I recently installed KDE Plasma to my Debian system after using Gnome my entire life. I still quite enjoy gnome, but I think that its workflow is better suited to a mobile system like my laptop (though to be honest this is also questionable to me at this point).
Using Plasma on my desktop system has been revolutionary - there is a stupid amount of functionality in here. In particular, widgets, themes, and activities are just so well implemented for the most part - I really feel like I can tailor the GUI to my needs and wants, and I think this is an enormous part of what is making Linux a truly modern OS when compared to proprietary alternatives.
The more I tweak things, the more the system feels truly like MY system - something that you won’t ever get in proprietary software, or even Gnome in it’s current state I feel (unless you jump through a tonne of hoops and write a lot of stuff yourself).
I was not a big fan of the splash screen until I found out that, of course, it can be disabled or customized as well.
My only real regret is that having been on Gnome originally, some Gnome stuff can get in the way (though I do still kind of like using GDM instead of SDDM). Whenever I should do some big update/upgrade I am for sure installing plasma from the get go.
As someone who is new to KDE overall, and particularly with a system that has Gnome still partially installed, if there is anything I should know, I would appreciate it. Furthermore if anyone has any favorite widgets and whatnot, I would love to hear about them as well.
Thank you
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Oh come on. He’s just stating his preference.
No problem with stating your preferences. Well-reasoned, respectful, compassionate and well-researched criticism is also okay.
It’s a warning for the rest of you. People who start banging on how they hate X, Y or Z or how P, Q, and R sucks will have their comments removed. Sorry.
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Alright dude. If that’s the way you think it should be. I think your tone is off, not the other way round.
Sorry.
I learned that the least you customize it, the less you’ll have problems. But that goes with anything in Linux, really.
I love plasma and now daily driving it for every system except games… Do agree I wish they’d make the splash screen more attractive, but like you said can kinda change it however you want so I just deal. Not a huge fan of the very pink lockscreen and I did change that. Once in a while it doesn’t catch the change and I end up with the default again for a session.
When I first installed it I was a little worried because I thought it broke my games, but then I quickly realized that Valve had updated their Proton release so all I had to do was roll back 1 version and everything started working again.
Proton is AMAZING! My issue was the window manager because I have dual monitors with different refresh rates I could just never get it to work right.
The other thing I ran into was that I couldn’t find anything that worked quite as well as Voicemeeter.
So until I get those two things figured out my gaming rig is still on Windows. I am amazed at how far we’ve come though. Even my work applications are compatible with linux now.
Ah yes, I also had to leave Voicemeeter behind when I switched. I’m aware that there are some softwares available that purportedly fill that gap (JACK Audio Server was one if I recall correctly), however I don’t think I could figure them out. Voicemeeter was really quite good as far as simplicity went.
I’m not sure if its my hardware or if I’m doing something wrong but I’ve tried Plasma several times and its just so buggy I end up going back to Gnome.
The most recent attempt I had a plasma process that kept kicking off by itself and maxing out my CPU.
What sort of hardware are you running? I’ve been converting some old computers at work in our “Business Centers” to Linux with Plasma and have not experienced anything like you’re describing. They range from pentium dual cores from like 2011 up to 6th gen i5s, and all of them have been working great.
Its a Lenovo Legion with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800h and a NVIDIA 3070 GPU.
I friggin love Plasma!I don’t use it myself - I’m more a keyboard guy, and use lightweight tiling WMs - but my wife’s laptop is running KDE and Plasma. I have to say, whenever I go into the machine to do maintenance, I’m surprised at how far KDE has come. It looks polished, professional, and attractive; there are no glitches or weirdness (that plagued Plasma in the early years), it’s smooth, and just… really nice. Really nice. I wouldn’t hesitate to install it on any computer for friends or family, distro choice notwithstanding. Not sure how it would run on a resource starved ARM micro computer; I might still think twice about that, but given that you can get a reasonably powerful, 12-core AMD mobile CPU-based mini with 16GB RAM for, like, $300 on Amazon, I can’t imagine why anyone would try to run a desktop on Pi anymore anyway.
I had the same feeling - I still disregarded other choices in favor of XFCE on my little home server since I mostly interact with it over ssh anyway and didn’t need all the other functionality others have for it.
I use Plasma now, but I miss the cohesiveness provided to developer by Gnome’s Human Interface Guidelines, the result is a vastly unified design language across core, circle and some other 3rd party apps. Plus, I appreciate that their design language is very simplistic and easy on the eyes. While Plasma tends to be more condensed and explicit even for non primary features, while on GNOME, secondary features tend to be hidden from plain sight.
That said, Plasma has been faster to adopt some gaming and design related features due to their collaboration with Valve and from what I’ve read in the fediverse, they are more open to other people’s opinions.
There were a few Figma mockup leaks that looked FREAKING amazing in these regards, but that mockup has been taken down by KDE and is no longer public. I can’t even find screenshots now. If that mockup ever becomes real, I won’t miss GNOME at all.
That said, GNOME is freaking amazing, I had an awesome time with it, and it’s a perfectly valid option.
I feel the same way about Gnome. But I really hate the path they took for the change in the desktop paradigm. It feels very much limiting and empty. More fit for a tablet, as others mentioned.
Welcome to KDE Plasma land 😀
I am particularly happy that you’ve mentioned activities! 😁
They are a somewhat under appreciated (or misunderstood?) feature that I personally find invaluable and it is great to see someone else feeling the same way
Yea, I happened across it when browsing the settings and was pretty fascinated - it adds a really cool extra layer of modular functionality to the system to make widgets actually super useful for specific cases and on the fly - or if I just want to instantly have a different feeling for the desktop.
@golden_zealot
Yes, Plasma is unbeatable.
Customization is almost everything for a DE. Customization is the most important this is why I try to use as customizable as possible software (not forgetting about privacy, sure), like #VivaldiBrowser , #linux and anything else like that 🤩Yes, I agree - I am also using Vivaldi for very much the same reasons.
Aww, thanks.
I agree about SDDM, it’s an unexpectedly sore point for Plasma. I hear that they’re working on an in-house replacement for it and it honestly can’t come soon enough
