Took weeks to decide between Cinnamon and Gnome Shell... So installed KDE Plasma :)

Hades · 6 Oct 2018 at 23:36

My laptop has been running either Ubuntu Mate or Mint Cinnamon for some time. I'm now almost full time Linux apart from when I use my desktop for gaming. So I wanted to have a second drive in my desktop for Linux when I'm using that and not gaming. I spent weeks agonising over which distro to use and spent weeks trying many of them in a VM. I narrowed it down to either my previously preferred Mint Cinnamon or use Ubuntu or a distro with vanilla Gnome Shell. I was almost at the point of settling on Cinnamon for the laptop and Ubuntu for my desktop.

...then for reasons I still don't quite understand I tried KDE Plasma on Kubuntu.

My word I'm impressed. The last time I tried KDE was back in about 2003 when it looked very cartoony. I've never considered using it since. But I thought I'd try it and I'm seriously impressed. I'm now running Kubuntu on both my laptop and desktop. It's just beautiful. Time will tell whether I have any problems. But so far I'm really enjoying it. It's come such a long way since I last tried KDE (yes I appreciate KDE is now the name of the organisation and Plasma is the name of the desktop environment.

It's fast, looks great, and has a 'just right' font size and I can customise it to work just how I want it to. Gnome probably looked a little bit more modern but I couldn't quite get used to how the workflow was or the minimalisation route it was going down. So I think I'll stick with Plasma for a while. If you haven't tried KDE/Plasma recently then it really is worth a look.

Ice Tea · 7 Oct 2018 at 10:07

If by the off chance you like the classic look with a bottom taskbar then next time you use Gnome Shell try the dash to panel addon.

https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel

Apart from giving you the classic look it has the option to disable Gnome's annoying group applications and will give you a separate taskbar icon for each running application plus it has hover preview so you can see a video playing without opening the panel tab.

Hades · 7 Oct 2018 at 12:01

Thanks. I will try that at some point.

pete910 · 7 Oct 2018 at 21:43

I've tried most of the DE's and do like Mate but have always ended back on KDE.

Hades · 10 Oct 2018 at 13:25

I've been using Kubuntu for several days now across both my laptop and desktop. I'm absolutely loving it so far. There have been the few inevitable niggles that always happen with a new Linux distro but nothing major at all. Although I've kept the look and feel fairly standard I've managed to tweak everything to get it just how I want it so far. Although it's still early days the only notable issue is that Skype asks me to sign-in every time I restart it rather than remembering my credentials. But that's probably fixable if I google it and may be due to using a Snap rather than a native install.

Pretty much everything else so far has been at least as good, and in many cases, better, than previous distro's I've used. I really feel at home with Plasma and, for the first time, I genuinely prefer it to Windows 10, rather than just accepting deficiencies because I want to be on Linux. The Dolphin file editor is a delight and I have KDE Connect setup for integration with my phone. Citrix receiver installed perfectly (as it does on other distros) so I can use this machine to remote into work too. I even played a few games on Steamplay / Proton last night (Doom did have some noise on the audio which I need to look into). What I've noticed is that GTK apps look fine on Plasma, whereas on GTK based distro's QT apps didn't integrate as well.

I'm sure I will find issues as the weeks progress. But it has been a very refreshing start to a new DE. So much so that I donated to KDE (Only £5 so far but will donate more as I continue using it).

While it's a cliche and I accept this is only my own limited experience, and desktop take-up is still in very low percentages, for me 2018 really has been the year of the Linux Desktop. It's the point where Linux has progressed far enough for it to become my main OS without any significant compromises (apart from gaming of course, where I still dual boot).

stopper · 10 Oct 2018 at 14:39

Ice Tea said:
If by the off chance you like the classic look with a bottom taskbar then next time you use Gnome Shell try the dash to panel addon.

https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel

Apart from giving you the classic look it has the option to disable Gnome's annoying group applications and will give you a separate taskbar icon for each running application plus it has hover preview so you can see a video playing without opening the panel tab.

Does this remove the Ubuntu top bar by any chance? That bar is the only thing stopping me from using official Ubuntu so I use Budgie instead.

Ice Tea · 11 Oct 2018 at 05:50

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYv4IGn1EdQ

stopper said:
Does this remove the Ubuntu top bar by any chance? That bar is the only thing stopping me from using official Ubuntu so I use Budgie instead.

Yeah , It removes everything including the side dock and places it on a classic task bar at the bottom.