Comment by jopicornell
2 months ago
That's something I think as well. I've tried 4 times through the years, and KDE always felt less stable and solid than Gnome. I guess it's the configurability of KDE that makes it that way.
I like the concept, but I guess maintaining it is no easy task, and people is more motivated to add things than fix them.
KDE lost me when they moved from the relatively stable (and - let's face it - pretty Windows 9x-style) KDE 3.5 to KDE 4. It was promised as a quantum leap, but Plasma came over as unstable, unfinished, and lacking a lot of the functionality I came to love with the 3.5 stack.
In the end, I gave up, went to window managers instead to full DEs, then to i3, and now am on a Mac.
Still, I remember 3.5 fondly. The last good Linux Desktop Environment (Gnome tried so hard, but always was a bit too 'our way or the highway' when KDE allowed for some customization)
KDE 3 to KDE 4 transition really was painful, it pushed me away as well, but it also happened over 15 years ago. I gave it a shot a few years back, and it was great, much better than modern-day Gnome in my opinion.
Thanks for stating this. It puzzles me how people can still hold a grudge against the transition to KDE4 that happened back in early 2008. It took a while but even KDE4 got pretty good. KDE6 is great and if you follow Nate Graham's blog, you can see the improvements that go into it every week.
https://blogs.kde.org/authors/nategraham/
3 replies →
Early versions of KDE 4.0 were terrible, and it lasted for a couple of years, but I've found later versions quite solid. Early versions of KDE 5 were relatively stable but were lacking features. I find late 5.X versions and all 6.X version quite robust.
There are still bugs but they do seem to be ironing them out, they go in the right direction.
The only big bugs I notice these days are the occasionnal plasmashell crashes but it comes back on its own. KWin doesn't crash and that's fortunate because on Wayland, that would bring down non KDE apps.
I exclusively use plasma, I'm quite sensitive to instabilities, it's not an issue for me with KDE.
I did avoid the first years of KDE 4 and was using GNOME at that time.
Have you tried Trinity?
It's not really windows 9x style? It's highly configurable so you can make it look like that but you don't have to. Even without theming it.
I find it a lot more sensible than windows especially because the latter started embedding ads and "helpful suggestions" everywhere in the UI.
I'm not talking about theming, but the general feel of the UI. It did not try and win innovation trophies back in the day, it was a platform that gave you the feeling it was ready for serious work to be done on, relatively stable, similar UI language over several programs, that kind of thing. Konqueror as the dual file manager / web browser was great, but it was "something on top", not "something radically different from proprietary UIs" like Gnome kept doing in that timeframe.
I think it was the closest we ever came to a 'Linux on the Desktop' year for a mass market.
This was true years ago but Gnome slowly removed every feature I liked and put me on an update treadmill for each and every plug-in, and I needed a bunch of them for basic functionality normal desktops provide.
A trivial example: keeping a working weather widget on my taskbar for an update cycle without breaking it was too much to ask for Gnome. I put up with this kind of thing for YEARS before switching to Plasma. Widgets for your taskbar and stable plug-in APIs should be table stakes for a desktop environment, especially if its whole philosophy is one that the core product should be minimal and most functionality should be in plugins.
You know what KDE has? Features. You know what it doesn't have a lot of? Bugs. Maybe you've tried it four times over the years but after a short trial three years ago I've been using exclusively Plasma.
It's way better than Gnome at this point, and I say this as a Gnome 2.x user. I laughed at KDE 4 back in the day.
But I'm pretty sure everyone in this thread who is bitching about Plasma has not used it in recent times. It's an absolutely fantastic, solid, polished, featureful desktop. To say otherwise is just to display your ignorance, frankly.
I agree, I just used gnome as the other mainstream DE alternative. I am a happy user of i3, due to my 1070ti giving a lot of problems using wayland. That could be the culprit of my unstability. I want to change to AMD gpus for that reason, and I'll some day test it again for sure.
My last time using kde was a few months ago, and it was stability issues (which could be hardware related), but also cumbersome customization of main UI, and minor annoying bugs, that keep accumulating through usage.
Don't get me wrong, I love KDE concept and I don't think Gnome is making great decisions keeping it minimalist (I use i3 for that reason. If I want a DE I want it fully featured and customizable).
I'm just sharing my personal view and agreeing with another user. I know what users can think about fabulous software, and that they (we) are biased in many many ways.
I was also one of the people who preferred Gnome back when it was KDE3 vs Gnome2, and I concur - the situation is very different today. Using Gnome feels like being force fed some kind of bland paste while being assured that it's healthy and good for you. With KDE, I can actually set it up in such a way that things are where I expect to find them, and then forget that it's even there.
In my experience, KDE is more responsive (especially under load) but its code base is less stable. It makes sense: Gnome is pretty minimalist in terms of available UI, uses JavaScript and shell scripts to provide integrations, and exposes quite a small native surface area.
On the other side, KDE consists of almost exclusively native (C++) code, although I believe some tools are written in Python. Great for performance, but C++ has a reputation for a reason.
For what it's worth, the last major release has been very stable. It has also always been stable for me on my Steam Deck. I have a feeling KDE's issues are similar to WordPress': external plugins hooking deep into the native API, making it seem like the software they're integrating with is unstable.
Yes, I have to agree with responsivened vs stability. As I mentioned in another comment, my main stability issues could be hardware related, because I'm also a steam deck user and it has worked alright there (although I don't use the desktop mode daily).
For me, KDE is a better concept than Gnome, and I genuinely don't know which is better developed/mantained. But it is true that I always change after a week or so, and I've been a gnome user for longer periods of time.
I'll keep testing it, more so if I install updated hardware in my computer