Hello folks. I use many distro from Debian to Fedora to OpenSuse and Arch. I also use many window managers like i3, dwm and qtile. On desktop environment, I use XFCE the most. Currently, I am looking to try something new, hence KDE.
I am looking for something with a beautiful UI and works out of the box. So, something on the same spectrum as XFCE but more pretty.
I tried out the distros with preinstalled KDE: Fedora KDE, Manjaro KDE, Kubuntu.
The good: KDE is beautiful and very easy to use. I actually enjoy using my computer more.
The bad: it crashes… a lot even when I turn off all the animations. My system is not that slow: AMD 7 Pro with 64 GB of RAM. Some examples:
-
Logging in, KDE hangs for 30 seconds. Even when I finally see the desktop, I would need to wait a further 10 seconds to finally able to interact, i.e. click and open stuff.
-
After resume suspend, system would hang and there is nothing I can do except for a forced reboot.
-
Browsing the web with only 3 tabs opened, KDE also hang.
As much as I hate GNOME, everything just works. I installed the GNOME flavors of above distros and never experience any hiccups.
If KDE works for you, do you use a preinstalled distro and which one? How about if you install KDE from scratch, like Arch?
You say KDE hangs, but what component hangs actually? It it plasmashell (other apps work but panel is dead?)? Kwin (windows move/respond to input?)? KDE apps?
I would suggest you to install a distro with kde (fedora KDE edition or open SUSE, not neon) if you’re not confident with administration. Use something like Kinoite for accidental breakage protection, or if you want to keep /home as is, install fedora 42 inplace (the new installer).
Not only my experience but also that of many KDE devs say that fedora KDE is probably the best mainline KDE experience (ignoring niche distros or customized KDE).
Also, don’t use xorg session. Always log in to default wayland session unless you have incompatible usecase (in that case you know what you’re doing).
Sounds familiar. I have tried it with many distros and it just isn’t usable. Gave up and ended up liking cinnamon more anyway.
KDE is just KDE. It has clear pros and cons. Hopefully one day they will take care of the cons.
Kde works great for me, I don’t have any special hardware. I have used it with fedora and bazzite.
I use arch and so I get the latest kde releases and sometimes things are buggy. But usually those are fixed next update. But yes, it is beautiful but man it’s not as stable as something like gnome
KDE just works on my machine, which is lower specs than yours. I’ve never had it crash. I use Endeavor OS, so it came with it by default (which was part of the reason I chose it).
Edit: I don’t do much tweaking of the KDE settings other than the main color scheme. I also have never had an issue with waking from sleep on Endeavor (but I recall in years past that was an issue with most distros I tried and unrelated to KDE since I was less a fan of its style back then and didn’t use KDE). My set up is a normal desktop PC that I use daily for everything, including gaming.
I think Linux nerds are clowns who don’t understand that not everyone wants to learn what -xvf means just to extract a goddammed file.
Kde is solid and requires zero fuckery in my experience to work well. This is in fedora, suse, arch (endeavour), void.
I use KDE with Chimera Linux which is only in beta. Rock solid.
I’ve been using KDE for over 4 years on over a dozen different machines and 5+ distros and I’ve never had major problems with crashing.
I do experience small bugs fairly often. Maybe once every month or two, little glitches or odd window behavior. Nothing huge, but they do happen. To be fair, I like to modify and customize KDE quite a bit, so that is probably causing some of my issues.
In my experience, Cinnamon is the most stable DE I’ve used by far. Least amount of random bugs, simple but stable. I don’t think I’ve ever had Cinnamon crash on me actually.
I’ve been using Fedora KDE for…months? Maybe a year now? And I’ve yet to see it hang or crash.
Vanilla Arch is much easier to install than it used to be. Connect to wifi via terminal commands or connect ethernet, enter
archinstalland go down the list.I’ve only ever had the waking from sleep problem, but it’s consistent in other DE’s for me. I have a desktop so I just turn that and hibernate off.
I had a known problem with krunner not opening after first run unless you killed the process, but I got rofi and customized it to the teeth instead. Found out that I love rofi. I probably won’t go back to krunner even it gets fixed now.
Arch is much more difficult to install now than it used to be as well. I remember when Arch had an installer.
it literally has one fym
Huh? Interesting, guess I’m out of the loop, since the install guide doesn’t mention it I didn’t even realize this got added back to the iso. When was that? I should check this out, I really missed the installer all these years, I understand why they did removed it originally, but if you know what you’re doing it’s just tedious work.
I’ve never had issues like that on Kubuntu, Debian, or EndeavourOS. KDE is great and I love it.
I had issues like that about a week ago, when gaming the system was super sluggish. It turns out that an update put the render under CPU instead of GPU, as in, without hardware acceleration, or software based.
In my experience, KDE can run just fine, but it is seemingly pickier about drivers and hardware (I’ve had a loose DisplayPort connection crash it several times) than other desktop environments.
openSUSE has the best integration of KDE, but I wouldn’t expect to see issues like yours on any distro, really…
