I feel like you can change dolphin “into” any file manager you want. It’s so configurable and really is a pleasure to use.

It's true, you can use another file manager as your default in KDE, via the settings application. Don't take my word on this but it's something you can do as early as since the KDE4.x days, when Dolphin was starting out and people were used to Konqueror.

I understood flatiron to mean you can configure Dolphin to look and/or behave similarly to other file managers, not that you can literally swap it, even though you might be able to.

KDE 3.5 had all the knobs you could imagine and probably had more than KDE today

Is there an easy way to store my KDE environment in a dotfile? KDE seems like it _can be_ the perfect DE given enough customization. How do I maintain and reuse that customization (aside from something like Nix)?

It's been while since I used it but I think all KDE applications store configuration in $HOME. I don't remember any global registry nonsense like in GNOME and Windows.

KDE stores a lot of dotfiles. I have had luck preserving my config because I don't wipe my root folder, but aside from that it's quite hard to migrate from one PC to another.

The few times I got annoyed by Gnome its 'my way or the highway' approach and switched to KDE, I whiplashed back to Gnome within a day due to how buggy and perplexing a lot of the decisions in KDE are.

That's fair. I also left KDE because I wanted a simpler system with less dependencies. I couldn't tolerate GNOME and all the alternatives so I just dropped the entire concept of an integrated desktop environment.

I installed i3 and it changed the way I use computers forever but I still miss many of the KDE applications. I wish there was a way to use them without bringing in the rest of KDE with them.

>it changed the way I use computers forever

Can you tell us more? I don't know a lot about i3, but that sounds interesting!

Tiled workspaces turned out to be a perfect match for me. I can easily organize windows into any layout I want: tabbed full screen windows, editor and terminal. The keyboard driven interface is so nice it's actually frustrating whenever I have to use anything else. It's very simple and effective.

KDE breaks every time you touch it. Not sure why all of these picky commenters leave that out every time we discuss DEs.

Because it is not true. Or at least, that hasn't been my experience in the last 13 years I've been using it.

Have you ever changed the theme?

I always change the theme, I've never really had it break. Most of the time I'll leave it on "Breeze" though and just change the colorscheme, but I seldom see it break in a way that's not immediately fixable (eg. switching icons to dark mode). Even when I did play with custom KDE themes, I never noticed it break much more than GNOME did with custom themes.

Just did.

KDE is more stable than ever before. I'm on 5.24.4 on Arch, fwiw.

Yes

They don't discuss it because its not their experience in the first place.

Plasma has the second biggest share behind gnome without being the default on many distros. Did you really think a quarter of Linux users sat in a constantly crashing environment saying well this is fine while their computers are on fire?

https://linux-hardware.org/?view=os_de&colors=30

KDE doesn't have IBM/Red Hat's resources behind it. Bugs are fixed and rolled out in new versions of libraries including KDE libraries and supporting libraries from outside KDE. If fixes aren't backported and if you use a version with 19 known issues that aren't ever going to be fixed and aren't worth reporting because they in fact have already been fixed in libraries you wont have access to for the next 2 years then your experience will not match someone who is actually running recent software.

I remember demoing netrunner years back when it shipped an edition that was based on Ubuntu with KDE. Everything crashed constantly. If this was my first experience with KDE I might have incorrectly come to the conclusion that KDE was unstable. In fact Netrunner made a shit show of shipping a combined package that just didn't work effectively.

KDE either works flawlessly and one praises it endlessly, or you change one setting and everything crashes at the slightest touch. I'm unfortunately in the latter camp having tried it twice over the years.

My biggest issue was this: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=426644 I've settled on Manjaro GNOME right now because while it's not as customisable as say Cinnamon (which I started having issues with after the latest release - mainly workspace switching gradually grinding to a halt) it seems more stable than KDE.

Don't have the energy to rice XFCE. There really isn't a DE that "just works".

> Don't have the energy to rice XFCE. There really isn't a DE that "just works".

That's not DEs, that's your distro which requires ricing.

If you install, say for example, Xubuntu, XFCE works as much as other linux DEs do.

Of course it may not be just working as much as Windows or macOS does, but that's same with all linux desktop environments.

I left that out because KDE never once broke when I used it.

> Not sure why all of these picky commenters leave that out every time we discuss DEs.

Because it's a lie.

i use dolphin with gnome, gnome is a nice ux in general but lacks a lot, as was highlighted.. mixing elements is the only way to get a useful experience unfortunately

Konqeror was the best.