Just use KDE Plasma
This is what I concluded in the end…
I do at home, can’t choose at work (but we keep pushing the people in charge)
I heard of imposing operating systems (which I’m also against*), but never specific distros or DEs.
* at least for technical people who know what they’re doing and wont spam the IT support
If it is a larger company that defintly would make maintenance easier.
My company started enforcing Macs this year but as a special exception they’ll let us use Windows or Ubuntu. No other distro and the CTO must still authorize it.
The reason? Meet some vague security guidelines that the PR team wants us to be able to say we meet, by forcing us to run a spying agent to ensure our OS is up-to-date so I’m not vulnerable to leaking data I don’t even have access to. But the tool doesn’t support anything that updates frequently.
I had just built a brand new laptop for work and I refused to sully it with Ubuntu so I installed it on an old desktop and just been putting zero effort into fixing Ubuntu shit. Wifi often can’t handle meetings, none of my cameras worked ootb - also can’t go to the office anymore since I can’t carry the desktop there.
Still a year away from being able to request the company buys me a machine again (last time there were no conditions for it) - but I don’t intend to stay here until then.
I’ll bet you 20$ that when some information finally leaks it is 100% some fuck ass exec giving away company secrets to impress a potential side piece or some geriatric board member ass fuck clicking a “Hot Dingles near you” ad
What distro do you use with it? So far I liked mint with cinnamon but looking to switch my main PC to Linux and ditch windows on October 23rd.
With KDE, you can go with Fedora if you like something “closer” to mint experience. I use it with Endeavor OS and I’m very happy
EndeavourOS
☺️such a joy
I’ve been enjoying CachyOS myself lately.
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A buddy of mine and I have been using it for a bit, he more than I. Haven’t noticed any major issues with it. Proton works well for gaming. Overall pretty solid. I’d say spin it up and give it a test drive.
Debian primarily, though I also have arch running on another box. But I basically only run Debian across the board. Almost all stable, with some Trixie and Sid for testing. I also won’t touch Gnome unless I’m forced to, so keep in mind I’m opinionated and hold grudges when you see my recommendations.
I use SpiralLinux (basically Debian with some tweaks). I like it a lot! If you want to stay in the Debian/*buntu lineage, consider it.
I use Arch, but you can’t go wrong with Plasma + Debian. Ubuntu has weird bugs which keeps me from recommending it. I wish Mint still had a Plasma edition. endeavouros is Arch with a user-friendly installer, so that’s an option as well. CachyOS is great too. Mint is good but Cinnamon doesn’t support HDR which keeps me from recommending it to anyone using an HDR display. Debian is probably best seeing as you are used to Mint.
cinnamint is great. i think you may have already found what to put on the ‘main pc’.
if you’re at all interested in ‘atomic’ variants, kinoite is what is running a couple of kde desktops here.
Kubuntu FTW!!!
no :3
I love how Ubuntu looks and feels
You mean GNOME? Ubuntu ships KDE too as Kubuntu.
I meant ubuntu’s customization of GNOME
You can customize it the same on any distro. Except Artix lol. Ubuntu has weird bugs that aren’t present it other distros that ship GNOME. I don’t really like GNOME’s current direction. Their devs seem to be comfortable with breaking things for both their users and users of of other desktops without a care.
Tried it. You supposedly can customize it any way you want, but after struggling for like an hour trying to make it look clean, I wondered why I was trying to force that. The UI in KDE is not clean. It’s messy and has exposed many options I would never use. People love to hate on GNOME but I think they’re only doing that because they know it’s so popular. And it’s popular for a reason.
I don’t hate on gnome because people can use what they want but coming from windows the UX was so unintuitive i had to switch to a different session without a DE to get rid of gnome. I’m sure it’s learnable and then depending on your preferences pretty great.
I also don’t think plasma is messy though. To me there’s nothing worse than a system hiding options out of the assumption that I don’t need them (see also: windows over time, which is a big part of why I made the switch to linux in the first place).
There’s a huge difference in hiding options and putting them into a menu that looks nice. KDE UI strikes me as busy and ugly. Crazy re: windows. It’s the busiest UI of all.
I get that. Personally, as someone who worked on a Mac and had a Windows PC at home, it probably would’ve been easier to use KDE, since I did need to learn a bit of gnome’s ui, but I just found it so much cleaner compared to KDE. Might try heavily customizing KDE again sometime, I just couldn’t get the hang of it. At least for now, I can get a nicer desktop for me by using GNOME with minimal extensions than I can with KDE. I don’t like the Windows 10 adjacent style, but of course, to each their own. Not to say I find GNOME perfect, the complete lack of usability of custom themes as of gtk3 (Gradience has never actually worked for me) is infuriating, but ultimately I prefer my GNOME setup over what I’ve tried out in plasma.
I have a seemingly yearly tradition where I manage to convince myself to try out KDE then am usually back on GNOME after a week. I genuinely don’t get the hate for GNOME. It looks clean, has great defaults (especially the keybinds) and mostly stays out of the way. I don’t hate KDE, it’s just not for me and that is okay.
Yeah, I’ve tried KDE a couple of times. If it was the only option I may be able to get used to it, but knowing there is a much cleaner option makes me dislike it actually. I also don’t get the GNOME hate, I agree with what you said about it.
The keybindings in Gnome never made sense to me. I’ve got decades worth of muscle memory moving windows around, minimizing them and such, and my experience with Gnome was it was made specifically to frustrate that workflow. The app drawer thing, first of all was always two clicks away not one, and wouldn’t automatically sort by category like most Linux app menus will.
I’m on KDE right now, I’d prefer to be on Mint Cinnamon, but it didn’t really play well with my monitor setup and Wayland wasn’t well implemented in Cinnamon yet, so I’m on Fedora KDE. KDE has a problem where, well…
The clock widget and the temperature widget. No matter what, I can’t get them to match each other. Something something different authors, they offer customization, but not in a way that can get them to match font sizes or spacings. The entire goddamn OS is like that. You can get it to do anything you want, but expect an 80 grit polish.
I don’t like the defaults of any the common DEs, so I always end up customizing whatever I use. Last time I tried KDE Plasma I was still running into bugs too often. I’ve been using gnome which is generally more stable, but it has a lot less stuff on it so I end up Frankensteining everything.
It’s probably time for me to try Plasma again though.
People love to hate on GNOME but I think they’re only doing that because they know it’s so popular
You sound like Honey Boo Boo.
My take is GNOME is Mac-inspired, and KDE is Windows-inspired. I never liked MacOS. Therefore, GNOME does not appeal to me. KDE feels familiar, so naturally I used it after switching from Windows.
The other week had a GNOME dev reply to a thread of mine on mastodon stating that the users desire to select a default terminal emulator was an “edge case” and it was beneath GNOME. then all the GNOME fanboys came out to his defense.
It’s an insufferable DE and community.
As insufferable as KDE users always shitting on gnome?
I’ve generally found gnome users just use it. New KDE releases don’t have gnome fanboys bashing it, etc.
But new GNOME releases? Directly the opposite.
Really wish people would just chill.
Yeah, there is way less hate and mockery towards KDE. Now let’s think why that might be
To me it speaks more of the users, less of the DE.
Either somehow every GNOME user is a saint and everyone else is just an asshole, or GNOME is laughably bad and every new release is also bad. It’s either of those two.
I’ve generally found gnome users just use it
lol
As insufferable as KDE users always shitting on gnome?
This 100%
I find that Penis Stroker 2000 never has users bashing it when a new release comes out.
But every single new release of Scrotum Puncher 5000 that comes out, it’s getting criticized. I’m sick of it!!
New KDE releases don’t have gnome fanboys bashing it
There is a lot less hate for KDE… Because KDE doesn’t break the user experience every time it updates. Gnome is the Apple of the Linux world. The entire dev team embodies the Apple attitude of “we know better than you, and you’re wrong for wanting to use anything except the default settings.”
You’re essentially getting the “iPhone user seeing all of the hate from android users every time iOS updates” experience. Because every time a new iPhone feature comes out, all of the android users go “lmao iOS didn’t have that feature until now? Android had it three years ago. Apple fucking sucks.”
At least for a time, many of the big distributions focused exclusively on Gnome, and for KDE users it was kind of frustrating as everything would be all wired up for Gnome, and either KDE wasn’t packaged at all and you had to go third party, or it was a clearly second class citizen where the packagers just didn’t bother to wire up equivalent features. You would look it up and see how KDE had the same capability implemented, but the packager just hadn’t included some dependency or configured something to manifest it.
Now I feel like the distributions take Plasma more seriously and so it’s easier to just ignore whatever Gnome is doing… Except for the occasional horrible UI presented by a Gnome app in your otherwise credible desktop. Since Gnome is both a DE and a UI framework, the UI framework gets to rear its head even if you largely ignore the DE.
Then of course you have the tiling window managers/compositors, but those projects tend to be less ambitious anyway, and what the audience wants is pretty much what they can get from packages, even if the packagers aren’t quite as invested to know what can be done.
I checked your Mastodon timeline but I don’t see the post, only the one where you relate the story.
I deleted it because the GNOME users were getting annoying.
Such a GNOME thing to say
I like how GNOME looks and functions for the most part, but I really wish the world provide more options instead of whatever design philosophy they think needs enforced.
Obligatory mention that Linux Mint’s dev team have forked some GNOME apps into their own XApps* project. Part of the reason is so that those apps retain the user’s window manager’s look and feel rather than GNOME’s enforced interface design. That might even be the main reason, but they also throw in their own improvements to the apps where they feel they’re necessary.
They’ve not yet forked all GNOME-looking applications in Mint, and I’m not even sure they intend to, but it’s a noble effort.
* Yes, it really is called that. Like I’ve said before, they probably could have chosen a better name, but they chose it before Wayland was a real threat and before Twitter got lobotomised.
X referred to a display server since long before Twitter was born.
They’re commenting about how the name is bad and how that X is ruined in the public zeitgeist. Yes, X the display framework has been around for decades, but Random Joe 28507 still doesn’t know what that X is.
I installed Debian + gnome today for the first time in years, I hate it even more now then I did back then.
If it had a taskbar it’d be a 10/10 for new users though
I don’t use gnome because I don’t think a desktop use interface should be designed for iPads
I’ve got Gnome installed on a tablet PC. It’s not good there, either.
When I first used Linux I loved Gnome for the intuitiveness and simplicity but I did not like the same thing you were saying. I guess it makes a good desktop for tablets lol.
The thing is in theory I love gnome for that. In practice keep that shit away from me
I think Gnome is the most beautyful Desktop out there. But it’s UX drives me crazy. I tried it a few times but never could get used to it. I always needed extensions to customize it to my needs. But that’s also what I want to avoid because extensions might break in the future. Therefore, Gnome is simply not the right Desktop for me.
But I’m happy for everyone who likes to use Gnome. The great thing about Linux: We have a choice!
I remember seeing a very MacOS like demonstration of Gnome. Someone had themed a Gnome desktop with a kind of sunset in the forest kind of feel, and they were opening menus and launching Nautilus and such like that, and it looked absolutely amazing.
I don’t know how anyone lives with it. I’ve got Fedora Gnome on a tablet that I use basically to have FreeCAD and power tool manual PDFs in my wood shop, and at some point I’m going to try something else. “Opinionated” is the gentle way to put it.
I’m having a great time on GNOME, even without any extensions at all!
That is sort of the thing with Gnome. If you like it it’s great, but if you don’t there is nothing you can do to really change it. Like I think it’s okay, but there are things I don’t like and it is just too much effort to try to adapt it to my preferences.
there is nothing you can do to really change it
So far from true
See: the above meme
You’re right. The several extensions I have used for years don’t exist because: meme. The many settings you can easily change in 2 minutes also fake. Meme.
I’m sure that’s what they meant. That you literally cannot change a single setting in Gnome. What a good-faith interpretation.
Ah yes, the real good faith argument here is saying you can do nothing to customize GNOME because sometimes extensions break. Great point.
Your reading comprehension is severely lacking.
Good for you. I broke my GNOME Pop OS build, I assume because of extensions and pop not updating anything for 2 years. GNOME goes against the Linux philosophy of user customisation.
They don’t develop GNOME for you, they develop GNOME for them
They don’t earn more with more users
If it’s only for them then they shouldn’t mind getting their Wayland protocol veto privilege taken away 🤷
Yea I agree, that seems fair 🤔 but it is for wayland to decide l, I guess
I used it for a while, because KDE was so buggy. Gnome gives you no functionality and it’s still buggy, though.
Once KDE improved I switched to it, though
So you’re not on Wayland you say?
I’ve been running native Wayland exclusively for ages. I disabled XWayland by running gnome-shell with the
--no-x11flag.What makes you think I wasn’t?
There are bugs in Gnome 49 using xwayland like caps lock and other keys not working. But if you don’t use x11 at all (and therefore applications relying on it) you won’t encounter them.
There are so many things the Linux kernel project does just right. One of them is “never break user space”.
Unfortunately most projects completely fail to get why this is important.
I think one of the worst examples is the enormous setback it caused when Python was “upgraded” from 2 to 3, which meant breakage of huge amounts of libraries, that were never fixed, and was extremely detrimental to Python.The kernel respects user-space, but actual user front ends do not!?!?!
KDE generally does the same when they upgrade to new versions of QT.The kernel equivalent of shell extensions would be kernel modules. Out of tree modules break all the time. There’s no stable in-kernel ABI, just like there’s no guarantee that shell internals never change.
python 2 to 3 is actually an enormous change
You can make improvements without introducing breakage.
staying on an end of life unsupported programming language does not spark joy.
open source projects are (often) maintained by unpaid volunteers. unpaid volunteers doing something for the passion of it often don’t want to build with one hand tied behind their back
GNOME is great but people recommending it to beginners need to make it clear that there is only minor customization, and that major customization / extensions will cause headaches.
Plasma is highly customizable out of the box. It’s personal preference in the end of course.
Then, after that, you can introduce them to Hyprland which is EVEN MORE customizable, at the cost of learning the hyprlang and jsonc if you also want waybar.
And then they encounter the horrible mess that is the Hyprland discord and run back to KDE or GNOME. There’s hope with Cosmic yet.
And then there is sway. Which makes you cry but respected.
Isn’t sway more limited in customization compared to hyprland?
(i know that swayfx is for that, but still not sure if it’a as good)
Yeah, probably true. It was a lighthearted joke, I do not know too much about sway or hyperland.
This is why I stopped using Gnome. After every update most of my extensions stopped working. Some took ages to get up to date or were abandoned. And there was no simple way to enable all extensions that the update disabled, having to manually enable them one by one. Maybe that has changed now? It’s been yearsnow… Not that I would go back anyway, tiling managers is where it’s at.
Dunno, I saw GNOME 3 run like molasses on my PC, went “ok, this might be lost cause”, went with LXDE and then XFCE, and now I’m like “if it’s a beefy proper PC I’ll go with KDEPlasma and if it’s, like, very obsolete system I’ll, dunno, go with XFCE”.
GNOME is just opinionated. I get it, it was kinda vaguely modeled after Mac OS, which is kinda an opinionated desktop environment, but the thing is, it’s even more opinionated than Mac OS ever was. The thing about (early!) Mac OS X was “hey, we have this slick desktop environment but also some power user features you might want to use. But we’re not forcing you to!” (Kinda like GNOME 2!) …GNOME has been kinda sweeping those under the rug, in my opinion.
Which is why Plasma is better
We all got choices, that’s what I like about Linux. KDE seems to run great for most people, for me it always seems to bug out and act super janky (the panel editor in particular would bug out and crash constantly, I could never get the damn thing to where I liked it). If it was more stable for me I’d probably use it, I love customizing my system. I’ve tried making it work a few times, never seems to click.
GNOME’s extensions may break on updates from time to time but my day to day experience with it is much nicer. While more rigid it’s a lot more polished and doesn’t crash out on me just using the interface. I like the layout of it. I’m glad KDE works for so many of you guys, but I’ll stick with GNOME until a better option comes around.
That said, if anyone has a better suggestion for a desktop environment I’m all ears.
I just don’t customise very much, either DE mentioned. I did initially when I was new to using Linux out of novelty, but I noticed stuff breaks the more I deviated from the norm after enough updates. Plus it’s such a timesink to begin with. I realised I just wanted to use the fucking computer, not tinker and fight it.
KDE on my office desktop. I like one of the themes CachyOS ships with so I left it at that.
GNOME on the living room PC hooked up to a TV. I think it works better there controlled by a wireless trackpad keyboard from the couch and for purely entertainment purposes. Stremio, web browsing, and gaming.
When’s the last time you tried Plasma? I felt the same way about it as you did until version 6. I’ve been driving it now since 6.2 and its at least as polished as Gnome but with WAY more features and almost infinite customization out of the box.
I tried version 6 last, the customization kept crashing the desktop, it didn’t like me messing with the panels at all. I just wanted a top bar and a dock.
I’ve recently installed the latest version for my fiance who is transitioning from Windows. Immediately there was a small problem with the app menu leaving graphical artifacts on the panel when the menu got closed (it was fixed by increasing the animation speed a bunch somehow?).
After a certain point I gave up and moved on, I can’t agree that it’s as polished as Gnome from my personal experience with the two. But as always, user experience may vary. My experience with KDE seems to be a minority which is good for everyone else lol
Hmm, well, “works on my computer” is never a helpful comment but I have a heavily modified panel that I moved to the top with no issues.
I’m using the built-in task manager widget rather than a dock. Maybe that’s why?
Mind me asking what distro? And Wayland or X11? Also, which dock?
I’m using Wayland and Fedora (Plasma 6.4) and also had a good experience with NixOS (6.3, also Wayland).
I’ve been using Nobara for a long time now, before that I was on Debian, before that Kubuntu. I’ve tried both Wayland and X11 on Nobara until they fully switched to Wayland, they both had issues.
I tried several variations on getting a dock to work, but even organizing the top bar or editing any of the panels at all was causing glitches and crashes. After a certain point I said fuck it and tried Gnome, my problems went away and it only took a few extensions to get it where I wanted. Been more stable since the switch so I haven’t been inclined to go back myself.
Hmm, oh well. As long as you found your happy place…
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy it works for you. Linux has something for everyone and that’s fantastic.
Once Gnome dispences grilled cheese sandwiches it’ll be my true happy place
Cinnamon. After using Xfce and KDE Plasma for years, and having testing Gnome, Budgie, etc., Cinnamon feels like it took the best ingredients from all of them.
I’ll try it out in a VM when I have a bit, looks like something I could recommend to Windows 10 refugees
Kinda same, but I would also always tinker with Plasma endlessly customising every little bit, installed applets and widgets to check if they’re better than what I’m currently using. It got tiresome, but I just couldn’t stop myself. After a while I installed Gnome and just embraced the simplicity.
It really is a shame that they force you to update to the new version. If only there was some way to continue using the existing Gnome version until the extensions have been updated by their authors.
If you want to update your software broadly, it’s a pain in the ass if you need to try to hold gnome and only gnome back.
And many of those extensions get abandoned after the authors get tired of the treadmill of having to redo stuff they already did.
The funniest thing about this is that, according to a Gnome dev, they decided to not create APIs or anything and keep relying on extensions to monkey-patch code into the gnome-shell process to ensure “developer freedom”.
It’s completely mad. I uninstalled Gnome after it crashed on me multiple times, taking either my work or (once) my game process with it.
On KDE at least IF the shell crashes it doesn’t cause all my programs to become unavailable too, I can save whatever I was doing. Its UI/UX is arguably a mess, but at least it god damn works reliably and doesn’t come as barren wasteland with missing base features. I would love to love Gnome, but god damn it hell no.
Shouldn’t that only apply if the other software depends on the new functionality in the updated gnome?
So if I want various things in fedora 42, but I have to refrain because my favorite extension hasn’t been ported from fedora 41. I didn’t use gnome largely because I got tired of keeping up with the extension mess.
Not all of us are trying to micromanage every little piece of software independentlly.
Pinning the version of one package doesn’t constitute “micromanage every little piece of software independentlly”.
No need to get hyperbolic.
If you’re not willing to take even a small action to customize your system, then you should just take what you get and don’t throw a fit.
Or I just pick a solution that lets me customize as I like and supports it in a way I can feel confident about taking updates without worry. So Plasma desktop it is
Gnome is not gods gift to desktop users that I feel I must accommodate, it’s a competent implementation that is just too set in their ways .
👍 I agree with that and personally use Plasma currently, though have mained gnome in the past.
Yes the volunteer software authors should work to the beat of the drum of the baying and braying users who insist on using cutting edge software before its wider ecosystem has adapted to its novelties. A very good point.
No, either gnome should actually support a lot of these things people are such with extensions for it or at least provide some semblance of compatibility if they are so insistent that extensions are the only way to get some of these customizations.
It’s just odd to simultaneously praise extensions as the way for users to get what they want while undermining them every release.
Wrong on all counts. the voluntary software authors actually go out of their way to spite users, extension developers and sysadmins by constantly trying to redefine what is a standard UX.
Most package managers allow pinning software versions, you could look into that for your distro. Might come in handy in other use cases too.
Just don’t upgrade to the next OS version?
I’d you are on rolling release tho, that’s on you. Rolling release is by definition the opposite of stable
I use Gnome with extensions and are quite happy. But it’s true. the worst part is when they break after a new version comes out.
Fun Fact: You can just add the new version number to some file (can’t remember which) for each extension and many of them work just fine. It’s from a list of version numbers where they decide whether an extension can be run on a given Gnome Version. And new versions are not automatically added to that list.
Metadata.
confOr just wait a while before updating, increasing the chance of extentions being updated
Edit .json
I just had a look and I think I edited “metadata.json” for every extension in “$HOME/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/”. I got it from this tutorial.
Yeah I once waited but I think it took multiple months for each maintainer to update. I don’t blame them tho. They update their projects when they can. I just wish it would not necessarily break since it apparently doesn’t really need to be broken.
It depends. Sometimes there are major changes, which would need changes. But most of the time, yes, it’s not necessary.
There is literally one working todo thingy extension for GNOME. KDE has one included.
