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?

  • Veraxis@lemmy.world
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    12 days 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.

  • stembolts@programming.dev
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    12 days ago

    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.

  • easily3667@lemmus.org
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    11 days ago

    I think Linux nerds are clowns who don’t understand that not everyone wants to learn what -xvf means just to extract a goddammed file.

    Kde is solid and requires zero fuckery in my experience to work well. This is in fedora, suse, arch (endeavour), void.

  • lattrommi@lemmy.ml
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    12 days 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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    12 days 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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      12 days 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.

  • JTskulk@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

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

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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    11 days ago

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

  • RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world
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    12 days 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.

  • krimson@lemmy.world
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    12 days 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.

  • monovergent 🛠️@lemmy.ml
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    11 days 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.

  • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
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    12 days 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.

  • nanook@friendica.eskimo.com
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    12 days ago

    I don’t like it, too much desk space wasted on useless crapola. I use Mate, a nice clean desktop with a simple pull-down menu leaving the majority of the space free for work.

  • pineapple@lemmy.ml
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    11 days ago

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

  • nafzib@lemmy.world
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    11 days 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.