In theory, I would love to use KDE and use Gnome only with many plugins and tweaks (like IMHO the majority of Gnome users out there, see Ubuntu desktop).
In practice, KDE has still too many unsolved problems:
- For years now, I try KDE from stable mainstream distros in standard VMs, always something from the vanilla KDE setup segfaults within the first 30min w/o me even starting to customize it. It seems this is not only a personal anecdote, but the experience of a lot of people trying KDE. (Gnome in these VMs runs stable w/o any segfaults, these VMs sometimes are running for days)
- KMail … even the KDE community themselves point out all the trouble with KMail: It works, until it doesn’t, no support for GMail OOTB, etc … This problems with KMail are known/reported/experienced for years now, w/o being fixed. Thunderbird/Evolution work OOTB and stable for my needs since a decade by now
- Online-Accounts for Gnome works on every distribution OOTB for me, for all my professional/private needs. Again, in theory Dolphin is a much better file manager than Nautilus, in practice I can remote mount everything in Nautilus
In summary: I am not a big fan of Gnomes UI and would much prefer KDE, but in practice Gnome works stable, lets me setup my online accounts/connectivity and email and simply works. The KDE community ignored too many of this issues for too long (stability) and is still ignoring the widely known issues with KMail (fix it, dump it or at least communicate it is not ready for general use). I lost trust that these issues will ever be fixed by now. (Was a happy KDE 3.X user back in the day.)
I’m sure kmail used to work (a number of years ago). But something happened to it and I never managed to get it to work again. I tried again recently and no luck.
Of course Thunderbird worked immediately on a basic Imap account.
And don’t even get me started on Google integration. Although Google probably shares the blame (or is responsible for most of it) given the hoops they make you jump through to (very reluctantly) allow anything to talk to their apps.
How are you running the VMs, with VirtualBox? I can’t say I’ve run a DE on a VM very often, but it’s always been under libvirt and I’ve not seen segfaults. I don’t disbelieve you, but I wonder if its the hypervisor.
Not sure why you’re fixating on Kmail; Thunderbird works fine on KDE and is the preferred choice across most distros IME. I’d use it before Outlook even if it were available on Linux.
I run my VMs with QEmu or VMware.
My fixation on KMail is simple, that I want to have an email client which is truly integrated in my DE and uses mostly the same libs. (Running Evolution btw.).
If I just run KDE as an application starter, I honestly rather use Xfce or even more minimal. The whole selling point of an DE (for me) is that things are integrated.
Merkuro Mail might fix some of KMail’s issues. It still uses the same backend though, and isn’t really stable yet.
I know you mean good, but exactly this is the problem: Fix known issues with KMail or with KMails backend? - Nope. Write a new E-Mail client which someday, in the far future might work and have all the features we need? Let’s go!
IMHO Evolution had the benefit, that it initially was written by Ximian and brought up to be good enough™. Honestly, I don’t see anyone investing this time, money and energy in a new KDE email client (or in KMail).
I believe these problems would be sorted out pretty quickly if big player like Fedora really switched. We can only dream for now…
I agree, it would give KDE a boost.
Building KDE on gnome is not feasible
Have you guys tried windows?
sadly.
Have you?
Unfortunate date to publish a proposal on…
I’d be against this, despite using Plasma on one of my systems and having an overall positive view of the project. Although admittedly I do slightly prefer Gnome because consistency is something I’m really anal about.
Gnome just feels a lot more stable and consistent. It works well, has a good release cadence (although KDE is making steps to improve theirs), and most people who use Fedora are happy with it.
Critically, Gnome has good accessibility features, and they’re improving rapidly at the moment. I think good accessibility features are imperative for a workstation distro.
I’ve also never really heard any Fedora Plasma Spin users complain about the quality of Fedora’s work, or it being called a “Spin” instead of workstation. It’s already treated with pretty much the same level of care as Gnome is, so what would this achieve, other than months of bickering and a bit of confusion?
God no.
Not gonna happen obviously. It’s so funny to see every fedora announcement on linuxfr.org detailing every single aspect of the release while ignoring completely KDE.
Obviously it’s a difficult sell - but if this got positive attention I could see Fesco relenting and “upgrading” the branding on Fedora KDE to Fedora Plasma Workstation
Funnily enough, leading the proposal is Joshua Strobl, the lead dev of the budgie DE. More here https://joshuastrobl.social/@me/112197620423915344
I personally don’t see the Fedora team breaking away from Gnome just yet, but he makes some good points.
Starting in 2025, KDE Plasma’s release cycle switches to a semi-annual cadence that lines up with Fedora Linux releases, enabling a tight interlock of development and integration between Fedora and KDE.
This is the key change that might make such a move viable, imo. One of the key benefits of Gnome to point release distros, and Fedora in particular, is the predictable 6-month release cycle. If KDE achieve the same, then it will make the proposition a lot more attractive.
I’d love to use my proc to fry my breakfast
Kde is hotttttt
Slowly more and more distros are looking over to a KDE future. GNOME devs being so incredibly hard to work with and this feeling of a huge community that is KDE and with how polished Plasma 6 is becoming, many distros are finally looking to at least give Plasma a try as a default. GNOME is well polished but there are so many extremely important and urgently needed features that KDE already implemented that are not even being discussed for GNOME. Many distros are getting fed up with how slow GNOME is into advancing their desktop. They take 2 years to change a few buttons around. And now that Plasma 6 has a 6-month fixed release schedule, it finally aligns with what distros want.
First Valve shocked the corporate distro world by choosing the seemengly less stable KDE as their default for the Steam Deck, which proved to be an amazing choice after all. Then recently, Nobara Linux, one of the most used Fedora distros, also switched to KDE as the default. And now Fedora is discussing into switching the main distro too. Qt6 is also a really flexible and promising framework and developers seem to have more fun working with it than with GTK4.
Recent switchers from Windows also largely prefer KDE instead of the minimalist approach, macOS-like GNOME. And linux has been gaining a lot of popularity and market share recently, and I could bet that a lot of these new users are not on GNOME, at least not on vania GNOME.
A great example is KDE having hit a HUGE record of bug reporting and feedback submissions, which means that more people than ever are using KDE actively and actually trying to help the project somehow. KDE has also been having a huge presence in social networks like YouTube and TikTok (especially because of its fun and interesting features that make GNOME look plain and a bit boring, needless to say GNOME vanilla wont convince a Windows user to switch…) which might speed up its adoption too.
Ah i see kde has fixed the issue where dropdowns had broken behavior when scrolling https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kirigami/-/commit/f6ca218607ff7e5d5066eb3224154c3256cb9516 this was my main blocker why i couldn’t use it when i tried it around 2020. Maybe i could give it another try?
Spot on.
That is not a great idea. KDE prioritizes features and customization over stability and out of the box experience.
The spin is there for those who want it.
Like the stability of blowing up extensions and APIs across minor point releases?
It really is not that big of a problem from my experience.
KDE has tons of customization which is great for people who want to rice. Back in the day I was into ricing and DIY Linux. However, KDE is a poor choice for a mainstream workstation as there are way to many configuration options which leads to everything getting buried. It also doesn’t look as nice out of the box.
I think the KDE spin is great for those who want to customize. For everyone else there is gnome and its derivatives
As the above commenter already said, …
Not Anymore
Exactly. While I love Plasma for what it is, I also don’t love certain things like lack of polish, stability etc. Again no offense. Fedora Workstation aims to be a stable OS with sensible defaults for wider audience including home users, disabled people and developers who want to get things done rather than tweaking their OS. GNOME may not have great customizability as Plasma but it is stable and well polished for average user.
I’ve been using gnome as a “base” DE for years, what that means is I install it, then install my tiling wm and use all the gnome utilities.
I recently had to set up a few new machines and decided to try KDE on a couple and I’m really enjoying it. I haven’t even gotten around to installing a tiling wm because I want to learn a wayland option and that’ll take some time. I haven’t ran into pain points listed here but one thing I like is when I want to do X, there’s usually already something ready to do X for me. Years of gnome and I felt like the devs were always fighting me. I haven’t really used a full gnome setup in a few years though, but I know the “mommy knows best” attitude is still prevalent with the devs.
Install KWin script “Polonium” and you won’t need any TWM anymore.
Polonium
Hm I’m not sure if that’d really give me what I’m looking for. I know its certainly possible to configure KDE and Polonium to get me 90% there but I think I’d rather just have a normal floating setup I can switch to if need be. I’d need to remap a significant amount of keyboard shortcuts that would stop making sense in the context of a full floating DE.
I really just want a very fast app launcher like dmenu, dynamic tiling, and monitor independent workspaces. I have a particular setup using certain alpha keys for my workspace.
I never really enjoyed the experience of tacking things onto an existing DE and having to mess with UI configuration. I’ve been really loving XMonad for a few setups and my ideal wm would be something that’s extremely low power and low fluff. Even if I only eek out 10% more battery life, breaking the 10hr mark is more valuable to me than most bells and whistles.
I’m just really lazy. I could load up my xmonad setup in 20 minutes but I wanted to see the state of wayland and that requires learning a new wm’s configuration quirks.
Meanwhile I CANNOT be productive in GNOME. There are hundreds of maybe thousands of KDE features that make IT and dev work so extremely easy. I could make a 50 page comment just listing them. I can start with how horrendously basic and generic the default gnome terminal is.
But then KDE also is in fact good for average ex-Windows users because it has stuff where people expect it to, has features that people expect too (cough minimize/maximize buttons cough) and well yea KDE is better for average users.
So KDE is better for IT users and developers, and is also better for average users. And since it supports vsync off, VRR and HDR it is also better for gaming.
So wait is KDE better for literally EVERYONE? 🤔
LMAO no.
I’m a developer and I’ve strongly preferred KDE over Gnome for many years. I find the lack of features and customization in Gnome extremely irritating.
Gnome Shell through extensions is very customizable but the two problems are that those extensions can break on Gnome updates and Gnome applications usually don’t offer that. I used Gnome + non-Gnome apps for quite some time years ago because I wanted to use Wayland as early as possible.
Please don’t! If RedHat start participating in KDE, it will kill it like it killed GNOME.
This is probably the best take in fedora not adopting KDE i’ve heard to date lmao
Red Hat has participated in KDE on many occasions. Not to a degree as with Gnome but it’s not unheard of.
