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:
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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.
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After resume suspend, system would hang and there is nothing I can do except for a forced reboot.
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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?
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.
If KDE works for you, do you use a preinstalled distro and which one?
Has largely worked fine for me on Tumbleweed.
There is/was an issue with launching some of the ‘K’ apps causing the desktop to hard lock. But this happens very rarely.
Haven’t experienced problems like what you’re describing though.
Been using Tumbleweed as well. May I ask if you encountered these 2 issues:
- Copy 1Gb movie to flash drive, says it’s done in 10 seconds. Try to remove the flash drive, still in use. Turns out it’s actually still copying.
- Send some files, whatever the size, even 10Mb, to the trash and it takes a minute per file.
Stumbled upon some github issues saying that it’s a longstanding problem (since 2009 even), but I can’t believe that people put up with it for so long without fixing it.
I’m not even thinking of changing DE but this is annoying to say the least.
- Copy 1Gb movie to flash drive, says it’s done in 10 seconds. Try to remove the flash drive, still in use. Turns out it’s actually still copying.
This is not distro related but GNU/Linux and a known “issue” for over decades ! Everything gets into you ram memory and gets dumped from there into your USB storage device.
watch grep -e Dirty: -e Writeback: /proc/meminfoA long term solution would like to write a udev rule something like here:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/771398/solving-the-usb-drive-mass-storage-stall-issue
Thanks! I’ll try that out today!
Why quotation marks? Issue is an issue, decades or days old. 😄
Copying mechanism itself isn’t an issue here; false reporting that something is done when it’s not is.
The question marks are because I read somethere that Linus himself doesn’t see it like an issue by itself but more like a feature? And that’s why it hasn’t been resolved for soo long ! I can’t exactly remember what he said but that’s the gist !
But I do agree, I also see it as an issue :/ and most people who aren’t aware probably fucked up some USB sticks that way…
Because it’s not an issue. This is the system functioning as intended. Changing this behaviour would cause dramatic performance degradation for the 99.999% of the time when the device you are writing to isn’t removable media that you want to eject right away.
It’s an issue according to any UX pattern. If something says that it’s done when it’s not, it’s misrepresenting the state of the action.
Hard to believe that modifying the counter to include the necessary time for actual writing to the flash drive would break everything. Target flash drives only etc.
System functioning as intended doesn’t mean that it’s a good UX.
Been using Tumbleweed as well. May I ask if you encountered these 2 issues:
Haven’t experienced either of those issues. Have you tried to isolate KDE in those cases? Not sure how you’d do it with the deletion because there’s no Trash for the terminal, but you could try the copy operation and see if your device is still blocked when it’s finished in the terminal?
Those are both file operations so they don’t strike me as strictly DE-related.
Thanks for the info.
I tried installing PCManFM-Qt and deleting from there. Works as you’d expect, deletes instantly.
Having NOxOn@lemmy.ml insight in mind that it’s a decades long issue, I don’t get how come that some of us are affected by it and some aren’t. 😅
This happens on slower USB devices the data is buffered and the write won’t be complete right away. You can use the “sync” command and wait until it completes to make sure it’s done before you unmount the device. These days KDE shouldn’t let you unmount before it’s done though.
Give Cinnamon/Budgie a shot, (I recommend in a vm and see which one you like)both are based on gnome(cinnamon personally its like a combination between gnome 3 ane xfce).
I have the same experience with kde personally(Like it crashes sometimes,looks dated,etc it didnt crash that badly for me), and I decided to desktop hop to Cinnamon.Yes I have Nvidia
Do you have an nvidia GPU? It’s the most important thing to know.
Agreed, have had issues with especially older nvidia cards, 840 and 970. Atleast until I switched to prop. Driver
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.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.
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 3to see if it yields any clues.KDE Manjaro running on 4 or 5 of my machines, pure stability. It sounds like a hardware issue.
Here are my suggestions to diagnose this.
Option 1. Setup an ssh server, connect from a second computer (or phone via Termux), execute $journalctl -fe, and observe the journal from your second device when the crash occurs. That should help pinpoint the issue.
Option 2. If you don’t have a second device, use a non-gui tty, access via Ctrl+Alt+F1. (Usually terminals are available F1 thru F6). Once again execute $journalctl -fe and observe it during the crash.
Tbh option 2 may just be easier especially if you have minimal knowledge of ssh. Good luck, ping me back if you find this helpful and would like more perspective, and apologies if this doesn’t help you.
If the entire computer crashes, boot into a terminal and browse journalctl history of previous boots, sorry I don’t have these commands off the top of my head but if you need them and ask I will get them for you.
journalctl -xb-1where 1 is last boot, 2 is boot before that, etc.
For what it’s worth, I experience none of that. My laptop is absolutely rock solid with KDE, it’s like a MacBook you pull it out of your backpack and it’s ready to go before I’m even done opening the screen.
My desktop is currently just over 5 days of continuous uptime (no sleep). I’ve crashed more often because of ZFS than KDE.
Both are ArchLinux. I also have a friend on Bazzite that doesn’t have issues with KDE either, and it runs great in my VM.
Those all sound like possible graphics driver issues.
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
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…I’ve been using Debian with KDE Plasma for over a decade and I can count the crashes with the fingers of one hand.
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.
openSUSE has the best integration of KDE, but I wouldn’t expect to see issues like yours on any distro, really…
I’ve never had issues like that on Kubuntu, Debian, or EndeavourOS. KDE is great and I love it.
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.
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.
