4d ago

Is KDE actually good or it is overrated? Or I was just unlucky because of prebuilt distros?

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?

70 comments

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 3 to 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-1 where 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.

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

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.

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.

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/meminfo
  A 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
  
  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.
  
  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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I've been daily driving Fedora KDE on two different systems (both all AMD, one laptop and one desktop) for nearly half a year and have experienced almost zero crashes or other issues. Maybe it's something to do with your hardware? I do know of some issues with NVIDIA graphics cards on KDE, so that might be a cause.

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.

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

I've had no problems with Plasma on Debian. I think the problem is probably the ubuntu, fedora, etc.
- Fedora's KDE is bulletproof on any of my installed systems (8 or 9 of them, completely different hardware including AMD). Now Kubuntu, on the other hand, has always been a shitshow, I've never had it work right for more than a couple days at a time.
- I'm using plasma on Gentoo, Arch and Ubuntu with barely any issues, on desktops, work laptop and older Thinkpad, Nvidia and AMD. Since 6.1+ and on wayland even the multi-monitor stuff works as expected.
  The only thing I'm still missing on 6.x and wayland is a replacement for khotkey.

I use KDE with Chimera Linux which is only in beta. Rock solid.

I've been using KDE for over 4 years on over a dozen different machines and 5+ distros and I've never had major problems with crashing.
I do experience small bugs fairly often. Maybe once every month or two, little glitches or odd window behavior. Nothing huge, but they do happen. To be fair, I like to modify and customize KDE quite a bit, so that is probably causing some of my issues.
In my experience, Cinnamon is the most stable DE I've used by far. Least amount of random bugs, simple but stable. I don't think I've ever had Cinnamon crash on me actually.

So far, as a more casual user, using the preconfigured Plasma on MX, I have had only minor grievances that truly effect me and only somehow only broke it maybe 1-2 times.

I had issues like that about a week ago, when gaming the system was super sluggish. It turns out that an update put the render under CPU instead of GPU, as in, without hardware acceleration, or software based.

It is great.

I use it daily and it occasionally may crap out, but it may happen maybe once every few weeks. Can't comment about GPU and the likes as I only have an Intel iGPU which works just fine.

Look at the reddit called "unixporn" and search for Xfce. You ll see what's possible with Xfce. For me the KDE crashes are a dealbreaker. My Xfce setup is so simplified, that nothing can be ugly. I use Bspwm for the windows and stripped down Xfce panel (dont touch third party status bars, such as polybar, its waste of time if you already have Xfce). No menu such as Whisker menu, but Rofi instead. I got Xfce stability without the old looking.

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

It is great. I have been using Linux for about three years and majority of that was with KDE Plasma and its Wayland session. Most of that time was with Arch and Fedora and it was all smooth sailing.
It was faster and smoother than GNOME Shell, Cinnamon or any other desktop I have tried.
It may have slightly more bugs compared to GNOME Shell due to sheer amount of features it has.
As others have mentioned, you might have a hardware issue that coincidentally pops up with Plasma.

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.

KDE is just KDE. It has clear pros and cons. Hopefully one day they will take care of the cons.

Sounds familiar. I have tried it with many distros and it just isn't usable. Gave up and ended up liking cinnamon more anyway.

You say KDE hangs, but what component hangs actually? It it plasmashell (other apps work but panel is dead?)? Kwin (windows move/respond to input?)? KDE apps?
I would suggest you to install a distro with kde (fedora KDE edition or open SUSE, not neon) if you're not confident with administration. Use something like Kinoite for accidental breakage protection, or if you want to keep /home as is, install fedora 42 inplace (the new installer).
Not only my experience but also that of many KDE devs say that fedora KDE is probably the best mainline KDE experience (ignoring niche distros or customized KDE).
Also, don't use xorg session. Always log in to default wayland session unless you have incompatible usecase (in that case you know what you're doing).

It has many preloaded features. You will use only a few of them.

Well, before wayland I always used fluxbox (eventually with picom compositor, which previously was compton). Then now on wayland I'm using sway with fuzzel, yambar and others.
I've always felt both gnome and kde, as well as most other DEs really bloated. Gnome used to be more stable on wayland, and as of Today with better support for nvidia AFAIK, but KDE is quickly catching up.
Not sure why the hate on gnome (and I guess on GTK as well). It doesn't offer all the customization by default, but you can get it through extensions while available. But on KDE one really needs to see a pletora of dependencies each time one adds a simple module or application. Both are improving gradually to become less intense on resources being KDE more advanced on that.
But hey, both are bloated compared to non full DE compositors such as sway or labwc. BTW I use sway with tabbed mode (not actually tiling) and some tweaks, and I prefer that over stacking compositors, but if wanting one labwc is pretty cool.
On X11 there's a huge amount of window managers plus compositors plus several other applications which altogether can give a similar sense to a DE but way less intense on resources, and for sure way less bloated. To me DEs are overrated to answer your title, but perhaps that's just me, :)
- re the hate on gnome: extensions are unsupported and can and do break between versions, sometimes intentionasely. The gnome devs would realey really like it if you didn't use extensions and just admit they know best for you.
  
  gnome devs would realey really like it if you didn't use extensions
  This is patently untrue. The GNOME developers even maintain their own repository with a bunch of extensions for people to use. Why would they do so if they didn't want anyone to use them?
  Do extensions break on GNOME major version upgrades? Sometimes, yeah. Nobody is forced to upgrade if they don't want to, and it's not like you log into your desktop one day to be surprised with a broken system. There's even an upgrade assistant that will tell you prior to an upgrade if any extensions will break.
  This pervasive loud minority of whiny complainers spreading nonsense about GNOME is annoying. It's free software; don't use it if you don't like it, that's fine. But don't spread lies about it, that's childish.

Plasma 6 started very prone to crashes in my laptop when it released. I like how it works a lot more than Gnome, but Plasma tends to be buggier for me too.
This last month I've been having rendering issues in a lot of software, like Firefox and Okular in Fedora 41 (and now 42). I don't know where they came from as it was pretty much perfect last month.
Sometimes I think I'd prefer to return to xfce in laptop (like I tend to use in desktops) or use labwc.

I have never gotten KDE to work well... but I'm a shitty user running on shitty hardware so grain of salt and all...

Most of those issues I do not have. By waking from suspend, do you mean hibernate? A system d update broke that last year in OpenSuse and I'm assuming other distros. I sleep now and it wakes fine.

Vanilla Arch is much easier to install than it used to be. Connect to wifi via terminal commands or connect ethernet, enter archinstall and go down the list.
I've only ever had the waking from sleep problem, but it's consistent in other DE's for me. I have a desktop so I just turn that and hibernate off.
I had a known problem with krunner not opening after first run unless you killed the process, but I got rofi and customized it to the teeth instead. Found out that I love rofi. I probably won't go back to krunner even it gets fixed now.
- Arch is much more difficult to install now than it used to be as well. I remember when Arch had an installer.
  
  it literally has one fym

I used to have hang on suspend resume problem on my Thinkpad E15. It somegot got resolved in later updates. Might be a random firmware problem, that's really hard to track down. So may be it mostly comes down to luck.

Yes, that's what its always done.

I’ve been using it on two older systems (4-8 y) one without a ssd or graphics card and it works flawlessly. As others suggested maybe you check your graphics drivers. I used to have problem with kde some time ago but since coming back it’s been nothing but smooth sailing.

Xfce user, here to represent!
I love it and haven't had any trouble. Try it out!

no, if you have qtile set up, it will be a better experience

I've never had those issues with KDE. I use Garuda dr460nized and Mokka. Both are based on Arch and use KDE.

In my experience KDE on OpenSuse and probably Fedora are rock solid. The first and nowadays probably also the second (which has moved to first tier instead of being a sub-distribution) are considered reference implementations of industry strength distros.
My thought would be that you've added something slightly broken to the mix which breaks KDE. It can happen. Linux is complicated, KDE is also complicated, what annoys one desktop can be ok with another. If you want to figure out what the problem is, you'll have to go through your various system logs to see what fails.

I have non of the issue on my Starlite (Kubuntu)
My PC with the newest Arch Linux seems to have sometimes issues with sleep and freezing on waking up. (Intel CPU + AMD GPU)

I use arch and so I get the latest kde releases and sometimes things are buggy. But usually those are fixed next update. But yes, it is beautiful but man it's not as stable as something like gnome

I've been using Fedora KDE for...months? Maybe a year now? And I've yet to see it hang or crash.

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.

70 comments