Trying Plasma for a bit to see how green the grass is as a longtime Gnome user. The last time I ran Plasma on my main desktop was version 5.11, I think? It’s been a while…
What do you think so far?
The couple of times I have decided to switch to Plasma I somehow get pulled back to GNOME. Like, I tried out earlier Plasma 5 on my system76 laptop and then s76 announced Pop!_OS. Then I tried again when I came across Nitrux which was essentially a heavily customized Plasma. Then I got a Librem 5 which uses phosh, based on GNOME.
I really liked it though, and have thought about trying Plasma Mobile.
Got used to the Steam OS Desktop on my steam deck. I used Ubuntu a decade ago and went with Kubuntu on my gaming rig which won’t support windows 11 but I wanted the same desktop like my steam deck.
More than 6 months and no regrets. Since 24.10 you even get wayland natively. Even my old NVIDIA 1080 Ti works good.
I think that’s the window environment on SteamOS. I honestly really enjoy it on my Deck. It feels light and fresh.
KDE + Arch is such a great combo. I’m using it on a 10yo laptop (though admittedly it’s a rather beefy lappy for it’s gen, a 2014 ZBook g2, with 32 GB ram)
KDE can be slow on lower spec devices but it is so great to use and it was trivially easy to alter keyboard shortcuts, default application, startup behavior, etc.
KDE can be slow on lower spec devices
Not any slower than anything else. KDE is surprisingly light for all it does. I am using it on a laptop with an Intel N processor and 4gb ram. I also use it on modern stuff, but it works better than gnome and about equal to xfce on this old hardware.
Yeah I used to do consumer computer recycling and the really old laptops that were not worth a Windows reseller’s license we would just slap Linux on I tested just about every de out there and plasma was shockingly fast on some of these ancient Celeron laptops. Gnome was like molasses, I’ve never understood where people get the idea of the plasma is heavy
I installed cosmic the other day. Uninstalled it like 5 minutes later but I enjoyed its vibe. I am excited to see it come out of alpha
Same here, I prefer KDE, but popos has been my daily driver for a while now just for compatibility and ease of use.
Very excited for cosmic as in not a fan of gnome.
I’ve never been a real plasma user (played around with it sure but never more than a week or something) and have been using GNOME since ~3.10 the whole workflow is just ingrained in my mind and simply works. So I’d be happy to hear how you’re doing on Plasma even if I don’t see myself switching anytime soon.
I used to be a huge fan of Gnome, back before they switched to whatever this mobile-first nonsense design is. Looks like something you would see on a tablet designed for children. They destroyed Gnome!
The same. I used to love GNOME, now I’m forced to use KDE because GNOME 3+ is completely disgusting and unusable.
Yeah, they really did our boy wrong.
Old gnome was great. Was like the best middle ground. Enough options to tweak stuff, but not plasma levels of knobs. Le sigh
And let’s not forget that it looked great. The perfect blend of style and minimalism.
I use Cinnamon on my desktop to avoid the whole “modern” Gnome problem. It’s far better. But it’s Plasma all the way on my laptop baby!
Yeah, Cinnamon is great, but I use Plasma myself. I got used to it after switching to Nobara, back in the day, but for most of the past year or two I’ve been using Bazzite and it defaults to KDE as well.
So went frivolous, and installed KDE after years of Xfce.
Wierd interactions everywhere, ctrl f4 doesn’t close windows, the terminal is called “Konsole” lol
Would not recommend, i m going back.
Funny thing, I used Xfce pretty much everywhere. When I recently had a work laptop I tried KDE seriously for the first time ever, and I was like, oh, this is just a sensible desktop nowadays.
Clearly meant for nice hardware though. Sometimes a bit slow on my Raspberry Pi 4. Might switch back. But otherwise, no complaints.
alt+f4 closes windows, like it did in Windows. Where does ctrl+f4 come from?
Even in Xfce ALT+F4 closes windows. Maybe bro changed it at some point and forgot about it
And the RAM usage!
XFCE for life!
Lol ram usage. If you are trying to split hairs between KDE at about 800 mb and XFCE at 400 mb when a browser is going to hit you for at least a gig these days, I am not sure it matters that much.
Welcome, make yourself at home! Want to put files on your desktop? You can do that here! We’ll still make fun of you for doing it, but you can do it.
KDE Plasma is honestly impressive in terms of customization, I’m running it on Pop!_OS on an ancient Macbook and I have it customized to look like Window 7.
Good stuff.
NGL, you had me in the first half…
How close to plasma is Cinnamon?
Plasma isn’t as visually polished as Cinnamon. Go ahead and get your clock and CPU temp widgets in the system tray the same font size and positioning.
KDE feels a bit more cluttered because…I’ve said this before, KDE gives you every option under the sun, GNOME software isn’t designed to do anything unless you add extensions to enable features, and Cinnamon is somewhere in the happy middle.
Plasma isn’t as visually polished as Cinnamon.
I’m pretty sure you can get Plasma to look and behave nearly identical to Cinnamon if you wanted.
I recently tried to do this because Cinnamon was pissing me off
I gave up after ~6 hours over 3 days, Plasma Amish a beast
Linux Mint 22.1 just came out with a new high DPI theme and some theme reworking and now my issues are fixed thank fuck
By default, both Plasma and Cinnamon have a very similar set up to Windows.
However, Plasma is insanely modular and customizable, so if you’re willing to take the time to, you can make it look as much like Cinnamon as you please. Given how simple Cinnamon’s design is, I don’t think it would be hard at all.
Hmmm. I’d like windows 98 to be honest.
OK. Easy enough.
You can make KDE look like that if you want.
Takes literally minutes to try with 0 install and no risk for your data : https://distrosea.com/start/kubuntu-24.10-default/
I’m not saying you should enjoy it (even though I do, Debian stable with Plasma for a while now) but it’s so convenient to give any distribution with any desktop environment a try that IMHO it’s wrong not to spend few minutes and see what you might be missing.
Fedora/dnf makes installing additional desktops super easy, also with no risk to data. To hijack your comment a bit:
To install Plasma:
sudo dnf install @kde-desktop
Logout and log into the Plasma session to use it.
To rollback, get the transaction ID of the above:
dnf history list
And then rollback:
sudo dnf history rollback <ID>
If Gnome’s fonts/icons don’t revert, install and open gnome-tweaks and reset settings.
I think generally installing another DE on top of an existing one (assuming you already had one) is not recommended, as they might use some of the same config files and mess them up for each other.
This is the first time I’ve heard of this, and I pretty much always have more than one DE installed and have never run into issues. Assuming you’re using a display manager (SDDM, LightDM, etc.), it should handle loading whichever graphical session at the time of login properly.
edit: For clarity, what do you mean by “installing another DE *on top * of an existing one”–like kludging two DEs together in the same X/Wayland session? If so, that sounds like a horrible mistake that lead to that happening.
I mean in a way where you’d get 2 different X/Wayland sessions to select in your login manager.
I have also never run into issues doing this, just have always been told it’s a bad idea.
eh. only vaguely.
basically, there might be some conflicts, such as a different icon theme being selected, but for the most part, things are fine - and most distros, uninstall is straightforward.
one more significant issue you might run into is display manager changes. Gnome may not always play nicely with a kde display manager, and vice versa, regarding sleep, lock, etc. however, i think all of those issues are pretty much fixed these days.
I have been a GNOME 2 and then MATE user for over a decade. Now I use KDE since that’s what SteamOS comes with and it’s fine.
Wow, I found the one other MATE user. Cheers.
What is this place?
Windows minus Microsoft BS.
Windows
Take that back… /s
I just installed plasma and I love it. I have no experience with it before this year.