KDE at 30 • Hacker News Board

Re: KDE at 30

#71

Post by trostaft » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

Truthfully, I like the more opinionated visual design of GNOME, but I moved to KDE long ago for VRR and better fractional scaling support. They just got it right and working. Huge props to the team, I know that's very difficult.

EDIT: On a side note, is anyone informed about the state of VRR + fractional scaling + general gaming on GNOME? Has it gotten better?

Re: KDE at 30

#72

Post by newsoftheday » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

Please do not drop X11 in Kubuntu, Wayland performs poorly and weirdly. X11 rocks.

Re: KDE at 30

#73

Post by vitorsr » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 6:07 PM UTC

I recently installed Fedora Kinoite [1] and I have been very pleasantly surprised by how stable and performant it is. I am afraid I cannot say the same for their new KDE Linux distribution [2] which in my opinion was a bit unpolished at the time. Both are immutable desktop distributions.

The good news, I guess, is Kinoite stands to benefit from KDE Linux development because it mostly depends on Flatpak to install programs which means all of the KDE ecosystem will eventually be available at Flathub [3] as first-class citizens with reasonable maturity.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/

[2] https://linux.kde.org/

[3] https://flathub.org/en/apps/collection/developer/KDE/1

Re: KDE at 30

#74

Post by swordzen » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 6:09 PM UTC

Apple's Safari was built on top Konqueror / KHTML. KDE deserves a lot of credit. I still use Konsole a lot.

Re: KDE at 30

#75

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

c-hendricks wrote: post #61

datakan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't dropping X11, they are only dropping it in their new login manager. Change the login manager and it will continue to work fine for now.

They do plan to remove X11 from Plasma Desktop as well: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...

[deleted]

Re: KDE at 30

#76

Post by wiz21c » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

ACS_Solver wrote: post #27

One of the most impressive and useful free software projects. My first experience was being totally confused by KDE 1 during my first attempts to use Linux, and I'm writing this from my KDE desktop. Other than the really bad KDE 4 release, the project has consistently been great for me. I've submitted a few smaller patches over the years and that experience was also low friction for a project of this size. KDE is hig…

I've been using KDE for the last 30 years I guess but somehow never used KolourPaint until to 2 weeks go. That's the first "pain" program that is usable to do simple things. Gimp is waaaaay to complex for simple tasks (especially the selection which I've never understood). Congrats KolourPaint team for KISS.

Re: KDE at 30

#77

Post by lowleveldesign » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

A bit tangential, but can you recommend any GUI applications for monitoring the system? The KDE's defualt system monitor is a bit heavy and does not provide much insights. I switched to Linux some time ago as my main system, but I miss a tool such as System Informer [1].

[1] https://www.systeminformer.com/

Re: KDE at 30

#78

Post by pmkary » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 6:38 PM UTC

Their design is getting too sterile and grey. I was a bit sad of seeing the screenshots.

Re: KDE at 30

#79

Post by nailer » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 6:40 PM UTC

KDE is the ultimate "lost the battle won the war" story.

KDE didn't replace Windows as the most popular desktop OS, but 99% chance you're looking at this in a browser that's derived from KDE (Konqueror begat webkit begat Blink) and it's open source because KDE's license made it that way.

Re: KDE at 30

#80

Post by stusmall » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 6:41 PM UTC

thewebguyd wrote: post #24

stusmall wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, when was open source not political? Look at early GNU writing. The topics have change but it being political absolutely have not.

Minor nitpick but s/open source/free software But yes, the free software movement is political, and the FSF is by all intents a political organization with a specific political goal and message. Politics is multifaceted, it doesn't purely relate to government either. Politics is how humans decide who gets what, when and how. You can't run a community or organization without politics.

That's a minor nitpick that probably worth making in this context. People often casually use free and open interchangeably, like the the person I responded to did. There are times when it does have a real semantic difference in meaning... but here? Not really. The thread is even about a free software project.

I agree with the rest of what you say. Politics, governance and identity are unavoidable in any kind of community. It's just part of it and unavoidable. It's about dealing with it fairly, clearly and with respect.