And I’d say it’s a pretty good release! As with all large sets of changes, there are a couple of regressions we’re tracking, particularly around the areas of external monitor brightness and multi-screen performance. They are being actively investigated. Other than those, so far all the issues have been fairly minor, requiring people to jump through various hoops to experience them. We’re still working on fixing them, of course! I’ll be writing up another post soon on these issues, discussing how they snuck into the final release, and what we can learn from the experience. But in the meantime, here’s the Plasma team’s work from this week.
That’s the problem KDE has seemingly always had. They historically prioritized features over stability. They have been improving the processes significantly but it still shows a bit.
I personally can’t use KDE as the basic settings are convoluted with lots of options. I wish there was some sort of long stable version that removes a bunch of options and settings to make a desktop that is stable and simple. Having so many options creates a lot of room for problems. I sometimes like to experiment and customize but for my main system I want tested and unchanging.
No need to change the identity of having many options and customization in KDE. This is why we have a choice of multiple desktop environments (and window managers too). If there was no XFCE or Gnome as an alternative, or even the upcoming COSMIC desktop, then I would agree to slim down KDE.
I used Gnome 2, Unity and Gnome 3 all for multiple years and have experience in XFCE as well. Really KDE is not much more buggy than Gnome 3 in example. In fact, I had lot of problems in Gnome 3 such as always breaking extensions and other limitations as well, why I switched to KDE in the first place. I was about to go back to tiling window managers, but KDE works good. I encountered with every desktop environment and window manager problems like these. So to me KDE is not really worse.
Its been a long time since I used gnome 3 so I can’t really testify to its stability. However, modern gnome is very good about make sure they give the gnome experience. Like it or hate it gnome only ships things they think will be reasonable to use. They also don’t ship anything that is not heavily validated.
The downside with gnome is that sometimes there is a breakdown between the devs and the users. The devs use it a certain way and assume everyone else does the same. This can lead to missing functionality that almost everyone reenables with extensions.
Linux as a ecosystem is made by humans at the end of the day and humans are funny about there beliefs. I think a mix of the gnome and KDE style would be great. Cosmic follows the KDE development style as far as I can tell and Xfce4 just doesn’t have a lot of man power.
I really think Cosmic is the ideal desktop, at least from the idea what they want to do. But I don’t want rely on it as its not proven yet (I mean with first release). Maybe in a few years from now.
I have my gripes with Gnome, so won’t go into it now. Not very healthy doing that. :D I do think if you use Gnome as intended and without (or almost none) extensions, and use Gnome Apps for the most part, and don’t need to customize each and every corner, AND embrace the Gnome way of doing things, then I agree it is probably the best DE. But these are lot of ifs and buts. I don’t know if most people fall into this category, I certainly don’t.
And on top of it is how Gnome… well I said I won’t go into it now. :D I’m sure you are familiar with all of this.