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.

So, 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?

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Boxscape

Been using Tumbleweed as well. May I ask if you encountered these 2 issues:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

I'm not even thinking of changing DE but this is annoying to say the least.

in reply to lemmeBe

  1. 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 ia not distro related but GNU/Linux and a known "issue" for over a decade ! 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:

unix.stackexchange.com/questio…

in reply to lemmeBe

The question marks are because I read somethere that Linus himself doesn't see it like an issue by itself but more like a feature? And that's why it hasn't been resolved for soo long ! I can't exactly remember what he said but that's the gist !

But I do agree, I also see it as an issue :/ and most people who aren't aware probably fucked up some USB sticks that way...

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Jerkface (any/all)

It's an issue according to any UX pattern. If something says that it's done when it's not, it's misrepresenting the state of the action.

Hard to believe that modifying the counter to include the necessary time for actual writing to the flash drive would break everything. Target flash drives only etc.

System functioning as intended doesn't mean that it's a good UX.

This entry was edited (4 weeks ago)
in reply to lemmeBe

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.

in reply to mazzilius_marsti

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.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to mazzilius_marsti

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.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to mazzilius_marsti

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.

This entry was edited (4 weeks ago)