With KDE’s 6th Mega Release finally out the door, let’s reflect on the outgoing Plasma 5 that has served us well over the years. Can you believe it has been almost ten years since Plasma 5.0 was released? Join me on a trip down memory lane and let me tell you how it all began. This coincidentally continues pretty much where my previous retrospective blog post concluded.
↫ Kai Uwe
It took them a few years after the release of Plasma 5.0, but eventually they won me over, and I’m now solid in the KDE camp, after well over a decade of either GNOME or Cinnamon. GNOME has strayed far too much away from just being a traditional desktop user interface, and Cinnamon is dragging its heels with Wayland support, but luckily KDE has spent a long time now clearing up so many of the paper cuts that used to plague them every time I tried KDE.
That’s all in the past now. They’ve done a solid job cleaning up a lot of the oddities and inconsistencies during Plasma 5’s lifecycle, and I can’t wait until Fedora 40 hits the streets with Plasma 6 in tow. In the desktop Linux world, I feel KDE and Qt will always play a little bit of second fiddle to the (seemingly) much more popular GNOME and GTK+, but that’s okay – this kind of diversity and friendly competition is what makes each of these desktops better for their respective users.
And this is the Linux world, after all – you’re not tied down to anything your current desktop environment does, and you’re free to switch to whatever else at a moment’s notice if some new update doesn’t sit well with you. I can’t imagine using something like macOS or Windows where you have to just accept whatever garbage they throw at you with nowhere to go.
KDE is rarely the default of desktops, especially lts ones. As a result it doesn’t get the kind of eyes and bug reports that Gnome gets.
And the reason for this is simple. KDE doesn’t have a regular release cycle. Its no surprise that most distros do a major release every 6 months (like gnome) and include their latest updates.
If KDE committed to a predictable release cycle, you’d see it’s popularity skyrocket overnight with distros.
I’m itching to get Plasma 6, but I’m just going to wait for distros (notably Debian Trixie/testing) to bring them in. Going to be an annoying wait, but I’ll accept it for the nicer distro integration doing it that way will allow.
It’s time for KDE to shine, due to most other desktop oriented environments lacking in some way. Interestingly, what is now holding KDE back is Wayland, that hasn’t matured yet and application sandboxing, that hasn’t matured either. So basically two technologies mainly introduce to compete with Android and iOS are now in a way holding adoption of KDE on desktop back, due to being immature for desktop usage. Go figure.
I dont’ know,
I just tried installing fedora kinoite 39 (with plasma5) as I haven’t used kde for 15 years and read comments from people liking it as a traditional desktop. I wanted to like it but i was so disappointed as the defaults looked like a total mess in the settings, in the ui/theme and in the installed apps usecase and names. Very window-like in a bad way. I am sure it can be configured to be clean and simple but the contrast post installation is huge compared to fedora silverblue with gnome for a « naive « user. I doubt this is a kinoite issue as it matches standard criticism about kde . Maybe I was brainwashed by libadwaita… They should ask a gnome stupid user (like me !) to pick the defaults and configure everything but leave all the powerful options and tools as a bonus for later use,
The experience would be less off putting. Perhaps other distro do that already. Here is an idea for a osnews desktop, haiku inspired of course !
Also to be fair, I did not try plasma6 and I install a couple of extensions (dock etc..) to gnome otherwise it is difficult to use.
And given the announcement focus of plasma 6 on simplicity and new defaults, I will shut up until I can try it.
Yes, likely you were brainwashed by libadwaita, among many other things, and AFAIK KDE has no intentions to repeat the mistakes GNOME made.
of course..
I’m in no position to comment on other DEs, I’ve pretty much used KDE from Corel Linux onward to today. Have used other DEs for periods of time, MATE for a few weeks (like work use, not playing around). It’s normal I think to compare familiar with everything else. For example I found myself trying to adjust MATE to be a little more like KDE. In similar vein, Gnome users for years will find it hard to settle with KDE. May be fine going from Gnome-MATE-Cinnamon. I mean, I’m so KDE bound that my customisation extends to changing single to double click, I put the logout widget next the clock, install Firefox and Thuderbird and I start working. I just don’t care to mess with anything else and I suspect I learned this the hard way years ago. The less I customise the easier it is to be more portable and waste less time.
>In the desktop Linux world, I feel KDE and Qt will always play a little bit of second fiddle
It wasn’t always so. KDE used to be the default for many very popular distros in the 2000s, like SuSE, Mandriva, Xandros, MEPIS, Lindows, Turbolinux, Slackware and so on. (see here: https://eylenburg.github.io/de_default.htm )