81–90 of 139 posts
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?
I hope someone comes along with a better recollection than I have. When KDE 1 came out there were some bitter licensing discussions on /. and elsewhere, largely regarding Qt. I had high hopes for Enlightenment and later Gnome but they mostly seemed to fail.
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/
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.
KolourPaint fills a small niche but does it very well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
> Outside of rare special cases, yes, they will still work using the Xwayland compatibility layer. It does a great job of providing compatibility for most X11 applications Not on my 4 year old PC. Wayland performs poorly and usually in wonky ways. I tried it for several weeks. Could not stand the odd behaviors and poor performance and went back to X11. And this is an AlienWare PC, cost me $2000 US, the most I've ever…
If you see this comment and ever decide to give the wayland session and whatever you were trying to run another go, I'd be more than happy to try and help you fix it.
I'm not a Wayland evangelist but as someone with an old(custom built) desktop myself who has used the Wayland session since it became an option, your comment reads to me as:
"Xwayland(and by extension Wayland on KDE) is bad, I'm not going to list any specific programs I had issues with or any of the troubleshooting I tried in the several weeks I attempted to use it but for me it ran poorly and/or strangely.
I have an AlienWare PC, which should prevent any of these issues from happening(?)"
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
> Outside of rare special cases, yes, they will still work using the Xwayland compatibility layer. It does a great job of providing compatibility for most X11 applications Not on my 4 year old PC. Wayland performs poorly and usually in wonky ways. I tried it for several weeks. Could not stand the odd behaviors and poor performance and went back to X11. And this is an AlienWare PC, cost me $2000 US, the most I've ever…
> Can't imagine how bad Wayland would be on the lesser PC's/laptops in our home.
Thousands of users use daily distros based on Wayland without problems. Maybe you had bad luck and something on your system is not fully compatible. But for the majority of people Wayland works fine. Have you tried different distros?
I have long held a bias of KDE being the clunky and slow option from trial in the ~early-oughts. Within the past month or so I installed it to give it a spin and haven't switched back to XFCE since. It strikes a good balance of customization / speed / taste / and just working out of the box. Thanks KDE team!
If you are someone that mostly likes the Windows 7/10 experience, KDE out of the box is basically that. It's more customizable. It's (IMO) less clunky and less burdened by legacy components. But it really just feels like windows used to feel like. But also just fast and low memory. You can run KDE on ancient hardware. If you have something like 512MB of ram, you can do KDE just fine.
The past is a foreign land. Minimum memory requirement for Windows 95 was something like 4MB. I ran OS/2 on 8MB of memory (with a Cyrix 40Mhz 486 clone).
It feels to me that a lot of the bigger ideas in KDE fell away over the years. In the 2000s I would log in every morning, open a KWord doc in one Konqueror tab, a KSpread sheet in another, and some browser tabs alongside them, then I'd launch Kate and open some files over SSH or FTP and get to work. It felt like someone had really embraced OO and applied it to every part of the desktop, and I assume something like KP…