I’ve been a very big Gnome fan in the past (I still love it!), but since Plasma 6, I rebased both my laptop (Silverblue) and gaming PC (Bazzite) to their KDE variant.
Plasma 6 was a huge milestone. Not only for the KDE team and everyone else out there, but also for me. I constantly tried KDE from time to time, but it never “clicked” for me. Gnome always felt more polished and better thought out.
But since I tried Plasma 6, I never felt the need to go back. It looked and felt very high quality, had quite a few nice features Gnome didn’t have (the only working fractional scaling, HDR, VRR, Krunner, widgets, etc.), and, most importantly, it felt more robust than previous versions, with less crashes and weird bugs.
The fact that the release schedule seemingly got adapted to a form similarly to Gnome, which is very handy for distros like Fedora or Ubuntu, boosted my confidence in not expecting big changes between releases.
Somehow, that isn’t the case tho. It worked relatively fine most of the time, but in the recent time, there are soo many paper cuts accumulating.
Nothing huge, but things like graphical glitches (sporadic colored horizontal lines when switching windows for example), my PC constantly awakening from standby, and so on. The compositor in particular is behaving weird from time to time. I stopped counting how often I lost progress of a game, because it crashed after unlocking my device for example.
What also annoys me a lot is the fact, that there are things changing all the time between releases.
I use Fedora Atomic, namely uBlue.
Bluefin, the Gnome variant, offers a gts variant, where you are always one version behind the latest Fedora release. This ensures a more laid back experience.
I wanted to try that for myself too, but turns out, Bazzite and Aurora (KDE) don’t even offer that, because KDE always pushes big changes between updates, which makes that impossible.
For a rolling release, like Arch or Tumbleweed, this is fine. But I chose Fedora (or any other distro with a fixed stable release schedule for that matter) specifically because I want to wait a few months until all bugs are ironed out.
Long story short, I started to think that KDE is somewhat inherently unreliable. Gnome feels more like “one thing”, and KDE is more modular, and between the single modules are constant incompatibilities that give me paper cuts. The weird and irregular (for my taste) release schedule introduces constant problems.
Sometimes, I get a bit “nostalgic”, and the grass is always greener on the other side. I will try to rebase to Gnome again for a while and see, if it gives me a more chill experience.
Don’t misunderstand this “rant” as hate or something against KDE. It’s unbelievable how much better both got this year alone, and I’m just incredible thankful what the developer teams of them have achieved.
I will start year 2025 with the best hopes and a lot of optimism for what will come!
(P.S.: I will of course try to catch and report all bugs I mentioned)
I ran KDE for a year or so recently. The screen sharing bug, since I rely on screen sharing greatly for work, made me switch to something else. If that hadn’t existed, I’d have probably stuck with it.
KDE is a great DE, but I’ve always found it more buggy than the rest. It also pushes the envelope, though, and really is a cutting edge DE.
GNOME might be more “stable”, but I’ve also found you need to have at least a half dozen extensions and GNOME Tweaks to make it usable OOTB. Also, it uses as much RAM just doing nothing as a Windows install.
KDE has always been “Wow this is cool and very well designed” until I always run into a bug I can’t get past and have to switch. This has been my cycle for half a decade or more:
These days, though, I use Cinnamon. It is the definition of “just works” and other than network management GUI elements being kind of meh (especially for VLANs), I’ve found it to be rock solid.
GNOME caches and prefetches everything it may need. Where as KDE will fetch as needed. If you run a memory tool that shows actual memory being used vs Cache, you will see most is cache.
I have a 14 year old laptop with celeron processor, KDE and XFCE were performing badly, GNOME runs great. My assumption is with all the prefetch the old/slow system CPU/board has what it needs to perform as expected.