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?

    • Morotsgubbe@sopuli.xyz
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      3 months ago

      Agreed, have had issues with especially older nvidia cards, 840 and 970. Atleast until I switched to prop. Driver

  • Veraxis@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I have been using KDE on Arch across several machines for about 3 years now, then Manjaro for a year before that. At no point have I experienced instability or issues like that. Especially that last one; I’m the sort of person who regularly has 10+ tabs open on laptops with a fraction the amount of RAM that you have.

    I would say that is definitely not normal. If that happened to me, I might search online or check journalctl -b -p 3 to see if it yields any clues.

  • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 months ago

    had a couple of crashes when 6 was released, but they were fixed pretty quickly and has been rock solid ever since. Those crashes probably had more to do with my nvidia card than kde itself, tbh

  • lattrommi@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    There is a bug that is open right now which sounds like it might be one you were experiencing or possibly explains part of the issues.

    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501073

    Like the web browsing might have been from middle clicking, which causes a lengthy hang and resuming from suspend and powerdevil are a prime suspect for it.

    The login wait might be an issue I vaguely recall about the splash screen and that disabling it removed the startup hang.

    I’ve been exclusively using Manjaro KDE since September of 2021 and the linked issue I started getting a couple months ago and it’s gotten bad enough to make me want to start hopping again.

  • highduc@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    Is KDE actually good or it is overrated?

    That’s like a trick question 😀
    If I say it’s good, and that contradicts your own experience with it, you can say “see it’s overrated, people say it’s good, but in fact I know it sucks.”

    I use it on Arch but I’ve seen people using it on Fedora and it looked good and stable.

    Did you try to look into it, see what’s causing the problems?
    In my experience having used Linux and KDE Plasma for about a decade now, if you wanna have a good time you’re going to have to figure stuff out, check the logs, troubleshoot, look it up online, etc.
    If you expect to go through different distros to find one that “just works” you’ll be disappointed, and you’ll be wasting your time. Issues can be hardware-specific, maybe you just need to pass a parameter to the kernel, or change a config somewhere or something like that…

    • corvus@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      I’ve been using Debian with KDE Plasma for over a decade and I can count the crashes with the fingers of one hand.

  • krimson@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I gave KDE a serious go again recently but it has some really annoying bugs on multi (3) display systems that affect me but probably not the grand majority of KDE users. Reported the issue, debugged it extensively, pinpointed the exact problem in the bug report and how to reproduce it (found out it also happened on dual screen setups). Then nothing happened. Ticket went quiet and it has been several months now.

    I also had plenty of crashes in KDE apps.

    I completely get the volunteer basis that KDE builds on, and I am not complaining that my issues do not get fixed. I understand it is being mostly built and maintained by people in their spare time and my issues are probably low priority. But for me personally it is stuff like this that makes KDE unusable as a daily driver.

  • pineapple@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

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

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    openSUSE has the best integration of KDE, but I wouldn’t expect to see issues like yours on any distro, really…

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Fedora’s KDE is bulletproof on any of my installed systems (8 or 9 of them, completely different hardware including AMD). Now Kubuntu, on the other hand, has always been a shitshow, I’ve never had it work right for more than a couple days at a time.

  • monovergent 🛠️@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • JTskulk@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

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

  • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    I’ve used it on Endeavour for about a year and on Tumbleweed for eight years before that with no real problems other than plasma-shell occasionally restarting. I have Nvidia and the open drivers.

  • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I use Fedora KDE, and I don’t think ive ever seen crashes that bad on my system (AMD CPU and GPU). I used to have a small problem with RADV crashing during video playback, but that solved itself after a few updates.

  • nafzib@lemmy.world
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    3 months 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.