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?

  • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    7 hours ago

    In my experience KDE on OpenSuse and probably Fedora are rock solid. The first and nowadays probably also the second (which has moved to first tier instead of being a sub-distribution) are considered reference implementations of industry strength distros.

    My thought would be that you’ve added something slightly broken to the mix which breaks KDE. It can happen. Linux is complicated, KDE is also complicated, what annoys one desktop can be ok with another. If you want to figure out what the problem is, you’ll have to go through your various system logs to see what fails.

  • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    13 hours ago

    Kde works great for me, I don’t have any special hardware. I have used it with fedora and bazzite.

  • easily3667@lemmus.orgEnglish
    95·
    15 hours ago

    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.

  • nafzib@lemmy.world
    2·
    15 hours ago

    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.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
    3·
    16 hours ago

    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.

  • nayminlwin@lemmy.ml
    1·
    15 hours ago

    I used to have hang on suspend resume problem on my Thinkpad E15. It somegot got resolved in later updates. Might be a random firmware problem, that’s really hard to track down. So may be it mostly comes down to luck.

  • JTskulk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    21 hours ago

    I’ve never had issues like that on Kubuntu, Debian, or EndeavourOS. KDE is great and I love it.

  • Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    18 hours ago

    Vanilla Arch is much easier to install than it used to be. Connect to wifi via terminal commands or connect ethernet, enter archinstall and 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.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
      1·
      14 hours ago

      Arch is much more difficult to install now than it used to be as well. I remember when Arch had an installer.

        • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
          2·
          11 hours ago

          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.

          • Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            4 hours ago

            Yeah, it got added to the iso fairly recently, though before it did I think you could install it through pacman in your live environment.

            It’s archinstall. It generates a CLI list similar to Calamares for you to go through and steps you through everything.

  • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
    11·
    14 hours ago

    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

  • superkret@feddit.org
    441·
    2 days ago

    Those aren’t normal issues.
    It sounds more like a driver or hardware issue which may only pop up in KDE (Wayland) and not in your other WMs (X11).
    As a first step, try logging into the KDE (X11) Session and see if it still happens.

    • JAdsel@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      10·
      1 day ago

      Very much agreed. I ran into some similar issues for a while on KDE Wayland, also with strange freezes–and was concerned that it might be a (fairly new at the time) hardware issue. No, it was evidently some weirdness involving the then-current NVIDIA drivers, which was thankfully fixed not that long after.

      If you do have NVIDIA graphics, you’ll probably want to make sure it’s using the latest drivers from them–and maybe particularly on Wayland. More stable distros do tend to ship older versions.