I'm absolutely loving KDE since I returned to desktop Linux after a long absence.
What really shocks me is how few of the big distros make KDE a default or "first class" DE choice. If I was a novice user coming from Windows, I'd much prefer KDE, which if you stick to the GUI is very navigable and similar in some ways.
> GNOME essentially gutted itself when it switched away from GNOME 2.
It gutted itself because quite frankly it was anemic at best. I was a heavy KDE 3 user back then and I vastly preferred it compared to gnome 2, but as a long time linux user I also recognize that ALL desktop linux solutions were pretty rough back them. This "gutting" was certainly painful and questionable but what we have today, KDE 6 (it also went trough painful changes in KDE 4) and GNOME 49 are leagues ahead of what we had back them and I honestly think it's important for both of these DE to remain distinct.
> And GNOME lives on as a sorry excuse for a bad copy of MacOS desktop looks without the feel.
It feels nothing like MacOS because it doesn't have 40 years of macintosh baggage in it, resulting in it being much more approachable for PC/windows users. I dare say GNOME earns it's distinction of being neither mac or windows, but it's own thing. It is very usable and approachable across beginners and advanced users, but lacks that depth you encounter in the competition.
> And GNOME lives on as a sorry excuse for a bad copy of MacOS desktop looks without the feel.
This is an inaccurate description. GNOME is a copy of (the worst parts of) Windows 8 and Mac OS, not just Mac OS.
But seriously, GNOME isn't that bad, and there are people who genuinely enjoy it over KDE. Choice is what makes the Linux ecosystem great.
However, I do agree that KDE is probably a saner default than GNOME, if the goal is to make the transition from Windows to Linux easier. GNOME is (probably) less buggy than KDE, simply due to having less features overall, but the UX is going to be completely alien and off-putting to most casual users.
If I look back at it, GNOME is likely responsible for me abandoning all of my attempts to transition to linux when I was younger. I had no idea KDE or alt desktop environments even existed back then and even now distros don't make it easy to discover/experiment with them. It's to the point I have some internal bias against trusting any distro that uses GNOME as the default.
I hope in the future KDE overtakes GNOME to become the "standard linux" experience.
As a long-time GNOME user, I support this sentiment entirely. What a disaster. It keeps getting worse too. Now you can barely even tell foreground from background windows thanks to this Adwaita bullshit. First they removed all the features, now they're removing all of the visual information.
Same, I've using GNOME for a long time and haven't switched yet out of laziness and being busy with other things, but the next time I have to upgrade my laptop I'm giving KDE a spin, I'm tired of GNOME replacing useful features with... nothing.
They deprecate something and replace it with an app that looks sleek because it has no buttons, and it has no buttons because it has none of the features that I use. And this has happened with the file browser, the image browser, the pdf browser, the text editor... I've lost count. GNOME is seriously worse to use now than it was 15 years ago. At this point I'm not sure what they have left to butcher, but every new version they seem to surprise me with something new they found to mess with.
It's not just worse. It's MUCH worse. I'm in the same boat. I want to change but I don't know what to and haven't had the energy to put into that yet. This desktop is dead though and they're just beating it's dead corpse at this point. I've tried KDE a few times and it was just too disorganized for me, so I might just do something simpler like awesome or one of those tiling things and add in what I want. I used to just use openbox. There must be something equally simple for Wayland.
Gnome isn't dead - it looks more consistent, and in my experience, is running smoothet and cleaner than it ever has (including gnome2 days). It's fine that it's not for you, but comments like this are insane, and not healthy. It's 2025, we don't need to I sult software we don't want to use - just don't use it.
(And, threatening to move back to something like openbox, because gnome is too simple and degraded, is extra hilarious)
What GNOME was is completely dead. All of that flexibility and all of those features are gone. This thing here is something else wearing it's dead corpse.
> consistent
Ah yes, very consistent with two entirely different sets of window borders (GTK3 and Adwaita).
By contrast, I find kde/plasma much more confusing for window borders. I see kvantum, dekorator, breeze forks, something called "klassy," etc. I appreciate gnome's ability to sometimes cut the legacy cord.
It’s far from dead. Take a look at the gnome circle apps as a demonstration of how many good applications are being written for gnome these days.
I believe a large part of this is due to the fact that to use QT you are still stuck with either C++ or Python, whereas there are a ton of gnome apps being written in JS and Rust now.
These are pretty small apps. "Binary" converts numbers between bases. Wonderful.
Meanwhile, more than a few large applications have switched away from GTK to Qt including Wireshark, Openshot, and now Audacity. How many large apps have switched the other way?
I finally took the plunge and upgraded from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 on my work laptop. With that come all the gnome package updates and such.
I reboot, load up my session, and a little while after need to grab a couple files from a zip archive. I double-click it in Nautilus, nothing happens. I give it a couple more clicks before I suspect something broke, right click it, and see "Extract" as... the default cursor action...?
I go back up and see five fresh copies of the folder that was inside the zip. I delete them all, go back to the file itself, right click, open with > file-roller. I try and drag'n'drop the couple files I need: doesn't work, for some reason. Great, they've broken drag and drop, too.
> is drag and drop extraction from Nautilus (or other file managers) really that important?
Why, yes it is! It's even worse if you go and _break_ drag'n'drop support on X11! I'm not even using Wayland!
But, oh well, looks like file-roller is unmaintained and outside of core Gnome scope now. Nautilus' zip capabilities are enough, they say! Why would a user want to inspect the contents of a zip archive before wanting to extract it, or god forbid select specific files, after all? Definitely not worth keeping as a core OS/DE feature.
And the PR on file-roller that fixes this on wayland with... a custom fuse virtual filesystem?! has been untouched for the past 2 years, never to be merged.
MATE was forked around the time GNOME 3 was released and is still going. https://mate-desktop.org
Some people consider Cinnamon to be a GNOME 2 spiritual successor while still using a lot of GNOME 3 stuff under the hood. https://projects.linuxmint.com/cinnamon/
zfs on Linux has not been production ready for decades. People have lost data from it. There's no real reason to allow the default installer to do this.
If you understand the risks, you can do it yourself.
> zfs on Linux has not been production ready for decades. People have lost data from it.
I don't think that's true. Other than with ZFS-native encryption, which I grant has been less reliable, it's been rock solid for a very long time. And I've run >1PB of postgres databases on it professionally, so I feel fairly comfortable in that assertion.
> There's no real reason to allow the default installer to do this.
The default Ubuntu installer at least used to support ZFS, which is the point.
If you Google zfs Linux data loss, you can find many posts about this. Including one lengthy discussion on HN.
Also, you are not the typical user installing the OS from the default installer. I am not saying ZFS is bad, but not including it in the default installer is no big deal.
So funny thing. I was planning to agree and write something about how you can find data loss stories for literally any filesystem, but the relative frequency and nature of those stories is important to differentiate.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=zfs+data+loss&ia=web - First result is someone claiming data loss after setting sync=disabled on a single disk over usb with slog+l2arc on the same disk, and scrub turns up 50k errors; i.e. they did everything they could to hold it wrong, and in the end their disk physically failed, which I really don't think is a ZFS problem. Second result is a stack overflow thread discussing why ZFS doesn't fail the usual ways. Third result is official docs. If I go down the rest of the first page of duckduckgo results, it's mostly discussions of how ZFS protects against data loss, with the one exception of https://forum.level1techs.com/t/solved-zfs-monthlong-changes... ... which looks bad until you realize the use didn't mount a filesystem, and once they found it they recovered their data just fine.
So no, based on random web searches I conclude that ZFS remains head and shoulders above every other option.
---
Edit: If I search for "zfs Linux data loss hacker news", I get https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22005181 which appears to contain zero stories of losing data on ZFS, although there's a bunch of stories about BTRFS doing so. Most of the remaining results are news stories about a single bug from 2023 and one story about ZFS's native encryption having problems (which I grant is a footgun).
I feel like the difference is that Kubuntu installer is specifically intended for users wanting the Desktop experience via KDE, whereas the Ubuntu installer can be used for multiple use-cases such as headless Servers or Desktops. Server admins might have reason to run zfs for root, but typically Desktop users are not really needing zfs when they have 1 or maybe 2 disks. There are other filesystems that provide some of the primary features without the overhead of zfs.
If one knows they want/need a zfs root on their Desktop, then they are likely capable of getting the KDE packages setup through the main Ubuntu installer without needing the Kubuntu installer.
As a desktop user I definitely have a lot of benefit of ZFS even with one drive. It's got bitrot check, copy on write (better crash protection than journals) and snapshots. All life savers especially on desktop. ZFS doesn't only shine on big arrays.
And yes you can do that but I don't use Ubuntu a lot and I hate gnome so obviously I tried setting it up through kubuntu when I wanted to give it a spin.
I'm not a fan of Ubuntu anyway due to systemd and snap but these days I'm on FreeBSD as daily driver and very happy with it. It was just when I was last deciding on an OS that I tried it. Also tried arch and manjaro and a few others but I didn't feel at home there either.
Personally I really like GNOME, and don't in any way consider it a "sorry excuse".
It's not perfect, of course, and it may not be to your liking, but that's just personal preference. I don't particularly care for KDE, but I don't go around spouting vitriol about it for no good reason.
Not surprising, when gnome it's already the default everywhere.
GNOME is polarizing with its feature minimalism and non-traditional desktop, and many people therefore are unhappy it's the default choice in all the big distros.
I respect all other DE's and window managers, I only hate Gnome.
And I only hate it for being the default option. I believe it hasn't gotten its position based on technical merit or user preference but because Ubuntu is pushing it at such, plus I also hate Ubuntu and the company behind it.
Like if people genuinely like Gnome, I don't understand it but that is fine, we are all different. I would just love to see more fair play.
Please. The only thing that's stayed constant through GNOME's history is that the developers have been rooting for other Linux projects to fail, like when System76 announced they were starting COSMIC (since completed and released) [0][1].
> It is very rare that people who use Gnome feel the need to shit on other DEs, but the opposite seems to be pretty common.
You know what they say. If you encounter one jerk, then you encountered one jerk. But if you meet 1000 jerks, and you think everyone who isn't your ally is a jerk, then maybe it's because you have a pattern of user-hostile and developer-hostile decisions which have given people reasons to dislike what you've done to their software ecosystem.
Also, parent comment wasn't "shitting on" GNOME. They were criticizing the design, the first time user experience, and the decisions of downstream projects on which software to center. You are kinda shitting on other users though, IMO, by reframing valid criticisms of GNOME in terms of personal attacks.
"Please. The only thing that's stayed constant through GNOME's history is that the developers have been rooting for other Linux projects to fail, like when System76 announced they were starting COSMIC (since completed and released) [0][1]."
Discussing in semi-private forums if other projects have enough resources to implement certain features is not rooting for other projects to fail. But good that you could dig up a quote from 3 years ago!
"You know what they say. If you encounter one jerk, then you encountered one jerk. But if you meet 1000 jerks, and you think everyone who isn't your ally is a jerk, then maybe it's because you have a pattern of user-hostile and developer-hostile decisions which have given people reasons to dislike what you've done to their software ecosystem."
That's a wild anecdote. I avoided KDE for YEARS because the guy that got me into desktop Linux told me it was terrible and I took his advice as a given. He and the folks he introduced me to all talked massive shit about KDE, and they used Gnome.
This was back around the time Gnome 3 came out.
Oh and when I switched to Plasma two years ago, a GNOME user I used to be friends with came out of the woodwork to tell me how shit KDE is
keep your anecdotal stereotypes to yourself bud. Maybe the real anecdote is that the people you know are unpleasant?
notably, I'm not in contact with the people I've told this story about, anymore.
To be fair, the transition to KDE 4 was super painful. It was basically the Python 3 moment for KDE but worse because they removed a lot of features and gave you a buggy mess instead.
Considering Gnome 3 released like three years after that it makes sense that he you would have discouraged you from using KDE.
It took KDE many years to recover from that. Of course using Gnome 3 instead is a bit extreme. Even broken KDE 4 was probably preferable to that. He should have recommended Xfce or something.
KDE these days is pretty amazing and for sure worth checking out. Though I sometimes still mourn the greatness that was KDE 3.5 even to this day and I am rocking Cinnamon these days.
"To be fair, the transition to KDE 4 was super painful. It was basically the Python 3 moment for KDE but worse because they removed a lot of features and gave you a buggy mess instead."
That is not an excuse to talk shit about a FOSS project. You can say that "you found it buggy and don't recommend using it, but try it out if you want to".
It’s the default because it’s much easier to provide a consistent desktop with gnome compared to KDE. Let’s face it, most quality Linux desktop apps use GTK. Even Firefox uses gtk.
So you can make KDE the default but you’re going to be forced to ship a smattering of gnome/gtk apps anyway with different ui/ux and looks.
On the other hand, you can easily ship a GNOME desktop without even shipping qt libraries at all.
> Let’s face it, most quality Linux desktop apps use GTK.
As I wrote above, more than a few large applications have switched away from GTK to Qt including Wireshark, Openshot, and now Audacity. How many large apps have switched the other way?
Then there are the "quality" apps that have always been on the Qt / KDE side of the fence: Kdenlive, FreeCAD, Krita, Scribus, qBittorrent, Qt Creator, Dolphin... And that's free software. It is a slam dunk for Qt on the commercial side.
> Let's face it, most quality Linux desktop apps use GTK.
My only dependents of GTK are Qalculate, Chromium and Firefox. I do not use the GTK version of Qalculate (but the Arch package includes it anyway) and I would never count modern web browsers as having a significant dependency on any UI toolkit. Am I missing out on a high quality Linux desktop experience?
1. Like yours, KDE is similar to Windows so it's less scary for new users.
2. KDE is similar to Windows so will confuse users when it doesn't run Windows software or doesn't quite behave in the same way. Macs don't look the same and people don't get scared or expect their Windows software to run on it.
I can see both arguments, and I've definitely seen internet complaints about both KDE and Gnome being either too similar or not similar enough and they are confused.
KDE looks different enough to windows in its default install though. And you can make it look like whatever you want, that's the best thing about it. Mine is heavily customised.
I like KDE a lot, and yes you can configure it to look and act just abut any way you like, but it's default definitely has a lot in common with Windows.
It's the other way round, at least some, if not all, of these screens were in KDE before they were released in Windows.
In general, KDE tends to be widely copied. Even macOS has borrowed a lot from KDE.
It has been over 10 years since I stopped being a KDE fanboy and became just a regular fan, but I remember that during my flame-war era, many features from KDE would often appear in Mac OS and Windows and their most popular applications (such as iTunes).
These days I don't care so much, I use KDE and I'm too old to switch.
In common yes but it's not windows, that's pretty obvious.
Especially that start menu with the tiles on windows is very different (and horrible because the default doesn't look like that screenshot, it's filled with ads, news and other crap)
Maybe I need to lower my expectations a bit but I feel like someone who is explicitly leaving windows for Linux by that point would understand it can’t run everything windows does right? In the same way basically everyone gets that a lot of software doesn’t operate on Mac and Windows.
> I feel like someone who is explicitly leaving windows for Linux by that point would understand it can’t run everything windows does right?
I get it, but it's unfortunately not true.
The amount of folks I've seen complain about their Windows pirate copy of Photoshop CS6 not working on Linux so they will go to Mac over the years has been quite silly.
They’re complaining but I think they at least knew that it wasn’t going to work out the box if at all, they just tried anyway. I work in film production so I’ve seen this exact scenario multiple times and you’re absolutely right, but they weren’t surprised IME. They just thought they could figure it out.
I usually tell them “if you have to use Adobe, then move on. If you don’t care that much, there are plenty of free/affordable programs with feature parity (or better) for Linux against CS6.” I mean it’s pretty old!
I migrated my non-technical mom from windows to Ubuntu in 2005 and my daily support questions on how to do this and that went to once a few weeks. Gnome 2 and Firefox was very simple. The OpenOffice stability was also great when Microsoft switched to ribbon.
Eventually I got her on a Mac and she hasn’t asked a question since. She keeps buying new ones ever since.
Many people (myself included) seem to get the impression that software that used to run on MS Windows before version 11 doesn’t enjoy the same level if backwards compatibility and forwards compatibility like it used to. People were half-joking that Linux/WINE now runs some older games better than Windows 11.
I can easily see a novice user coming from Windows accidentally getting into the edit mode of Plasma and being completely confused. I like KDE as an advanced user but I wouldn't install it on my grandma's laptop.
I agree that it would be great to have it as a first-class citizen in more distros, but I guess the maintenance burden is not negligible. I'm glad Fedora promoted it though.
The average Linux user is not your grandma and lets not overstate how easy it is to mess up your KDE config. Most of the config ui in KDE is delightful compared to other desktop environments, and most non-technical users would shy away from even trying to fiddle with technical stuff. And those that do fiddle and mess up are likely to have a technical person at hand to help them, because someone had to install Linux for them in the first place.
KDE is a much more sensible default for the highly technical person who is likely to install Linux themselves. There are other great options if you want something more locked down and noob proof. KDE really is the most relevant choice for default for most distros atm.
Playing devil's advocate, KDE settings are clear but there might be a possibility for a "Advanced Mode" button (with a first-time click warning) on the top-right of the "Quick Settings" screen that opens up when we launch the Settings. That can hide the "risky" stuff (e.g. "Window Management" etc). There might be value in adding a "Lock Panels" options to handle accidental modifications/removal etc.
I agree with the “Advanced Mode” button. That’d solve a great deal of the issues that KDE Settings suffers.
On the other hand I think it could use a fair deal of work on the clarity front. There are a number of settings that are confusing or ambiguous even for some technical users.
The problem with advanced modes is that it is easy for a chaos monkey to get into them, and at scale that will happen all the time.
A mitigation for advanced modes is to have a big bright red "get me the hell out of this to a normal state" button. Making it easy for a human to get back to the normal steady-state reduces the risk of an advanced mode and gently encourages exploration and experimentation, if it is always trivial to get back to what you're used to. This means that configuration changes can't ever be fully destructive though, which requires quite a bit of design and engineering.
I've had the opposite experience. I installed KDE on a new desktop I built for my mom, and outside of a handful of growing pains (mainly things Windoze had vendor locked), she's been happy as a lark with it. She hasn't gone very far off the beaten path and really doesn't have too much of a need to.
For novice users there's already other more opinionated environments anyway. I get KDE because it's powerful not because I want my grandma to use it.
In fact I don't understand why people are rooting for Linux on the desktop. I personally don't even want that to happen because it would quickly become so dumbed down and commercialised that it would become the same trash that is windows and mac. Because normal users just want to pay someone to take care of things for them and that someone will want to make ever more money. Meaning app stores, services, lock-in, advertising and such crap. So what you get is basically like ChromeOS. Easy mode for users, totally locked in to their warm and fuzzy walled garden, total corporate surveillance and completely evil to power users like you and me.
I'm very happy if the majority of consumers stays away because their wants and needs are completely opposite to ours. All the things that make Linux great will not apply to whatever they will use.
20 years ago, my late dad (then aged 69) had a desktop PC that couldn't run Windows anymore in his store business.
Problem solved: Installed the latest Slackware stable (with yours truly as root for essential maintenance) equipped with the latest KDE 3.x environment.
Had no complaints.
I second this. Once and once again I saw new distros being created, some with quite ambitious goals for the desktop, and then crippling themselves by choosing Gnome. I have nothing against it, but it seems to me clearly inferior in functionality and customizability.
What’s up with this constant insistence that the Linux desktop should be familiar to windows users? I feel like people are just as likely to be familiar with OSX at this point.
Also I’m not sure why sticking with a 30 year old mouse driven desktop metaphor is a hard requirement.
I’ve been trying it out coming from the Mac recently, mostly because I had to do stuff that didn’t play well with an arm processor.
It is surprisingly elegant and polished now. There’s a couple rough edges - the settings menu needing the apply button on every change like a form is weirdly ancient, and notifications are a bit noisy, but overall I could see myself ditching macOS for it.
What really shocks me is how few of the big distros make KDE a default or "first class" DE choice. If I was a novice user coming from Windows, I'd much prefer KDE, which if you stick to the GUI is very navigable and similar in some ways.