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)
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Personal experience - I used some late version of Plasma 5.2x on desktop and now Plasma 6.x of course (always Wayland, generally always the latest stable version available), and Gnome (always Wayland, always the latest stable version) on my work notebook. I’ve never experienced any “serious” bug on Gnome, but I have experienced multiple on Plasma over that time period. I think the most “serious” bug I’ve had on Gnome was that the cursor was flipped upside down for a while until they fixed that (some time ago). While the most serious bug in KDE were multiple crashes in plasmashell since Plasma 6.x. (Meaning all your open apps got closed, I’d say that’s pretty serious for a bug). Another smaller bug, very recently, was that virtual desktops in KDE Plasma were named wrong and when I renamed them they didn’t get saved so it reverts to the wrong names (e.g. “Desktop 1”, “Desktop 3”, “Desktop 4”, “Desktop 4”). But it seems they fixed that with the latest update as well.
Which is also why I’d like to keep it that way, Gnome for work and KDE where it’s not super important if plasmashell crashes or does some weird thing every once in a while. But I think KDE is more prone to bugs because it’s simply more complex than Gnome. Gnome is quite minimalistic and doesn’t offer lots of features, KDE is a powerhouse desktop with literally tons of features, dwarfing probably every other desktop environment, at least in the available options for which a GUI exists to set them. Also, Gnome doesn’t support many advanced features like HDR (yet), while Plasma does.
So I view KDE Plasma as “slightly more buggy” than Gnome, still. Especially for dot-zero releases. But the KDE devs are also improving it all the time, so it might become more stable soon. But still, for personal use, KDE Plasma is stable enough despite those mentioned bugs, some of which were also fixed in the meantime. For example I didn’t have any more plasmashell crashes since they said that they fixed those causes. Which is why I’m using KDE Plasma 6.x for my personal machines. I like it more than Gnome, but when I want “100%” reliability for a DE, I’m still using Gnome.
I have Fedora KDE spin on my laptop. I have not seen a single bug for a year. Arch KDE on my desktop, and occasional glitch but nothing like you describe.
I dobt think this is a KDE issue.
Experienced none of that with openSUSE Tumbleweed or EndeavourOS. The only bug I have is a panel mis-sized when first logging in but that seems to be fixed in 6.3.
I experience lots of bugs that only a handful of people share and the majority has never seen. And they are different from OPs.
I consider myself a prime candidate for bugs as I use quite a few widgets including third party ones and compile desktop effects from source but apart from afore-mentioned, nada. I sometimes wonder if it’s because I carefully choose my hardware to be Linux compatible even if it means not buying the latest and greatest. Maybe I’m just lucky 😬
The bugs I have right now have nothing to do with hardware.
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Window rules just refuse to work no matter what (wayland)
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A single GTK app stays in light mode, while all other GTK apps are dark. On my laptop, same OS, same settings, same apps, (I dd the ssd) the app is dark…
I’m on a rolling distro so newest updates always.
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Window rules are working fine here but I only have a couple of simple ones. I seem to recall a problem with a lot of rules, like 50 or 60 but I can’t remember what the problem was.
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If you have exactly the same image, then as far as I can tell, the only thing different is the hardware however unlikely it seems and it does seem unlikely.
I am just trying to illustrate why posting personal anecdotal evidence is useless.
Linux and it’s software is in a state where you can expect every user to have a vastly different experience and set of issues or the lack thereof.
But it starts a good conversation. It’s good to get a handle on other peoples experiences.
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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:
- I hear about KDE’s latest cool features (HDR support was the latest) and give it a try.
- I use it for several months.
- An update breaks something that is critical to my workflow and I have to switch to something else.
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.
