[Oanid]

I'd have to disagree with you on that one. I recently migrated to Fedora from Windows 11, which gave me the chance to try Plasma, GNOME, and a couple other desktops.

Plasma is exactly what I don't want in a DE. It’s extremely configurable, but also overwhelming, and I don’t think that’s something the average user would feel comfortable navigating.

I ended up choosing GNOME. It feels visually cohesive, and the design is much more opinionated — they’ve clearly made decisions about what should and shouldn’t be part of the core desktop experience.

[ryukoposting]

I don't see how Plasma is any easier or harder to navigate than Windows. If you find the customizations overwhelming, then just... don't. It's fine in its stock form. I turn off the top-left corner thing and leave everything else alone.

[lrschaeffer]

Same. Although finding the setting for the top-left corner is annoying, it gets easier every time.

[Pxtl]

Omg yes the top left corner thing is imho the only complete misfeature in stock plasma.

[yoavm]

Thank you for saying this. Power users love to complain about how GNOME took away many settings and options, and just made some hard decisions. I left GNOME many years ago since I miss these options, but I'm going to refer to your comment the next time people complain about the direction they took: there clearly is an audience of people that simply don't care about customizing every bit of their desktop environment, and GNOME is targeting exactly them. It's an audience we must cater to if we want Linux on the desktop to be successful.

[shevy-java]

I settled down for Fluxbox back when it was still actively maintained. Ever since its death I have been using IceWM, mostly because it is so much faster than GNOME or KDE-Plasma. I think both KDE and GNOME went into the wrong direction though. GNOME because it forces everyone into the shell-centric way to use a computer, similar to a smartphone (the whole UI constantly reminds me of a cloned OSX smartphone interface, for GNOME3 that is; mate-desktop is more of a desktop-centric UI but sadly the project slowed down immensely in the last few years, aka becoming more and more inactive really). KDE indeed has too many configure-options, but the defaults are more similar to the 1990s desktop-centric era shaped by Microsoft. I like that approach more than GNOME although in the last few years KDE also went the wrong way, largely due to Nate, David Edmundson ("our destiny is systemd"; that reminds me of Firefox "you must have pulseaudio for audio on youtube", how strange I can hear audio via chromium/thorium just fine, so what are the Mozilla devs thinking here ... not much, that is for sure) etc...

[jorvi]

Not only that, because it has so many options and more of a bazaar-style development, nothing is optimized.

Right now the systray has a very ugly delay when opening applets like WiFi or sound. Up to 1.5 seconds (!). This doesn't happen with the applets bare in the menu bar, so there must be some sort of negative interaction there between the systray code and applet code.

This is on a bog standard KDE install too.

I don't like Gnome's high and mighty attitude either, especially because it chases people away from making bug reports or contributing. And when 90%+ of your users uses a particular extension (Dash to Dock), maybe make that behaviour integrated and the default.

At this point my hope is squarely aimed at PopOS' COSMIC environment.

[IshKebab]

That's definitely a bug. It's instant for me.

But I do think some of the systray things are overly complicated. E.g. why does the volume widget list all audio outputs and inputs by default?

On the other hand some things are really great. E.g. which other DE lets you adjust the screen brightness (the real one via DDC/CI) from the systray, or start video screen capture by pressing print screen?

KDE is definitely better than gnome at this point.

[aquariusDue]

I've encountered the same KDE bug in NixOS though from what I understood when I did some digging[0][1] it doesn't manifest on distros like Fedora.

Now I'm using Cinnamon until the bug gets fixed which I enjoy too but it doesn't come close to the ease of use of KDE. And when I say ease of use on KDE I refer to the fact that out of the box you can pretty much do everything you need to without having to search for extensions or hunt for settings, someone already thought of what you wanted to do and made it straightforward to do. Sure it's overwhelming to be presented with a lot of things at once e.g. the screen capture UI but when you need to do something that's not the base case it's easy to see that the UI has got you covered.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1pdtc3v/kde_plasma_i...

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/126590

[gucci-on-fleek]

> E.g. which other DE lets you adjust the screen brightness (the real one via DDC/CI) from the systray, or start video screen capture by pressing print screen?

Both of these work for me on Gnome 49.

[aucisson_masque]

I can't agree more, I wish Linux had some good desktop environment.

It's fine giving lot of customization but the default got to be good, and at the opposite (gnome) it's fine to give no customization option as long as it's well thought out and makes sense.

Sadly, it's neither the case.

The best I could find was cinnamon desktop, they're not too bad.

[vrighter]

so just.... don't reconfigure it?

[shevy-java]

If the defaults work: sure. Do they, though?

I don't mind changing things on KDE, but the defaults are useless to me. Too many annoying things, all those time-wasting gimmicks, on-hover uselessness. It is clearly written for another target audience, e. g. Average Joe coming from Windows. While that is fine perhaps for those users, to me the default is useless. And I think many others feel in a similar way. To me the defaults in GNOME are even worse though, so it is a lose-lose scenario. But things can be configured, so that problem can be solved for most settings or behaviour; I am just not convinced that sticking to the defaults works that well.

[bigstrat2003]

Yes, they do. I've used Plasma on a couple of computers for a while, and the defaults have always been fine for me.

[monegator]

what defaults didn't work for you? i only removed the floating panels (screw those) and changed the shortcut for konsole. Done.

[Symbiote]

My guess is many KDE users have one or two adjustments they make, but we're all different.

I add a "keep window above others" button to the window title bar and set the "menu" key on my keyboard to be Compose.

[306bobby]

That's the problem I have with most DE talks though

People act like these issues are going to "stop the Linux migration" or otherwise, and then they give examples of things that most users will never do/isn't even possible on windows / mac

It feels like most people don't like some DE's just simply because it's not what they're used to, not because there is actually a problem with them

[prmph]

I couldn't disagree more.

I have found KDE excellent and intuitive from the get go without much customization. To me GNOME is very primitive in comparison and ugly too.

KDE is the DE that made shed the bias again linux UIs as having that crummy look that set them apart from commercial desktops.

Sure it has issues (which mostly crop up when you are doing deep customization) but for the basics I don't even think any other Linux DE come close.

[Oanid]

I won’t disagree with you, KDE is certainly usable from a clean install. But calling GNOME primitive in comparison feels off to me. It was actually KDE’s applets and overall fit and finish that pushed me toward GNOME.

[Narushia]

Never expected someone to call GNOME straight up ugly. IMO it's currently the most stylish DE out there by far (comparing to the default look of other DEs). Opinions, huh.

[Oanid]

GNOME is stylish, but what really sells it for me is that the apps match the aesthetic and feel cohesive.

[wolvoleo]

I totally agree it's not for the average user but I'm not an average user. That's why I like it so much. I love the way I can make my computer work the way I want it, rather than being stuck with someone else's design decisions and having to adapt to them (I really hate opinionated design). My KDE is customized heavily though I never needed to use addons because it's so configurable.

I really like this about KDE. And the number of options isn't in the way. When I'm thinking of something new to do there's usually an option for just that that I'd never seen before. I love software like that that feels way ahead of me, almost anticipating my wishes.

Gnome on the other hand, their developers have this attitude of "you shouldn't want to do this". I don't like software or other people telling me what to do. I'm sure their stuff is based on UI principles but those are made for the masses too. I only care about what works for me.

But yeah I'm a power user, that's not for everyone. I love that KDE exists though. And it's great that you like gnome, that's the power of Linux/FOSS.

The only thing I object to is when people claim Linux should get one standard UI (and then they usually want that to be gnome). That's not ok for me. But it's also impossible to enforce anyway.

[monegator]

Dude, default plasma breeze theme, remove rounded corners, you have the windows 10 interface. What else do you want?

[account42]

There is no default breeze theme unfortunatley, at least not one that isn't a function of time because they can't help themselves from messing with it instead of crating a new theme.

[WD-42]

Here’s an example: https://imgur.com/a/konsole-vs-ghostty-tR4Otmy

Konsole on left, ghostty (which is gtk) on right. The latter has at least 3 additional lines visible outputting the same command. The giant copy paste buttons, tab bar which wastes a ton of space, are typical of kde apps. The klutter isn’t just visually annoying it makes the apps less useful.

[Pxtl]

Honestly this is the only complaint I agree with. KDE plasma desktop and its configurability looks and feels great... but all their in house actual windowed applications like Konsole and Kate are mediocre at best. All that duplicated effort seems wasteful.

[array_key_first]

It's honestly just Konsole. Kate is very good, you can legitimately use it as a vscode replacement if you want. Dolphin is also the best file manager and it's not even close.

And then kmail... kmail is bad.

[Pxtl]

I don't want Kate to be vscode, I want it to be notepad.exe. I want it to open a document instantly and let me edit and save and close with no distractions or delays.

I have vscode for vscode.

[GreenWatermelon]

For just notepad you have kwrite.

[array_key_first]

I think Kate does that, it just also has a bunch of other functionality.

[WD-42]

I wonder how much QT has to do with this. AFAIK the only _decent_ bindings are still C++ and Python. For KDE it might just be C++?

There's plenty of valid criticism of GTK but choosing C over C++ isn't one of them. It seems like there is a new Rust GTK app every week, and other languages as well, thanks to the availability of bindings.

I'm curious how long relying on C++ contributions is going to last.

[wao0uuno]

I just want less of this: https://files.catbox.moe/uvxbea.png

Look at it and tell me this is normal. I love Plasma but oh man do they need to hire a real designer. Someone with balls to unfuck the interface and move all advanced settings out of GUI into a well documented config file.

[ufmace]

That seems a bit contrived to me. Okay, that particular place is pretty deeply nested, but it's clearly a regular menu tucked away in there, with a option to show the menu bar. If you turn that on, then those options are half as deep. Or if you don't need to adjust those options, you don't go that deep.

The sibling comment, meanwhile, is complaining about extra space devoted to explicit controls for all of the extra options. Well, you can't have it both ways. If you want to have a lot of features and options, you have to either devote some space in the main UI to them, or have a lot of deeply nested menus like that.

Or I guess you could do a config file somewhere, but IMO that's even worse. If we're going to complain about bad UIs, isn't it even worse than some deeply nested menus to need to open a separate file somewhere else with a separate program and learn whatever config file syntax they happen to use.

[aquariusDue]

While I prefer deeply nested menus (and I acknowledge I'm a weirdo at that) there's plasma-manager if you happen to use Nix and home-manager. I don't know if it will help in that specific case but if you'd rather have the config in a well documented file this could generally help.

https://github.com/nix-community/plasma-manager

[wao0uuno]

Nothing wrong with nested menus. The problem is that plasma has a classic File menu inside of a hamburger menu hidden under a "More" button with a whole set of duplicated options that can be found in other parts of the interface. It's nuts.

I'd rather have all that mess removed and settings 1% of the user base "needs" moved to a config file. I don't want to add an another layer of complexity with external configuration tools.

[monegator]

Uh, dolphin could really use a rewrite IMO, but first we'd need to agree of how it should look like :(

[lunar_rover]

> What else do you want?

No alignment issues, menus sorted by professional designers, easier to learn UX like ribbon menus and a lot more.

Feel like the design issues stem from it being shaped by existing power users. Familiarity tend to downplay design issues so stability took priority, even though the UX never should've been stabilised in the first place.

[Pxtl]

Really? I found KDE plasma hit the perfect sweet spot between the slapdash nature of Cinnamon and the polished but restrictive Gnome.

Plus AFAIK it's the most multi threaded so it's the hardest to freeze.