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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It’s a combination between KDE 6 and Wayland, which required support in the Nvidia drivers. I remember running Nvidia on KDE 5 and had zero issues compared to now, but we’ll just have to wait. Some issues are just configuration changes that needs to be implemented by the distro mantainers (literally a one line fix on a conf file which was communicated by KDE but not picked up)
I’m going out on a limb here, and guessing you have a high end video card that is causing probably 99% of your problems, likely an NVidia.
I’m using KDE on MXLinux on a old macbook, and I don’t have these graphical glitches you mention.
I wish everyone and OP included would begin with their hardware, or at least mentioning if it’s a Nvidia system. if it is, I’ll just disregard everything written in regards to glitches and crashes.
my (all AMD, F41) system gets updated and rebooted like once a month, if I remember (flatpaks are on an auto-update timer); it gets suspended in the evening and woken in the morning, tons of apps are open for days. that’s a month-long uptime on a workstation that also does gaming, with those same apps open in the background. this was impossible on Gnome - just randomly closes all apps and here’s your login screen. OOM? driver? who knows - alls I know is, since the switch that happened zero times.
My desktop is a full AMD system that I set up specifically for Linux compatibility, and the laptop is also one of the best compatible ones out there (Dell XPS) with firmware updates included.
Theoretically, the system should be less buggy than other ones, because due to Fedora Atomic, there is less configuration drift and easier fixing for devs due to reproducibility.
I’m fairly sure ublue recommend against rebasing between desktop environments…
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.
My experience is aligned with this. I’ve barely had any issues at all, especially in the 6.x cycle.
There was one pretty annoying panel bug, which was caused by Nvidia, but i’ve sent them reports, and they fixed it in the next driver release. The other one is a thirdparty addon, where under a certain setting combination, your shell would occasionally restart, but again that’s not a Plasma bug
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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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. 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 the complexity in having all that stuff means Plasma must be more prone to bugs.
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. The main thing I dislike about Gnome isn’t actually its UI or design philosophy or even the limited GUI-based options it offers, but rather its philosophy regarding standards or compliance or making interoperability easier. The Gnome devs often do their own thing and don’t play that nice with others.
What always irritated me about Gnome was that when Mutter crashed, I lost anything I was working on. When Plasma crashes, it’ll bring my applications back. The GC bug Gnome had for years was what pushed me to KDE because I couldn’t trust it to not nuke whatever I was working on. Never looked back.
Well, that and the Gnome devs thinking they know how everyone needs to use their DE. That was fucking irritating, especially when they’d break extensions with nary a care.
Fedora is pretty aggressive with updating KDE. They push major new versions during a Fedora release.
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.
I know what you mean. KDE has always felt a little quirky in a way you can’t easily discribe to people. I keep going back to GNOME because it feels like an appliance. The non fractional scaling is a pain, that maybe they will fix at some point.
With the latest 47 release I think the fractional scaling got to the point where it’s a perfectly usable in almost all cases. I use it on 125% and don’t see any blurred apps or glitches or anything like that.
Graphics bugs are from the graphics drivers most of the time (but not always). I reported quite a few bugs in kde 5 about window decorations looking/acting weird, and it got fixed quickly.
I used to switch between gnome and plasma all the time but since plasma 6 came out and I switched to a 4k screen, I’ve been sticking with plasma without any issues. Gnome actually looks bad now on 4k for me. :)
I actually switched to Fedora from Debian recently and haven’t found either to be buggy under KDE. I’ve been using Linux for longer than many I remember just about every release of kde and gnome back to the start. Gnome never felt right after 2.0. I ended up using xfce for many years. I’ve tried gnome here and there and the current version is OK, but it still feels off.
That said I’ve seen bugs and workarounds in nearly every kde or gnome I’ve used, occasionally bad enough to cause me change. I’d still pick either one over windows in a heartbeat.
I do see a visual glitch here and there, but I’m never certain if I should chalk it up to kde or something else.
I haven’t experienced any of those bugs either, but I can see how it would be an issue. I always thought the KDE team waited to release new updates, but maybe they’re rushing things now? Not trying to hate on KDE, I’ve only heard good things about the developers. Gnome always seemed like the more minimalist option between the two, and to me that means stability.
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.
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.
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