Hello folks. I use many distro from Debian to Fedora to OpenSuse and Arch. I also use many window managers like i3, dwm and qtile. On desktop environment, I use XFCE the most. Currently, I am looking to try something new, hence KDE.
I am looking for something with a beautiful UI and works out of the box. So, something on the same spectrum as XFCE but more pretty.
I tried out the distros with preinstalled KDE: Fedora KDE, Manjaro KDE, Kubuntu.
The good: KDE is beautiful and very easy to use. I actually enjoy using my computer more.
The bad: it crashes… a lot even when I turn off all the animations. My system is not that slow: AMD 7 Pro with 64 GB of RAM. Some examples:
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Logging in, KDE hangs for 30 seconds. Even when I finally see the desktop, I would need to wait a further 10 seconds to finally able to interact, i.e. click and open stuff.
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After resume suspend, system would hang and there is nothing I can do except for a forced reboot.
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Browsing the web with only 3 tabs opened, KDE also hang.
As much as I hate GNOME, everything just works. I installed the GNOME flavors of above distros and never experience any hiccups.
If KDE works for you, do you use a preinstalled distro and which one? How about if you install KDE from scratch, like Arch?
I use arch and so I get the latest kde releases and sometimes things are buggy. But usually those are fixed next update. But yes, it is beautiful but man it’s not as stable as something like gnome
Yes, that’s what its always done.
I used to have hang on suspend resume problem on my Thinkpad E15. It somegot got resolved in later updates. Might be a random firmware problem, that’s really hard to track down. So may be it mostly comes down to luck.
I think Linux nerds are clowns who don’t understand that not everyone wants to learn what -xvf means just to extract a goddammed file.
Kde is solid and requires zero fuckery in my experience to work well. This is in fedora, suse, arch (endeavour), void.
KDE just works on my machine, which is lower specs than yours. I’ve never had it crash. I use Endeavor OS, so it came with it by default (which was part of the reason I chose it).
Edit: I don’t do much tweaking of the KDE settings other than the main color scheme. I also have never had an issue with waking from sleep on Endeavor (but I recall in years past that was an issue with most distros I tried and unrelated to KDE since I was less a fan of its style back then and didn’t use KDE). My set up is a normal desktop PC that I use daily for everything, including gaming.
I use KDE with Chimera Linux which is only in beta. Rock solid.
I’ve been using KDE for over 4 years on over a dozen different machines and 5+ distros and I’ve never had major problems with crashing.
I do experience small bugs fairly often. Maybe once every month or two, little glitches or odd window behavior. Nothing huge, but they do happen. To be fair, I like to modify and customize KDE quite a bit, so that is probably causing some of my issues.
In my experience, Cinnamon is the most stable DE I’ve used by far. Least amount of random bugs, simple but stable. I don’t think I’ve ever had Cinnamon crash on me actually.
Vanilla Arch is much easier to install than it used to be. Connect to wifi via terminal commands or connect ethernet, enter
archinstalland go down the list.I’ve only ever had the waking from sleep problem, but it’s consistent in other DE’s for me. I have a desktop so I just turn that and hibernate off.
I had a known problem with krunner not opening after first run unless you killed the process, but I got rofi and customized it to the teeth instead. Found out that I love rofi. I probably won’t go back to krunner even it gets fixed now.
I’ve been using Fedora KDE for…months? Maybe a year now? And I’ve yet to see it hang or crash.
I’ve never had issues like that on Kubuntu, Debian, or EndeavourOS. KDE is great and I love it.
I have never gotten KDE to work well… but I’m a shitty user running on shitty hardware so grain of salt and all…
Most of those issues I do not have. By waking from suspend, do you mean hibernate? A system d update broke that last year in OpenSuse and I’m assuming other distros. I sleep now and it wakes fine.
I had issues like that about a week ago, when gaming the system was super sluggish. It turns out that an update put the render under CPU instead of GPU, as in, without hardware acceleration, or software based.
openSUSE has the best integration of KDE, but I wouldn’t expect to see issues like yours on any distro, really…
In my experience, KDE can run just fine, but it is seemingly pickier about drivers and hardware (I’ve had a loose DisplayPort connection crash it several times) than other desktop environments.
