[skriticos2]

I just recently switched to kubuntu (KDE) back from fedora (Gnome 3).

On one hand I do like that the desktop does not try to re-define basic muscle memory things, like changing the shortcut if you try to switch between two windows of the same application. (Seriously Gnome, WTF?).

On the other hand it crashed left and right after install (less so now that it settled down a bit) and there are a million QA type problems. I have a 4K 27" screen and everything is tiny by default, so I put scaling to 1.3 and Kate + Terminal are full of lines. The computation of the window update is broken.. I browse the internet and the ticket is open - since two years.

Then there is Wayland, which I got used to on Gnome and think is a great achievement - not in KDE though, that is still highly experimental and so back it goes to ancient protocols. Yay!

So yes, we are building fancy new stuff on an eroding foundation is the message I am getting from KDE nowadays. Compared to Gnome - which is stable but weird.

Thinking back on the Gnome 2 / compiz / beryl days we have gone downhill so much it's not funny..

ps. I know I'm complaining too much and that's unfair to an open source project. And I still perceive Liunx desktops as superior to Windows which has it's own issues (technical and non-technical). Just wondering what all the effort was spent on in the last decade or two. I just don't see it.

[jhoechtl]

As a die hardcore kde fan I am not of a fanboi enough to admit that Gnome has the best HiDPI multi-monitor wayland fractional scaling support of any DE I am aware of.

[viraptor]

Isn't gnome scaling only by whole numbers? Or did they get the fractional scaling out of experimental status? (Ubuntu 19.04 still had it as an experimental mutter setting)

[dman]

Things like dwm / i3 handle this much better since there isnt any UI to scale. You just set the right font size and you are good to go.

[majewsky]

HiDPI support is more than setting a font size for the task bar. The tricky part is getting application windows to rescale their UI as they're moved between screens with different scaling factors (e.g. from a notebook screen with high DPI to a projector with low DPI).

[dman]

That was kind of my point - the more starkly minimalist the workflow the easier it is to make it pixel perfect and look exactly as you intended.

[diffeomorphism]

So the parts of the UI that are i3/dwm scale. Everything else like email, browser, image editing, applications, the stuff that actually matter, doesn't.

Sure, if you only ever need a text editor you don't need to care about scaling anything but fonts, but that is not the case for most people and unrelated to which WM or DE you use.

[rantanplan]

Kubuntu is, and always has been really bad, as a KDE distro. Just use the Fedora KDE spin. I've been using it for the past 10 years or so.

[topspin]

> Kubuntu is, and always has been really bad

Not for me. I switched to Kubuntu in 18.04 LTS (after many years of OpenSUSE, so I've got a pretty good idea of how a polished KDE distro looks.) No complaints at all. Kubuntu use to be a poor rendition of KDE but it's working great now.

I'm pretty happy with Ubuntu generally; kernel-hwe is outstanding. With 18.04 LTS you still get updated kernels; it was released with 4.15 but with "hardware enablement" updates it's up to 5.3 now.

[wdfx]

This. Kubuntu has been my daily driver at work and home for a good number of years now. Love it.

[jen20]

I tried Kubuntu this week, and it’s the first time I’ve seen a desktop linux distro where everything works, and the experience is not made miserable somehow by poor font rendering or lack of suspend/resume or external display capability. I put lots of this down to Ubuntu but also a lot of it to KDE, so I’d be interested in knowing why Fedora is supposedly an improvement?

[diffeomorphism]

Kubuntu has a bad reputation for a reason.

The fractional scaling could use some work, agreed. The foundations seem rock solid, but work on new stuff (e.g. wayland, fractional scaling) could be quicker.

[skat20phys]

I use kubuntu as my preferred system and love it.

I will say that in my experience initial releases are often kinda glitchy or something, and that it can take awhile for brand new hardware etc to be supported well. But it's usually solved by just waiting a bit for the second version.

Classic flamewar statement here, but I've had fewer headaches overall with kubuntu than gnome flavors of Ubuntu (which Ive had to use for work). Deb+kde is a great combination. Maybe there's a better way to get that but I've always gone back to kubuntu when I've tried something else.

[skriticos2]

Kubuntu at least boots. I was trying neon first, which refused to do so on my laptop.

[tokamak-teapot]

Ah I was about to suggest neon as it’s been very stable here. There is still that bug with X11 and scaling, but Wayland worked for me so I stuck with it.

[babypuncher]

I've always had awful luck with Kubuntu. I switched to Manjaro's KDE flavor and haven't looked back.