensuse kde and I have found the perfect distro and desktop environment for me kde serves me the best love it
OpenSuse is highly underrated.
Fedora has a KDE spin with the latest KDE version.
I've been using KDE Plasma for a few years now and you pointed out features I never even noticed. I'm going to have to make use of some of those (like vaults).
Also thanks to KDE and everyone who's contributed to the project for their amazing work I've noticed like 3 bugs in the whole time I've used their software. (I'm literally typing this on a machine running KDE Neon)
The biggest KDE mystery for me is why, no matter how I customize it, I always revert to Breeze...
After I installed Layan theme I don't change themes anymore. It's the most beautiful theme I've used in any DE.
@@demarkz Same here
I have 3 computers and two run linux with KDE plasma. The only windows PC is used for gaming and runs mostly KDE apps like kate and okular. I absolutely love KDE and how customizable it is and i'm contemplating switching my last windows pc to linux as well.
Having used Linux exclusively for gaming for the last couple years...I haven't looked back. In fact I had a lan for my staff just this last weekend. Linux+KDE was used due to the various hw setups. We just cloned the image to multiple SSDs. We had no stability or performance issues, just had good clean fun. Good luck doing that with Windows. The other reason we chose Linux was that we had limited internet speeds so chose linux as it's more bandwidth friendly than windows' apps all phoning home - not just MS but virtually everything you install (updates/telemetry and who knows), now multiply that by all the staff and gaming would have sucked.
you don't even need windows anymore for gaming unless you want to play something like destiny 2 or six siege or something.
I was a hardcore GNOME user for many years because GNOME is also the main Fedora desktop. And actually my philosophy is to leave everything as it was intended by the developers. Simple, clean and minimalistic. I also never "pimped" the GNOME desktop with extensions or anything like that.
Then yesterday, on an inexplicable whim, I post-installed KDE on my Fedora Linux, played around with it for a few hours, and was thrilled! My last attempt with KDE must have been over 10 years ago or more, and so much has changed. And it's a real satisfaction visually. With GNOME, everything is so clunky and chunky. With KDE, I can create a very fine look, with a few clicks, nothing more - which looks so much better than GNOME on my 35" 1440p monitor. It makes working much more fun again.
Today I have therefore downloaded the KDE spin from Fedora and installed my system completely fresh and clean. Even if this is not quite in the sense of the Fedora developers, who fully rely on GNOME, I think I'm becoming a KDE fanboy.
I think you should try openSUSE KDE, since it's their flagship distro and it's considered the best KDE distro in all aspects.
Unix-Viking, my journey was: GNOME 2 → Unity → GNOME 3 → Unity → KDE SC 4 → KDE SC 4 & GNOME 3 → KDE SC 4 → KDE Plasma 5. I've also used Enlightenment a bit. I've been exclusively using KDE for 10 years now, and I'm very happy with both, built-in functionality and my own, pretty extensive customization. I also follow news about other DEs and WMs as well, but I can't imagine myself using anything else ATM.
@@GioGziro95 Mine was WindowMaker for like 10 years -> some openbox for a year or so -> then I didn't use desktop linux for 6 or so years -> I've been on dwm for the last 3 years. But I've always checked on KDE from time to time, and used XFCE in some cases where I needed something that would work quickly. KDE is great though. I'm not really recommending dwm, there are a lot of good minimalist options if that's what someone wants. If I had to settle on one full desktop environment it would be KDE. When I need a file manager I use dolphin actually, definitely one of the best ones, and as far as I know the only one that supports ACLs.
Welcome home friend, we're glad you finally came to your senses lol
@@demarkz I have tried openSuse + KDE each year for a week or so for the last 10+ years. I must strongly disagree that it's the "best" KDE distro. For me it doesn't even feature, I find it clunky old and mix of new and antique looking apps (like Yast). It feels like I'm using QT+GTK apps due to the lack of consistency. Neon, Nobara, Arco, Manjaro, Kubuntu all given better KDE experiences imo. To be fair I haven't tried OpenSuse KDE in 2022 - YET. Last was Sep 2021. I'd be excited to learn a few nevermind "all aspects" where OpenSuse KDE is better.
I appreciate how up to date this video is in terms of research of what the most recent plasma versions have to offer. Also you really managed to condense all of the benefits of this platform into a short video. Great job!
KDE is just a more modern desktop environment at this point. I've been using it for two years and have to say I love it.
I like KDE, I'm using it and it's great, but one thing they should do is redesign the settings menu
Gnome is clear
@Watcher Why would that be your default answer? Better that he pays a professional to do it like every other product in the world. This is the way forward if you want quality work, not amateur crap.
I find it just cluttered
@Watcher Why is nobody attempting it? That seems like the real problem.
In general Windows or macOS (modern) design is much better looking and usable than kde. I'm sure the market thinks so too.
I always like GTK desktop and apps more... but in recent years I pretty much switched to KDE, since is mature in many ways, functional, friendly and customizable, I can't fight gnome anymore
Especially as it's less than five minutes' work to make Plasma do what you were missing in GNOME while reconstructing the same layout.
Mate, Cinnamon, LXDE, XFCE and Budgie are all GTK and good options.
Fight?
gtk was fine on kde until gtk4 began taking over apps, its visually inconsistent with gnome itself
I've always preferred KDE to GNOME. I use KDE Connect on my Windows desktop to wireless transfer FLAC music to my Android phone whenever I rip a new CD. It's pretty great.
Ant the international with your android device like the windows phone feature where you can operate your phone on the pc even lauch the phone apps on the pc ( works only with wayland)
CD? lol! It's ok to say rip off the net
Yup I agree so much with this. Best desktop environment of them all. 💙⚙ Nothing comes even close. I love it how customizable everything is. And not only looks but also feel and behavior. So it is the only desktop environment that enables me to make the layout and behave like nothing else there is, or just emulate any other desktop environment if I want. Also it has so many powerful features and awesome applications. And with all this it is still one of the most lightweight environments. uses about as much resources as XFCE did but offer couple of times more stuff. And maybe the most important of all yeah the community is the best I have come across. Very knowledgeable and very friendly and accepting. Really awesome people.
The only way Plasma can consume as much resources as XFCE is when you remove Akonadi with its MariaDB server and as the result entire KDE-PIM, plus disable baloo file indexer. However if you want entire KDE experience with KDE email, calendar, contacts etc, it will bring the entire SQL database... I know sqlite3 is an option for Akonadi, but according to the KDE developers sqlite3 isn't stable and not recommended.
Love KDE. I’ve tried gnome many times. Always went back to KDE because I find gnome frustrating to use because of the limited customisations.
I absolutely love KDE, but for me it is terrible for productivity. I feel like I always get lost in making everything pretty rather than productive. (This isn't a criticism on the DE, I know this is my own fault). For now, Pop OS 22.04 is the way to go for me.
“feel like”?
Same here, when I'm on KDE I always end up browsing for more theme, I'm always moving my plasma desktop layout around, cloning some macOS & Windows look, etc...
I find myself more productive on Gnome.
But to each their own I guess
Yepp. Overwhelming cutomization options to a point where it becomes distracting
@@ArniesTech Yes, extremes are never good. KDE and Gnome are good examples of that.
But with Kde, once you set everything, you won't need a command line at all and on mobile if you intend to use linux on arm64 kde with wayland ist awesome
Thanks for the video, an amazing one like always.
I switched from GNOME to KDE years ago (I’m a developer and GNOME is simply a cancer for my work and home use imho). I’ve always been extremely happy with KDE. Very stable and always up to date. Lately I just wanted to test out the new Ubuntu and I can confirm I’ll never can go back to GNOME again.
Going from KDE to GNOME is like going from freedom right in the arms of limitations.
I wonder how all of the users of KDE (and all other systems, which provide enormous possibilities for customization) handle the next things:
1. New desktop/laptop setup
2. Cases when they have to work on computers which do not belong to them
3. Cases when someone has to work on their 'highly customized' computer.
Sometimes, unification is not a bad thing. :)
I'm trying to think of the last time I had to deal with 2. and 3. Gosh, not since I worked as a generic sys admin about 20 years ago.
KDE is a big W for those struggling with fractional scaling on HiDPi screens and ones obsessed with handy customization
Yup the only DE I found that works beautifully but only with X11.
KDE is so customisable, it's great! And the default settings are pretty good.
A lot of the apps are excellent but a few are very poor, a basic/intermediate image editor for example.
My biggest problem is that there are a few annoying bugs. No show-stoppers but some days I get tons of pop-ups telling me of problems that I can't seem to figure out the cause of.
I’ve recently been getting more into Linux and as a Mac user I have gravitated towards Gnome since it looks the most “Mac-like”. But the other day while making a Linux VM for something I decided to give KDE plasma a try and was honestly impressed at how intuitive it was to use and how nicely it flowed. It might be my new DE of choice
you will be even more impressed when u have to use KDE apps like dolphin and gwenview for complex things.
xfce better than al.
mate is better
Been using KDE Plasma on my Kali Linux install for months, and I've always favored it over other DEs like Gnome or XFCE for its flexibility and easy customization, and I clicked on this video hoping I'd learn something new, and I did, particularly about all the additions I can get to customize the gui even more!
14:56 (*NOTE*: See reply by Nicco below) Missed the opportunity to talk about Latte's current dormancy (because the developer quit). It's might still work now, but there needs to be someone working on it to make sure that it works on subsequent Plasma releases.
There's some maintaining going on, and if I understood this correctly the latest changes and bugfixes should be packeted at a certain point :-)
@@niccoloveslinux Thanks. Will update my comment to reflect on that.
I used latte dock for almost a year and a half but recently it hasn’t been updated and is abandoned and buggy so I switched to GNOME with Fedora 37 and so far I’m loving it
@@youtube.user.1234 You can very easily make a panel acting like a dock.
I don't use Latte dock, but I have a panel/dock
@@JanSteen7870 it’s not just that. I was also using some features that were there in latte dock and not in the panel, but I don’t remember what it was
11:59 ... wow that's awesome 😄I'm not surprised, but providing such a transparent way to audit what it sent back is a great way to help earn your users' trust. Lots of other apps can learn from this.
While KDE may does an exceptional job there, the fact is, that most FOSS projects 100% respect their users. Which is one of the main reasons I love Linux in general. You just prefer the way Gnome or any other DE looks and feels? No worries; your data will be safe.
Use Windows instead and the only way for you to have controll over what leaves your Network is basically to yank out the Ethernet Cable.
i can confirm this KDE is great, especially with kde connect
I'm absolutely in love with KDE, I'm learning C++ to become a Dev of this community
It's the most gorgeous and productive desktop environment in Linux world. If you want even more beauty, just install the Layan KDE theme and your DE will look even more beautiful. I don't get when someone says Gnome is the most productive DE when we have KDE.
I always hate when peps think free app means cheap or something. They should learn from this awesome community why free & freedom have so much in common.
Look at societies, most people equate freedom with:
"I can talk nonsense, without fear of consequences."
Whoever Reading This, Beware Of Scammers Like This.
KDE is by far my favorite DE, currently running Fedora KDE.. I also like Opensuse and Arch based distros with KDE.
Same! I use Fedora KDE too!
For me KDE's customization is its biggest detriment. Out of the box it's dated - like Windows 95. I don't think many people (think Windows users) actually customize much of anything. KDE's default layout IS a Windows layout. Rather than giving the user the ability to change everything under the sun, wouldn't it be better to give us a bunch of different pre-rendered layouts like Zorin. If we want to customize them further they would make a great starting point. And please make it more modern looking out of the box. They can start with rounding all four corners on each window. Then, don't default with a menu-driven start-like button, use the more modern overview function.
kde is so customizable I tricked my Dad into thinking it's macOS
I’ve always liked the versatility of KDE, however every time I’ve tried it I’ve had stability issues regardless of the distro, such as the system freezing up etc. Seems to be an issue on my NVIDIA system as well as my AMD system. I tend to stick with XFCE, as I’m able to make it look quite nice with the right modifications, and I’ve never had an issue with it.
I understand this. Move off NVIDIA and you'll notice the difference.
Only one question: How on earth do you make a taskbar at the top and file menu bar directly below it? KDE just throws them on top of each other and it becomes a real mess.
Plasma truly *is* the *K* oolest *D* esktop *E* ver. Practically whatever you want your DE to be, you can do it. There are tasks where you prefer tiling, while you generally prefer a full DE? Well, there's a bunch of tiny scripts right there, and soon it's going to be an ootb option. And KRunner is legendary.
12 out of 10 stars for Plasma.
Great job putting together all the awesome things about KDE, thank you!
Just started using kubuntu. The configurations and notification updates is mind boggling. The system is secretly seducing you to know it better. Brilliant.
Plus each application comes with a help offline manual.
GNOME has a really good workflow... but KDE also has that same workflow if you choose so. I like to make my KDE a hybrid between the two.
Gnome is useless without its extensions, and extensions breaks with every new Gnome release. It's alright for someone who like to tinker with the system or wait till extensions will get fixed, but not good for someone who want reliable system to make the work done.
@@snowmean1 I only use a couple of extensions on GNOME, Alphabetical App Grid and Bluetooth Quick Connect, and I'm fine with it
@@snowmean1 Though I never had any broken extensions on my system I do agree. KDE is more reliable.
@@MarcoMissere and that's totally fine, though when Gnome 43 was landed on SuSE Tumbleweed few days after the release there was pretty much no working extensions for the next few weeks, which made the entire Gnome desktop a potato. Even Arch postpone recent Gnome adoption due to exactly that reason. In addition to that not all extensions kept maintained by their authors and getting updated accordingly.
I've always liked KDE, used it for a while as my main desktop back in 3.5, but even with newer plasma I still find myself trying it out for a while and going right back to XFCE, pretty much all the customization of kde with the widgets, custom bars, custom window layouts/etc, but just that little bit snappier/lighter weight with the UI in general being less busy/less animated. Personally, I always turn all that stuff off anyways, I hate window animations/transparency/etc. Plasma desktop actually reminds me a LOT more xfce4 than even previous versions of KDE, just everything more animated, which for some people might be great but honestly, I'm not a fan.
since the pinephone was talked about in the video, I assume you mean the pinephone pro? I have the original pinephone and plasma lags like crazy on it, it does run but everything is on about a half second delay from when you actually tap the screen, I had to switch to phosh on mine which sadly is far, far less capable as far as the apps it supports goes (it's messaging app is honestly pretty bad, where plasma's is pretty good) but it at least doesn't lag on the original pinephone. I'm honestly pretty hit and miss on the pinephone in general though, it's a nice little pocket computer but honestly...not a very good phone, it's reception is bad, it's speakers are bad, and the only apps with full support for media messaging/etc in the US only run on plasma and lag like crazy.
Yeah I agree. I use dwm, but xfce is my go-to DE when I don't have anything else setup. Though if all DEs and WMs except one were going to be deleted, and I had to choose the one environment that everyone would use I would pick KDE. It's pretty quick, and customisable enough to mostly satisfy both the eye candy people and the minimalists like myself.
KDE is more light weight than XFCE
@@clintquasar well that's just not true at all, they idle at roughly the same usage but XFCE uses less than 2/3 the memory and considerably lower cpu utilization under actual use, all those windowing features of KDE come at a cost that adds up as you have more windows open/tasks running. There's also considerably less video card utilization, which makes a world of difference on older or embedded systems.
@@clintquasar I know they claimed that. Maybe it's even true for some narrow definition. However it's certainly not generally the case.
@@entelin Probably measuring on clean startup, w/ full compositor, XFCE allocates more resources up front and handles more worker threads, plasma doesn't until you start opening windows/running tasks. Technically true but means nothing on actual use, it's extremely easy to see the difference on stuff like the r-pi, you literally get stutters on windows opening.
My Pop_OS! kept freezing so I switched to Manjaro KDE because I've had enough of Gnome. It's gotten butterfly smooth and I didn't experience as many freezes as when I was on Gnome.
Since I have to use a Windows machine at work, I use KDE Plasma on my Linux machine at home. Thankfully I can customize KDE to look and operate almost exactly like Windows. It's a bit of work to customize everything, but it's worth it to me to have a consist workflow across all my devices.
KDE Neon Score: 1 out of 5 - How I as a VIsually Impaired evaluate a product:
1. Does it enable a Dark Theme by default?
2. Can it be switched to a Dark Theme?
3. Are the Text/Icons/Pointers large and readable?
4. Can the Text / Icons / Mouse Pointer/Cursors be changed to a very large size?
5. Does it maintain the Dark theme and large text/icons/mouse pointer througout all applications?
For me, trying to read black text on a white background (in a dialog box) would be like you staring into the sun. NOt only is it painful, you see absolutely nothing inside it. I see the world like you would see the world thorugh a frosted car Window on a cold winter day. It's very bright and blurry. If someone held a STOP sign up to your window, you could read it, but as they moved further away, it would blur to a red smudge and then disappear into a world of blur.
Final verdict: FAIL> UNUSABLE
I was able to change to a Dark Theme with black background. No support for large mouse pointers. Installation was very painful. Does not maintain the Dark Theme throughout all applications.
KDE gets a lot of flack for being bloated when compared to other desktops but as someone who works as a level 2 tech support agent supporting windows 10 machines, my PC running arch and KDE plasma only using 1.4gb of memory is still something that makes me smile.
KDE is hands down the best. My only complaint is Discover. I really hope they put some work into that, granted I'm glad it's the least of their priorities. :D
I used to use KDE years ago, not I can't even attempt to use it because it's so bloated with so many unnecessary things. Gnome keeps it clean, simple, stable and usable
I use both DEs, having KDE on my gaming laptop and GNOME 43 with lots of extensions on my other personal laptop, and as a user of both who is familiar with both, its the little things that are hard to do on GNOME that make me like Plasma way more if honest, the kwin window rules that let you start apps automatically minimized, on another desktop, and so on is sooo good because some apps do not let you start minimized
i find GNOME's workflow to be quite decent, it being REALLY REALLY NICE for laptops and touchpad users, the overview that GNOME uses is amazing, but idk KDE can just do more? likee it has more customization. Both are excellent DEs.
I like the desktop for all the reasons described but I just wish it worked better with Mint. It just seems a bit unstable and slow. Would be nice if the two groups worked together to come out with a mint option using KDE. I guess that's up to the linux mint people?
They stopped maintain a mint KDE version because they didn't have enough people that wanted to maintain a KDE flavor. I guess you could say it is up to them...or KDE fans that have the skills required to maintain it for Mint.
I love KDE But the biggest downfall is because its extremely customizable which means you can break it to hell changing a few settings. And there is no way to reset the settings back to default. That's why I prefer Gnome with Tweaks added because if something breaks you can toggle the setting off.
KDE team does great work. I realize it's not for everyone and you can spends weeks and still be learning things and tweaks. As mentioned, they do an excellent job with their app development, all of which you can use on other environments.
If on the next update, touchegg and bismuth are pre-installed on KDE Plasma, that would gonna be a dope move.
So far i'm using Linux, those two feature are essential to be impelented for taste a modern desktop experience.
I looooove KDE so much! I don't know why "major" distros don't use it more often
KDE is easily the best desktop environment, even comparing to MacOS and Windows, and QT is the only serious UI library that is multi-platform. The downside of KDE is that the KDE team will constantly chase the QT library team that is developing it as a commercial product. And also the quality of themes and plugins is really mixed. But compared to the Gnome project, KDE is levels above...
GTK is also a very good UI library, both have pros and cons
Ciao, i'm using KDE since Version 2 in 2001 or so, and right now KDE Plasma 5, waitin' for Plasma 6 in Feb.2024.. many greetings from brunswick in germany and please stay safe 🙃
KDE seems like the perfect DE, my friend flamed me for choosing it as my DE for Manjaro but I like it
KDE is great but I found that it struggles with multi-monitor support, which for me can be a deal-breaker if my setup requires it. I found Manjaro Cinnamon to be a decent substitute so far.
Interesting... I run 3 Monitors (2560 x 1600) on 2 AMD Video cards. No problems since Kubuntu 14.04
Hi, KDE developer here. We are aware of that, with some setups and hardware multiscreen is ok-ish, with others has big visible problems. We are putting a lot of work to change a bit how multi screen is managed hopefully fixing many broken cases. Most of that work should come to fruition in the 5.27 release.
@@MarcoMartin cool. Ya I would immediately switch if I could. I prefer KDE pretty much on every other measure. I even find the config to be more portable to new installations.
20 years ago I was heavily committed to KDE, haven't touched Linux in years. Ready to back, was getting used to GNOME, now I need to try KDE again...
Amazing video man, i have learned a lot of new things abt KDE, they / their products seem amazing
My favorite thing about KDE? The unique naming scheme is so cute! Who knew that just changing one letter in common names can create such a unique and cute naming scheme?
Lol jk that's not my FAVORITE thing, I love customization and KDE just makes it easier. The naming scheme is awesome though.
I love this summary. Much deeper than most and communicates it in such a way that an experienced power user looking at Linux can appreciate.
Why does everyone say "Guh-nome" and not "nome"? "Gnu" is the name of an animal. Gnome is a fantasy creature. They don't have the same pronunciation structure.
I found the energy conservation works better on KDE than XFCE. That's probably something I could have fixed with applications, but KDE just-works in that respect.
I use Linux Mint with the Kubuntu desktop which is KDE. I like this one the best because KDE has the most customisation options. Also as an ex-Windows user I like that you can customise the desktop with start up and shutdown sounds and other system sounds. Something we had on Windows but only seems to be on KDE. Although other Linux Desktops do have the option of adding a start up sound but not the shutdown sound. I don't know why that is. KDE seems to be the only one that does have system sound settings apart from Cinnamon which also does. Though KDE is much nicer as it has really beautiful themes. I now run KDE as my main desktop in Linux Mint.
Hi! For 2 days I have been testing in VirtualBox Linux Mint (I am a beginner). I used Ubuntu 6 years ago for 2 months. I'm thinking of giving Kubuntu KDE a chance as well, possibly Neon KDE as well. Should I stop thinking about all the distros belonging to Ubuntu (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc.) and use KDE Neon? I really like KDE, it looks good and is very customizable. Thank you!
@@AndyTurcu I think Kubuntu is a good one to start with or Linux Mint with the Kubuntu desktop which is what I use. Debian with KDE desktop is also another option but not as user friendly as the Ubuntu based distros. Because with those you get everything including drivers out of the box but not always with Debian.
@@AndreaBorman Thank you for info!
Hi, thanks for the video. If I remember correctly, latte-dock is abandoned and it's not possible to customize the mouse gestures (I guess you're referring to the ones available ONLY in the Wayland session, aren't you?).
I recently switched to KDE Plasma from Cinnamon. They are very good products, but KDE is more than a notch better. The modularity is impressive, for instance.
I looked at KDE like 6 years ago and wow this project evolved a lot.
Good video. Xfce is my usual flavor. Its nice to know the kde features while distro hopping.
Once you set it up and check how powerful and how much resources it save by being modular, we'll it will use resources only if those tools are also used if not and dolphin file manager has the most services a file manager ca dream you can convert media files within the file manager vs code plugin, cloud storage like gdrive, next cloud even ondrive, and it is also compatible with windows systems, realy git integration
Alright... I run old equipment. Not ancient, but a decade behind the times (but very well maintained :-).
So XFCE was always my goto given its low overhead. But I'd certainly tried all the major DE's over the years. And while I always liked KDE style, it never ran smooth on my iron.
But alas... this last pulse of Plasma has made its way from my test machine (the least among them) onto all my little minions!
And I'm f'n lovin' it!
Spent the afternoon building out my keyboard shortcuts, and then rcp'ing them to the crowd.
Wooow, I only used Gnome and Cinnamon, KDE only for a short while with Mandriva, not since. That's really impressive, I have to try it. Thank you for this great video!
2:40
You sold me, I've been using Gnome for a while now, as it was the default, but I'm sond on KDE now :)
Great video, thank you. I have been using linux as a hobby for a while but am considering making the move from Mac permanently. Truth is I feel a KDE Plasma desktop environment is the best option for me but can't settle on which one to commit to. Any views or advice gratefully received and considered.
I think I’m finally moving back to FOSS operating system, away from macOS. Thanks KDE, I’ll pay a regular donation to keep this evolving system strong and competitive on all fronts.
I use tuxedo os1 on my laptop because it's a clevo system and works great and happy that it's KDE.
The thought of using Fedora Silverblue with KDE is enchanting
In practice, Kinoite is a tire fire ):
Didn't know KDE was the UI on Steam Deck - suspect that augers well for the future of KDE. I've tried KDE, Gnome, Mate and xfce and agree, KDE is the best.
I've been using linux for the last 10 years but I've never used KDE. Will give it a try
Wow, I remember when the K desktop started. Congratulations to all involved.
Kate is good, but Geany is better. If only Geany was natively KDE it would make a perfect little IDE.
I'm now using ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS. I installed KDE on top of Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS. I like using the customization part of KDE Plasma.
While I love Gnome's files and stability, it's backed by Redhat. KDE is backed by it's community, and I respect what they managed to do.
I love KDE. But, I am kinda forced to use Gnome, as KDE had frequent system freezes at my machine, and every time I had to do a hard reset 😞.
same thing with me!!!
I am a big fan of KDE. No words to express.
For me the choice of KDE is influenced by my love of Qt and their frameworks which make developing GUI-based programs a proper joy.
May I to add the most important reason for me, at least? It's paradigm is the one where I and most of us grew up with from the mid 90's to date. Oh, well... Even MS cannot go out of its own, even though, if my memory doesn't fail, this paradigm is a derivative from the IBM OS2 times!... People want what they better know...
Yeah, as a former Windows user, I also prefer a taskbar workflow. With the ability to minimize Windows instead of closing them.
But Gnome has its own merits in its clean and uncluttered appearance and way of function.
(I just wish there was a better way to change the workflow, without having to deal with broken add-ons.)
I hope for cosmic, do this balancing act. Cause it's already in a good track so far.
@@UnifiedFriends for me this is just crucial
I was on KDE for a few years, and then l tried Gnome and haven’t gone back. My other env. is DWM. I do remove some bloat that comes with the Gnome distro. I remember KDE was a bit loose back then, and Gnome seemed tighter. I don’t like spending much time on ricing.
Great video! Made me discover some really nice KDE software and features!
i love your content, and i am a frontend developer and thinking about moving from windows to Linux and i wanted a recommendation on the best distro for that purpose some suggested distros but wanted to hear from ya'll too.
Depends what kind of experience you're looking for.
Since it sounds like you're an intermediate user, if you're comfortable doing package management for your OS from the terminal I'd highly recommend EndeavourOS. It's Arch-based and sticks very close to what Arch does while being just as easy to install as any other distro. You can choose from basically any desktop environment, so that way you can figure out which one you like best. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking the distro is what you should be choosing for, but it's really a combination of things including the distro, and EndeavourOS gives you a lot of freedom in this respect. One important note is that EndeavourOS is rolling-release, meaning there are no fixed version numbers and when you update you will get the most recent stable versions not just of your apps, but of any of the packages that make up your OS. This is why it is often referred to as a "bleeding-edge distro", which generally requires occasional manual intervention to keep stable.
Another recommendation is Fedora, which is more concerned with stability and is geared towards developers. Manual intervention is basically never necessary, since the OS itself is not rolling-release like EndeavourOS, but they treat most of the developer tools and apps very similarly to a rolling-release distro so you'll still be up to date on everything. Fedora refers to itself as a "leading-edge distro", since they are generally just behind bleeding-edge distros in terms of recency. If you want to use GNOME they're extremely stable, they also have KDE and XFCE options but I've heard they're less stable though they do have their own dedicated communities. Fedora is specifically tailored towards developers, and has many tools to make the developer's life easier, while EndeavourOS is more of a power-user distro (though Fedora is still reasonably accommodating of power users). From what I've seen online, EndeavourOS should also be better for gaming, however in my personal experience both distros are a pretty similar experience for gaming.
Apart from the release cycle, since both of them generally have the same desktop environments available, main thing to consider is the difference in package management. EndeavourOS's package manager (pacman) is the fastest out there and will get packages that are slightly more recent than Fedora, but Fedora's package manager (dnf), while being quite a bit slower, has more features, many of which are geared towards developers, such as being able to search for packages based on what libraries they contain. Fedora also does not need to run as many updates as EndeavourOS, since it does not need to update OS packages as often. Both will require terminal usage for installing dev stuff, however for regular app installation, Fedora has very good support for GUI app stores like GNOME Software and KDE Discover, while EndeavourOS's support of them is unstable and could potentially break your OS so you should probably stick to the terminal for everything for them. This means that with Fedora, you will by default get update notifications, and you can set it up to automatically update stuff for you in the background, and your software center can even update dev tools that you've already installed alongside everything else, all of this is customizable. With EndeavourOS, automatic updating is not supported and you will have to do all updates manually. So with Fedora, you can get automatic updates, notifications, or you can just do it manually or through the terminal, with EndeavourOS you are stuck with doing it manually through the terminal for everything, but it's much faster.
TL;DR for package management: Fedora runs updates slower but is much more customizable with how they are done, has a ton of advanced functionality for package management, and is easy to automate. With EndeavourOS it is much faster at updating, but it's less customizable, and everything must be done manually through the terminal, and updates are available more frequently which may be a plus or minus depending on your workflow.
These are my two main recommendations, since in my experience both of these distros tend to be pretty good developer distros. I would recommend trying them out in a VM before installing, maybe try out some desktop environments as well to get a feel for it.
Shots fired. Let's talk about KDE's mixed DPI support why don't we... Oh wait, it doesn't exist in Xorg and the Wayland support is still pretty janky. "Janky" is KDE in a nutshell. You can massage the jank in to a usable desktop, but good luck with updates or if you have to plug in an external monitor sometimes. I love KDE, but it does have issues. Gnome is far from perfect too.
Xorg is on the way out. Wayland is still fresh. It’s that weird situation where committing resources to fixing the xorg version isn’t worth doing, but wayland is too new to be stable enough. Both gnome and KDE are facing the same conundrum. Thankfully Wayland is getting close to fully usable on a standard desktop so once nvidia completely sort out their drivers I expect these issues to dissipate over time.
You've sold me. From now on I'm on the KDE bandwagon.
KDE is ahead of Gnome and years ahead Windows/Crapple
Gparted, Nemo are better than the KDE versions of these apps>
Cannot yet make personal storage of our KDE preferred customizations?
Some of the extensions and add-ons are not very flexible.
Which part are missing on both those software ? I didn't find any missing feature on KDE Partition Manager and to be fair I would even consider Gparted sometimes buggy while trying to deactive LVM partitions.
So better in which regard ?
I use gparted on KDE. I do think it's better than the KDE option tbh
i use i3wm, but i take some apps from other desktops as well (example : terminal from xfce), and i'll probably take some from kde as well
Looking forward to their future updates to multi-monitor usability.
it is in the name itself : "Koolest Desktop Environment"
I think you meant to say, "Kakkest Desktop Environment".
- Wikus van der Merwe
- MNU Department of Alien Affairs
Have kde plasma fixed these two bugs:
1: Dolphin fails to safely remove flash drive.
2: Kde plasma does not allow you to change cursor system wide. 🤔
Its been a while since using KDE, like 6 months. But my last experience was great, for the first few days. Then everything fell apart, icons from the main menus disapear, things get stuck, icons dont resize properly. Then I just end up going to GNOME. I would prefer to use KDE, but need better stability and consistency. Looking forward to it actually getting better.
Awesome video. I am going to be trying MX Linux 23 soon.
Dolphin: Open as root with right click since: NEVER!
There's a dolphin extension that lets you do root actions. And in the beta versions right now you can use the admin:// shortcut just like with Nautilus.
@@fotnite_ You have nailed the problem: It's an *extension* .
And this is only because KDE thinks their users are too stupid to handle the tool (they used different words, but if you don't include a tool by default because you think it's too powerful you don't trust the user base and don't think they can handle it). Nemo for example has no problem with this. And I don't think their usebase is (statistically speaking) considerably smarter.
The beta of which version (5.27 or 6)? I'm running on 5.26.4 at the moment.
@@KuruGDI Makes me wonder what DE you use if even KDE doesn't have enough built-in functionality for you.
To be clear, I don't even use KDE myself, I'm not some blind fan of it or anything.
@@fotnite_ I don't know if Dolphin really counts as _built-in functionality_ - I would say YES and NO. YES because it comes with the Plasma DE. NO because if you (or the distro of your choice) doesn't like Dolphin, you can replace it.
It's exactly what I do not understand: You have KDE as master of configurability which does not even offer you a config setting to enable such a basic function. It is not build into Dolphin, because the developers see it as too dangerous (of course a terminal build into dolphin where I can break by whole system with removing essential system files by using commands wrongly is not a problem at all).
I like KDE and it's configurability. I use KDE so it's not a dealbreaker for me either. It just bothers my right to the bones that other file managers give you easy access to such a tool.
KDE is a fine environment. But, lately has been driving me insane with the buggy updates!
They say that KDE is the most customizable Desktop Environment. How do I adjust the size of the icons on the panel? I can't find it. Change the size of the panel by one step instead of only two? I can't find it. Full transparency of the panel? I can't find it. I can on Xfce. When I change the icon of the start menu, I've noticed that the icon is not in the middle exactly like the others (I'm a bit of a pie exactly😭) That's how I noticed it. And I must log off to change the cursor theme and when I change the fonts. Not so on Xfce. I'm not here to bash KDE because I like it because the theming is so much better. My two favorite themes, Arc dark KDE and Fluent dark theme look so much better on KDE compared to Xfce.
Size of icons on the panel: you can change the margin of the plasma theme to change the size of the stuff that's inside of it! Increase size to odd number: that would mess up icon alignment! We only allow even panel thickness for good reasons. Full transparency: you can edit the plasma theme or use one of any of those on the store!
@@niccoloveslinux Thanks for explaining😉
I like using Gnome because when I reboot my wallpaper isn't defaulted to black.