[HN Gopher] Plasma 5.25
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Plasma 5.25
        
       Author : HieronymusBosch
       Score  : 171 points
       Date   : 2022-06-14 12:56 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (kde.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (kde.org)
        
       | mikevm wrote:
       | I don't understand why they still haven't changed their ugly
       | black flat icons, they are just horrendous. And the default fonts
       | on KDE have always been bad too. I feel that with just a couple
       | of tweaks it could be much much more pleasant.
        
         | ropeladder wrote:
         | Do you mean the little icons they use on eg Dolphin's "Places"
         | panel? I agree they are not great. Does anyone know how to
         | change them?
         | 
         | I've been trying to use Nemo as my default file manager in
         | Fedora KDE, but something broke where I can't actually launch
         | anything from Nemo most of the time, so I'll probably go back
         | to Dolphin.
        
       | jasfi wrote:
       | Looks a bit like MacOS, cool! Too bad the default is the taskbar.
       | I would prefer a dock.
        
         | smoldesu wrote:
         | KDE can handle docks, too. Actually, you could have multiple
         | docks if you really wanted...
        
         | troyvit wrote:
         | There's a popular app for KDE called Latte dock[1]. It replaces
         | your bar with a highly configurable dock that was inspired by
         | OSX.
         | 
         | [1] https://github.com/KDE/latte-dock
        
         | zamalek wrote:
         | Lattedock is the best dock for any desktop environment I've
         | used (including Windows/StarDock, MacOS/built-in, and
         | Gnome/Dash-to-Dock). Install Latte, run Latte, and finally
         | delete the bottom panel. It takes less than a minute to change
         | it.
        
         | babypuncher wrote:
         | Latte dock can give you a dock pretty similar to macOS. There
         | are also widgets that let you build a global menu bar, and
         | libraries which allow most apps with a menu bar to export it to
         | the global one.
         | 
         | I've done a lot of experimenting though and never gotten it in
         | a state that feels as polished as macOS.
        
         | yokoprime wrote:
         | It's more of a Windows 10 look. Gnome has a toolbar at the top
         | giving it somewhat of a macOS feel (which I guess is why some
         | skin it to death with macOS like widgets)
        
           | zamalek wrote:
           | They should adopt Latte as an official/built-in project and
           | present the user with presets on their first login IMO.
           | 
           | But going with the Windows look by default is a good idea
           | because, in terms of pure market share, that's what users
           | expect.
        
           | kitsunesoba wrote:
           | Yeah, KDE has always felt more Microsofty while GNOME has
           | felt more Apple-adjacent.
           | 
           | GNOME 2.x kind of reminds me of Classic Mac OS with a taskbar
           | duct taped on while GNOME 3.x+ is kind of like what you'd get
           | if you tried to turn iPadOS into a desktop OS.
           | 
           | Nothing in the open desktop world really mirrors Aqua-era OS
           | X or modern macOS which is a bit weird to me. ElementaryOS
           | aesthetically reminds me of OS X 10.9, but doesn't operate
           | like it at all in practice, instead also feeling kind of
           | iPad-ish like GNOME does.
        
             | smoldesu wrote:
             | GNOME 3 took most of the parts of Aqua that I liked and
             | removed the ugly "lickability" from it to seem more
             | professional. It was good (and controversial), but
             | eventually they threw all that work away to Big Sur-ify
             | their desktop.
        
               | Macha wrote:
               | Many of those "Big Sur" changes came to Gnome first, I
               | remember my first impression of the design changes being
               | "Looks like Gnome"
        
             | ahartmetz wrote:
             | I guess it's because:
             | 
             | - Copying something old is kind of embarrassing, especially
             | if
             | 
             | - Seriously, macOS isn't/wasn't clearly superior at
             | everyhing. For example, I think the dock is a rather
             | terrible idea.
        
       | wiz21c wrote:
       | I use plasma on debian current stable 10+ hours a day. It works
       | really well except for a few bugs sometimes (diasppearing window
       | decoration after using firefox).
       | 
       | As a user, I like Plasma a lot but what I'd love is even more bug
       | fixes. It's not that bugs are there by the dozen, I hardly
       | encounter one, but I have a global feeling that little details
       | here and there could be improved.
       | 
       | Anyway, thx KDE for Plasma, it just rocks !
        
         | ryantgtg wrote:
         | File reports!
        
       | dethos wrote:
       | Excellent. Since it was released, Plasma 5 has been my Linux
       | desktop environment of choice and, truth be told, it keeps
       | getting better and better.
       | 
       | Nowadays I can't stand an environment without the sane defaults
       | and powerful customization capabilities we can find in
       | Plasma/KDE.
       | 
       | A big "thank you" to all KDE contributors.
        
       | Gracana wrote:
       | I recently switched from Ubuntu to Arch with Plasma, and this is
       | the first time I've been truly happy with a KDE desktop. It all
       | works, it's snappy on my 8th gen intel system with AMD graphics,
       | I've been able to tweak anything I wanted to tweak, hidpi looks
       | good, and now there's a new release and it's looking even better.
        
         | raffraffraff wrote:
         | Same, except OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. First time using any SUSE
         | distro for over 15 years, and it's really nice. I don't really
         | want to tweak everything, and Tumbleweed has a nice UI to
         | quickly switch between DE lookalikes (like, click this one too
         | get top menu, bottom dock)
        
         | ryantgtg wrote:
         | I've used KDE and Arch for the last three years and it's been
         | great and pain-free. I got a new Thinkpad last week and used
         | the archinstall installer, and was up and going in 15 minutes.
         | Very smooth.
         | 
         | KDE devs are regularly in the kde subreddit and they seem nice
         | and approachable.
        
         | babypuncher wrote:
         | I was happy with KDE 3.5 back in the before times. Then KDE 4
         | happened.
         | 
         | I'm glad we are back in a good place with KDE 5, but it felt
         | like it took way too long.
        
       | akagusu wrote:
       | Plasma is the best modern desktop environment for Linux and yet
       | people barely talk about it.
       | 
       | It is complete, mature and works out-of-the-box.
       | 
       | For users it has sane defaults but provides virtually endless
       | customization and contrary to other desktop environments, user
       | customization is encourage.
       | 
       | For developers, it provides solid libraries to build upon, not
       | like other libraries that are constantly changing and making
       | developers' life harder.
       | 
       | And yet, people don't care about it.
        
         | Beltalowda wrote:
         | I haven't even looked at KDE in many years (I'm not a DE kind
         | of user and just use dwm), but this was true back in the KDE 3
         | days as well, which I considered much nicer than the
         | contemporary Gnome 2 as well. I never quite understood why
         | Gnome got so much more attention compared to KDE.
        
           | Wuzado wrote:
           | Bundling in major distros? (Say, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora,
           | SUSE(?)) GTK being open-source and quickly adopted by several
           | popular projects? Being initially under the GNU Project?
           | Probably a lot of factors adding together.
           | 
           | KDE is pretty great, though.
        
         | kitsunesoba wrote:
         | Its sheer customizability makes customizing it into a real
         | task, though. Every time I start sifting through its settings
         | my eyes begin to glaze over.
         | 
         | It's gotten better over the years but still has a long way to
         | go. Something that would help a lot is if KDE came prepackaged
         | with a handful of different full configurations that could be
         | easily flipped between to serve as starting points.
        
         | db65edfc7996 wrote:
         | Linux barely works as it is. I no longer have any interest in
         | debugging my desktop technical problems. Which means my best
         | option is to use the most popular environment so when I do
         | encounter an issue, there is likely to be someone who has
         | already encountered the same issue and reported a solution.
         | 
         | Until Ubuntu switches to KDE, I am stuck in the Gnome-lets-
         | remove-desktop-icons-because world.
        
           | runjake wrote:
           | Here you go[1]. Official[2] Ubuntu with KDE.
           | 
           | 1. https://kubuntu.org/
           | 
           | 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuntu
           | 
           | Edit: OK, "officially blessed".
        
             | 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
             | I wouldn't call it official, it's a side project run by the
             | community. 'Official' would be something created and
             | supported by Canonical. It's a moot point though since you
             | get the exact same thing by installing Ubuntu without a gui
             | and then doing 'apt install plasma-desktop'.
        
           | TheChaplain wrote:
           | Ubuntu already have a KDE flavour; https://kubuntu.org/
           | 
           | Myself I'm running XUbuntu (XFCE) as my daily driver, works
           | excellently and I have no issues doing what I need to do.
        
         | kps wrote:
         | As a heavy terminal/editor user, I use KDE because it's not too
         | difficult to stop its programs stealing the Control key. It
         | could, and should, be much easier (global) but at least it's
         | possible.
        
           | klibertp wrote:
           | Remap Control_L to Hyper_L in xmodmap, then map Hyper to
           | Control in the terminal emulator. Just an idea, personally
           | I've been working with window managers (most recently
           | Awesome) and not desktop environments exactly due to the
           | keyboard shortcuts that are hard or sometimes impossible to
           | unbind...
        
         | captainmuon wrote:
         | I never got over the renaming to Plasma. KDE 3 was great at
         | it's time, but KDE4 / Plasma felt like this bloated, buggy
         | desktop shell seemingly based on QML (not sure, but it looked
         | like it did) with the strange cashew in the corner. Plasma was
         | _too_ configurable, with too many ways to break your setup.
         | 
         | I'm sure it got a lot better, and people have even described
         | Plasma 5.x as light weight. The times I tried it later, I liked
         | it, but for the time being the Linux desktop has lost me and
         | I'm using Mac :-)
        
           | atoav wrote:
           | I entered the game way after the renaming and it makes a lot
           | of sense to me. KDE is the organization, plasma is that
           | specific project (like Korganizer is the Calendar
           | application).
        
           | zokula wrote:
        
         | jcelerier wrote:
         | > Plasma is the best modern desktop environment for Linux and
         | yet people barely talk about it.
         | 
         | It's the DE of the Steam Deck, for which was apparently 1.5
         | million units were already sold in May. That's certainly one of
         | the most significant events for the Linux desktop.
        
           | akagusu wrote:
           | Although it makes its way to Steam Deck, the Linux community
           | favors Gnome and other DEs.
           | 
           | If you search for videos and blog posts, Plasma is usually a
           | second class citizen.
        
           | pjmlp wrote:
           | So now people are plugging monitors, keyboards and mices to
           | Steam Decks...
        
             | steamer wrote:
             | Writing is tedious but desktop is very much usable without
             | without extra peripherals. I am replying via steam deck.
        
               | squarefoot wrote:
               | How durable are the gaming controllers and keys on the
               | Steam Deck? Are they repairable/swappable? I'm usually
               | fairly heavy on gamepads and broke a few of them already,
               | so I'm not that comfortable buying something that I could
               | easily damage.
        
           | IE6 wrote:
           | This is completely tangential and a purely anecdotal
           | observation but I find it interesting that big movements in
           | the "year of the linux desktop" usually come in some very
           | specific use case like ChromeOS or SteamOS.
        
             | Barrin92 wrote:
             | because the biggest issue for linux is that it's not the
             | default on end user devices. Barely anyone is ever going to
             | (re)install an operating system so large companies shipping
             | linux is a big deal.
        
             | jrm4 wrote:
             | I'm glad you said it, I think it's _really_ important,
             | especially for those of us who really like Linux.
             | 
             | It's easy to split hairs over "true Linux" or whatnot, but
             | I think it's far more valuable to celebrate wins like
             | ChromeOS and SteamOS in the hopes of encouraging more of
             | this. I think that's what gets us closer to the general
             | ideas and ideals of "Linux" and or "Free Software" broadly.
             | 
             | It won't be "Year of the Linux Desktop," it will be "Years
             | of many Linux Desktops."
        
         | dagw wrote:
         | I distinctly remember the KDE 3->4 transition causing a massive
         | revolt and lots of people abandoning KDE. I also remember
         | personally switching from KDE3 to XFCE right around then
         | (although I cannot quite remember exactly why, or what the
         | specific complaints at the time where.). I wonder if we can
         | still be seeing the echos of that backlash as most of the
         | people who left KDE simply never came back.
         | 
         | That being said, I did recently try KDE5 for the first time in
         | ages about a year ago, and it is now (again) my favorite
         | desktop environment.
        
           | akagusu wrote:
           | The transition from KDE 3 to 4 was a completely disaster, but
           | KDE devs learnt from it.
           | 
           | They made a successful transition from KDE 4 to 5, and are
           | committed to users needs, so we can expect a smoothly
           | transition to Plasma 6.
           | 
           | Now, compare it to Gnome, where every release means deeply
           | changes for both users and 3rd party developers, and Gnome
           | developers simply don't care.
        
           | calvinmorrison wrote:
           | Yeah, it's unfortunate they abandoned the really good HCI
           | paradigm in favor of glitzy, interesting problems to work on.
           | KDE4 rollout was a absolute trainwreck.
        
           | simcop2387 wrote:
           | If it was like me, the KDE4 roll out was done way too
           | haphazardly and wasn't usable for a bunch of releases (like
           | 1.5-2 years? been a while) but a whole bunch of distros
           | adopted it anyway, despite the KDE developers saying it
           | wasn't ready yet. That ended up leaving a lot of people with
           | a bad taste for it. the Plasma 5 releases were handled much
           | better. I'm hoping that this latest release fixes the last
           | few bugs with wayland that i kept running into (mostly
           | multimonitor crashes, been tracking the bugs and they claim
           | to have fixed all the ones i remember seeing last, but we'll
           | see). I really want to ditch X11 because there's a noticeable
           | performance increase and better power usage with wayland, by
           | about 4-5 watts on my laptop, when it does run. It's also got
           | better handling of scaling displays which is nice but not as
           | critical for me.
        
             | snapplebobapple wrote:
             | This was what pushed me off kde back in the day and started
             | a multiple year odyssey through all the lesser desktops
             | before ending up on lxde for a while. When lxde started to
             | get left behind as they tried to port to lxqt with limited
             | resources I took kde 5 for a whirl and it was like meeting
             | back up with an old friend and I haven't bothered with
             | anything else since except a brief foray into qtile (I see
             | why people like tiling desktops but I also really think
             | they are not good for anyone with a diverse and ever
             | changing usage/workflow sitaution vs just autobooting kde
             | with a few windows set to autostart in fixed locations).
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | Macha wrote:
         | It's nice and were I to use a standard desktop environment I'd
         | be all over it, but I'm too attached to tiling WMs and bismuth
         | doesn't quite cut it compared to i3/sway.
         | 
         | As a non default environment for most distros, I think this is
         | the problem they face. Once you get into the people going into
         | the customisation sphere, everyone has their own little
         | dealbreakers like moving a window left repeatedly with keyboard
         | hotkeys not wrapping into the next monitor, or the amount of
         | spacing on titlebars or the way the dark theme handles the
         | settings app
        
         | jeroenhd wrote:
         | > And yet, people don't care about it.
         | 
         | It works as you expect and you don't ever need to tweak it
         | unless you're really into it, which makes it... boring. Boring
         | is good. You don't want your desktop manager to distract you,
         | it's there to help you!
         | 
         | As for library support, I looked into it but the only real
         | options seem to be to write code in C++ (not a fan) or to use
         | some high level abstraction (Python).
         | 
         | I like GTK for projects like gtk-rust. The relevant types and
         | macros seem much better supported than any Qt binding I've seen
         | so far, and the Qt ones often come with unsafe code blocks out
         | of necessity.
         | 
         | My Rust GUI code will (sadly) be GTK based because of its
         | decent support without too many hacks. That's quite sad,
         | because GTK applications look very GNOME-like, even when
         | running on Windows or macOS. An unfortunate result of their
         | unwillingness to consider other options in the CSD/SSD fight.
         | 
         | Stupid stuff like the inability for applications to look native
         | in any desktop environment is why I don't think we'll reach the
         | year of the Linux desktop any time soon. The Linux desktop
         | can't even run applications in a consistent style.
         | 
         | Any way, I hope KDE will in time grow more language diverse.
         | I'd like to switch my code to a less opinionated code base.
        
         | IronWolve wrote:
         | I like kde, it was my main for a over a decade. I had lots of
         | automation, then continual updates kept breaking my kde setup,
         | as functionality was modified for things such as window setup,
         | placement and size, to the teams correct way of functionality
         | of settings should work. Bug fixes I guess.
         | 
         | Took a many years of me interface hopping around, but I'm back
         | at kde. I was using mate, but I'm back at kde on arch.
        
         | MisterTea wrote:
         | I always felt kde was both cluttered and bloated. From memory
         | the initial plasma debut was met with a lot of complaints about
         | stability which tarnished its reputation (though it did
         | improve.)
        
           | teekert wrote:
           | You should give it another chance.
        
             | 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
             | I was a heavy KDE user until 4 came out. After a massive
             | amount of issues with it (Plasma crashes every few minutes
             | on multiple devices with different hardware), I abandoned
             | KDE and tried it from time to time after seeing comments
             | like yours (roughly once a year or so). I don't know how
             | well it works these days (no desire to spend any more time
             | on trying it out), but IME it worked about as badly as the
             | first 4.x releases until at least whatever version was the
             | latest at the beginning of 2021. It's the same story every
             | time -- I install it, login into my desktop, start doing
             | stuff, and get crashes at least once an hour (on wildly
             | different hardware, on many releases ten years in a row).
             | Nepomuk crashes, Plasma crashes, kio daemon (or whatever it
             | was called) crashes, this thing and that.
             | 
             | I found happiness in xfce4 (that beauty hasn't crashed even
             | once in about 8 years of using it heavily), and then sway
             | (same story, currently at two years).
        
               | chupasaurus wrote:
               | > on wildly different hardware, on many releases ten
               | years in a row
               | 
               | Is the problem. Plasma has been my daily driver since
               | 4.4, on Debian testing, on systems which I know
               | beforehand wouldn't have any random issues (Debian-
               | specific also).
        
               | 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
               | Eh, maybe. I don't care either way anymore. If it works
               | for you -- great, I haven't been so lucky. Everything
               | else has been running smoothly (even gnome), and as a
               | fanatical Linux user I'm usually very careful in my
               | choice of hardware (no nvidia/broadcom/etc).
        
           | akagusu wrote:
           | It was. Now it is a full featured and lightweight DE.
           | 
           | I've switched from Gnome after 15 years to Plasma 5, and I've
           | never been so happy.
           | 
           | Contrary to Gnome, Plasma is lightweight, works out of the
           | box without 3rd party extensions, but yet 3rd party themes
           | and extensions are 1st class citizens.
        
       | JJMalina wrote:
       | How is Plasma in terms of CPU, memory, and graphics load? When I
       | switched from Mac OS X to Linux six years ago I tried Ubuntu but
       | I found Gnome to be incredibly slow and resource intense. Then I
       | tried Xubuntu and I've used it ever since. I'm pretty happy
       | running XFCE on two 4K screens with my desktop and on my hidpi
       | Lenovo laptop. I've noticed Plasma continuing to improve and
       | people recommending it so now I'm more keen to test it out.
       | 
       | Besides the improved UX are there any other advantages of Plasma
       | over XFCE?
        
         | AnotherCommetn wrote:
         | Plasma (KDE) is generally lighter than XFCE these days. Highly
         | dependent on how you customise each one of course.
         | 
         | IIRC there was a thread a while ago with benchmarks. And an
         | XFCE developer confirmed that this doesn't surprise them,
         | because KDE have a lot more dev resources to spend on
         | optimisation than they do.
        
         | quantumfissure wrote:
         | Honestly, At this point, KDE is just as light as XFCE and Gnome
         | is pretty low too. From my testing, minimal KDE on Arch or
         | Gentoo install pulls it ~450-500mb at boot, Manjaro and Suse
         | around 550-600mb.
         | 
         | Fresh Gnome on Arch or Gentoo I've seen ~650 at boot and around
         | 750 with Ubuntu, around 650-700 with Fedora.
         | 
         | Gnome's Wayland implementation is much better then KDE at this
         | moment, but KDE is quickly catching up. Nvidia still lacks,
         | even with their EGL support. I use a Nvidia 1060 6gb on an
         | updated (KDE 5.24), but several year old Manjaro KDE install
         | with XOrg as a daily driver, and it's very smooth for me. Games
         | work great. Maybe some occasional stuttering on my monitors
         | that are 144 and 60hz (xorg limitation).
         | 
         | Gnome's gestures and by far and away better then KDE's too (at
         | least as of 5.24, but 5.25 adds many more).
        
           | lolpython wrote:
           | > Gnome's Wayland implementation is much better then KDE at
           | this moment
           | 
           | Agreed, with a caveat-- Gnome's Mutter compositor for Wayland
           | has bugs. It does not support server side rendered window
           | decorations while KDE does. This means that the title bars
           | for Alacritty[0] terminal emulator and the mpv[1] video
           | player are ugly and not so functional. This is an intentional
           | decision by the GNOME team[2]. Also the screen locks while
           | watching videos on mpv because Mutter does not support the
           | idle-inhibit protocol, although work is currently being done
           | on this[3].
           | 
           | [0]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/5956
           | 
           | [1]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/pull/7186
           | 
           | [2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217
           | 
           | [3]:
           | https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/111
        
             | zamalek wrote:
             | Also, Mutter does not support variable refresh rate.
        
             | dylan-m wrote:
             | The window decorations stuff drives me batty. Titlebar and
             | buttons aside, there seems to be a widespread
             | misunderstanding about window shadows. There is some vague
             | effort afoot[1], but a surprising number of developers
             | don't really care whether they're consistent (note, nobody
             | even mentions shadows in that extremely long gitlab issue
             | you linked to), despite the Gtk folks going to tremendous
             | efforts to make them look nice for their specific toolkit.
             | Which is great, until you have a Gtk 3 app beside a Gtk 4
             | app and it looks like they're each being affected by a
             | different light source, begging the question: why do we
             | even have them? Shadows are supposed to create a consistent
             | sense of space and guide the eye around the desktop, but if
             | they're all different, that isn't happening. They're just
             | noise.
             | 
             | To be fair, it's difficult because Wayland clients might
             | have rounded corners and other odd shapes, and I'm not in a
             | position to really look into it myself so I shouldn't
             | complain, but _argh_ , the indifference about it is
             | frustrating.
             | 
             | [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1517
        
             | jeroenhd wrote:
             | Ugh. I enjoy the GNOME look and feel but every thread on
             | their big tracker makes me want to switch desktop
             | environments. "Your standard is irrelevant because we don't
             | want to follow it" is something I'd sooner expect from
             | Microsoft than from an open source collective.
        
         | noisy_boy wrote:
         | I have been dealing with frame drops and not-so-smooth video
         | since I updated the NVIDIA driver to version 515 on my Pop_OS!
         | install on Thinkpad Extreme Gen 2 (last "good" version was
         | 460). I thought of trying another DE to see if that makes any
         | difference and with KDE, even though the graphics issues are
         | somewhat still there, the performance is a definite
         | improvement. I thought of trying KDE because I heard all good
         | things about it and it has indeed been a joy to use. Now if
         | only NVIDIA had the ability to produce some decent drivers for
         | Linux...
        
         | babypuncher wrote:
         | I run what I would consider a pretty heavy Plasma desktop, with
         | latte dock, all the fancy compositing effects, and a few other
         | additions. On top of that, I'm running several Electron apps,
         | one Windows app in Wine, and Firefox with several tabs right
         | now. My memory usage is 3.5GB.
        
         | wooque wrote:
         | It's still heavy.
         | 
         | Other suggest that it uses same or even less memory than Xfce,
         | that may be true on fresh boot, but it's misleading, because
         | Plasma utilizes lazy load aggressively and also still leaks
         | memory like crazy.
         | 
         | I tried to use it for a while and I noticed that memory grows
         | quite a bit after using it for a whole day for example. I
         | witnessed once plasma-shell process using 600MB and kwin 300MB,
         | which is quite bad, worse than even GNOME. You can restart
         | processes and it returns to normal, but I don't want to do
         | that, I want DE using reasonable resources, not 1GB for showing
         | wallpaper and few windows
        
           | dnzm wrote:
           | To be fair, a DE does quote a bit more than just "showing
           | wallpaper and few windows". If that's your only use, switch
           | to something like Window Maker or maybe something even more
           | sparse.
        
           | riidom wrote:
           | Can't really confirm, it's at 350mb now after 4 days of
           | uptime - when I add krunner and baloo indexer, it's 630mb.
        
         | brnt wrote:
         | Phoronix benchmarks are showing for years now that KDE has the
         | lowest footprint. Only bare window managers beat it.
        
         | IceWreck wrote:
         | Plasma consumes almost the same amount of resources as XFCE.
         | However you tradeoff stability for shiny new features.
        
       | mattlondon wrote:
       | Brilliant! Now all we need is reliable WiFi, Bluetooth, CPU power
       | management, wake from sleep, screen scaling, and audio and we'll
       | be ready for Linux on the desktop! /s
       | 
       | Less sarcastically though, I found plasma to be the most usable
       | of the bunch and glad to see the release cadence continuing.
       | Gnome et al feel like they are on a relentless march to replicate
       | Mac OS as closely as possible. I find Mac OS's approach to
       | multitasking actively user-hostile, so something same like plasma
       | is welcome.
       | 
       | Ironically I migrated to Mac OS because hardware support in Linux
       | on common dell hardware is just not there, even in the 2020s
        
         | haolez wrote:
         | I've just came back to Linux, with Plasma nonetheless, and the
         | only problem I had from this list was that sleep was consuming
         | a lot of battery. Besides that, everything worked fine. It's
         | good enough :)
        
           | qudat wrote:
           | sleep_then_hibernate is the setting I used and it worked
           | great for preserving battery life.
        
         | itwillnotbeasy wrote:
         | Have used multiple monitors with latest KDE, and never had an
         | issue with display scaling - both fonts and icons look good,
         | whereas in MacOS fonts are just terrible on external displays,
         | so far tried 23" 1080p, 27" 1440p and 34" ultrawide 1440p with
         | the same result. And KDE also allows changing external display
         | scale, where MacOS only offer setting lower resolution,
         | seriously, wtf?
         | 
         | That's a pity that in year 2022 apple sells notebook with only
         | 16GB of RAM for $2000 and there is still no adequate
         | alternative for the macbooks in terms of hardware, battery life
         | and driver support.
         | 
         | MacOS feels so limited compared to KDE, even base functionality
         | like alt+tab that shows windows previews(and not icons), or
         | window arrangment with keyboards shortcuts or by dragging to
         | the display corners, is not possible without 3rd party
         | software.
        
       | mikro2nd wrote:
       | Who the hell decided that windows no longer need a border?
       | Clearly someone who never has overlapping windows open at the
       | same time. It's a horror-show of trying to visually figure out
       | where one window ends and the one beneath it begins because,
       | well... white backgrounds look just the same as other white
       | backgrounds. Please, for the love of everyone's bleeding eyes,
       | put the border decorations back. (If I could find out where to
       | change the styling myself it would be done already. But I can't
       | and defaults matter!)
        
         | 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
         | I believe MS removed windows borders (on Windows) quite a while
         | ago, and you don't even get a choice there. Maybe they've just
         | copied that.
        
           | jstimpfle wrote:
           | Borders on Windows 10 are ~1px wide and last time I looked
           | they couldn't be tweaked to be thicker. There is a drop-
           | shadow too, but that has hardly if any effect for white-on-
           | black terminal windows.
        
         | viraptor wrote:
         | It's literally called "windows decorations" in the settings.
         | https://userbase.kde.org/System_Settings/Windows_Decorations
         | 
         | See the "window border size" dropdown here
         | https://userbase.kde.org/images.userbase/d/d2/SystemSettings...
        
           | dTal wrote:
           | On my system, if you type "window borders" into krunner, it
           | pops up the "Window Decorations" settings page. Krunner can
           | be spooky sometimes.
        
             | mikro2nd wrote:
             | Krunner is my friend! ;) Between Krunner and a few custom
             | hot-keys I seldom use a conventional app launcher any
             | more...
        
           | mikro2nd wrote:
           | Thank you for that! Was disabled (so _very_ light grey)
           | because  "Use Theme border size" was selected, so I never
           | noticed the whole thing.
           | 
           | I say again, though: Defaults matter!
        
         | kube-system wrote:
         | Drop shadows are a way to discern between overlapping windows
         | without a border.
        
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