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?
Is KDE actually good or it is overrated?
That’s like a trick question 😀
If I say it’s good, and that contradicts your own experience with it, you can say “see it’s overrated, people say it’s good, but in fact I know it sucks.”I use it on Arch but I’ve seen people using it on Fedora and it looked good and stable.
Did you try to look into it, see what’s causing the problems?
In my experience having used Linux and KDE Plasma for about a decade now, if you wanna have a good time you’re going to have to figure stuff out, check the logs, troubleshoot, look it up online, etc.
If you expect to go through different distros to find one that “just works” you’ll be disappointed, and you’ll be wasting your time. Issues can be hardware-specific, maybe you just need to pass a parameter to the kernel, or change a config somewhere or something like that…I’ve been using Debian with KDE Plasma for over a decade and I can count the crashes with the fingers of one hand.
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.
Yes, that’s what its always done.
Kde works great for me, I don’t have any special hardware. I have used it with fedora and bazzite.
If KDE works for you, do you use a preinstalled distro and which one?
Has largely worked fine for me on Tumbleweed.
There is/was an issue with launching some of the ‘K’ programs causing the whole desktop to die. But this happens very rarely. Logs seem to point towards this being driver-related (on nVidia), and updating the driver fixes it. Certainly no problems like what you’re describing though.
Been using Tumbleweed as well. May I ask if you encountered these 2 issues:
- Copy 1Gb movie to flash drive, says it’s done in 10 seconds. Try to remove the flash drive, still in use. Turns out it’s actually still copying.
- Send some files, whatever the size, even 10Mb, to the trash and it takes a minute per file.
Stumbled upon some github issues saying that it’s a longstanding problem (since 2009 even), but I can’t believe that people put up with it for so long without fixing it.
I’m not even thinking of changing DE but this is annoying to say the least.
This happens on slower USB devices the data is buffered and the write won’t be complete right away. You can use the “sync” command and wait until it completes to make sure it’s done before you unmount the device. These days KDE shouldn’t let you unmount before it’s done though.
Been using Tumbleweed as well. May I ask if you encountered these 2 issues:
Haven’t experienced either of those issues. Have you tried to isolate KDE in those cases? Not sure how you’d do it with the deletion because there’s no Trash for the terminal, but you could try the copy operation and see if your device is still blocked when it’s finished in the terminal?
Those are both file operations so they don’t strike me as strictly DE-related.
Thanks for the info.
I tried installing PCManFM-Qt and deleting from there. Works as you’d expect, deletes instantly.
Having NOxOn@lemmy.ml insight in mind that it’s a decades long issue, I don’t get how come that some of us are affected by it and some aren’t. 😅
- Copy 1Gb movie to flash drive, says it’s done in 10 seconds. Try to remove the flash drive, still in use. Turns out it’s actually still copying.
This is not distro related but GNU/Linux and a known “issue” for over decades ! Everything gets into you ram memory and gets dumped from there into your USB storage device.
watch grep -e Dirty: -e Writeback: /proc/meminfoA long term solution would like to write a udev rule something like here:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/771398/solving-the-usb-drive-mass-storage-stall-issue
Thanks! I’ll try that out today!
Why quotation marks? Issue is an issue, decades or days old. 😄
Copying mechanism itself isn’t an issue here; false reporting that something is done when it’s not is.
Because it’s not an issue. This is the system functioning as intended. Changing this behaviour would cause dramatic performance degradation for the 99.999% of the time when the device you are writing to isn’t removable media that you want to eject right away.
It’s an issue according to any UX pattern. If something says that it’s done when it’s not, it’s misrepresenting the state of the action.
Hard to believe that modifying the counter to include the necessary time for actual writing to the flash drive would break everything. Target flash drives only etc.
System functioning as intended doesn’t mean that it’s a good UX.
The question marks are because I read somethere that Linus himself doesn’t see it like an issue by itself but more like a feature? And that’s why it hasn’t been resolved for soo long ! I can’t exactly remember what he said but that’s the gist !
But I do agree, I also see it as an issue :/ and most people who aren’t aware probably fucked up some USB sticks that way…
I’ve been using it on two older systems (4-8 y) one without a ssd or graphics card and it works flawlessly. As others suggested maybe you check your graphics drivers. I used to have problem with kde some time ago but since coming back it’s been nothing but smooth sailing.
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 use it daily and it occasionally may crap out, but it may happen maybe once every few weeks. Can’t comment about GPU and the likes as I only have an Intel iGPU which works just fine.
KDE is just KDE. It has clear pros and cons. Hopefully one day they will take care of the cons.
In my experience KDE on OpenSuse and probably Fedora are rock solid. The first and nowadays probably also the second (which has moved to first tier instead of being a sub-distribution) are considered reference implementations of industry strength distros.
My thought would be that you’ve added something slightly broken to the mix which breaks KDE. It can happen. Linux is complicated, KDE is also complicated, what annoys one desktop can be ok with another. If you want to figure out what the problem is, you’ll have to go through your various system logs to see what fails.
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
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.
openSUSE has the best integration of KDE, but I wouldn’t expect to see issues like yours on any distro, really…
I’ve used it on Endeavour for about a year and on Tumbleweed for eight years before that with no real problems other than plasma-shell occasionally restarting. I have Nvidia and the open drivers.
It is great.
