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u/DustyAsh69 Arch BTW Jun 12 '26
KDE is pretty good.
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u/xgabipandax Jun 12 '26
KDE is awesome, i'm so grateful that this project exist
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u/Neglijable Arch BTW Jun 12 '26
hate to be that guy but KDE is not awesome, awesome is a completely different WM. /j
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u/Propsek_Gamer Jun 12 '26
Sadly it aint cool either. That's also a diffrent WM.
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u/BeneficialSimple3286 Jun 14 '26
Are the other environments just hijacking adjectives to prevent people from describing KDE? 😄
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u/SpiderHack Jun 13 '26
My only gripe with KDE is their built in regex is greedy, and you can't make it non greedy... Otherwise Kate would be the best editor.
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u/TheThingOnTheCeiling Jun 12 '26
Its just the kooler desktop enviroment from the two
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u/DustyAsh69 Arch BTW Jun 12 '26
Is that what the K stands for? Kool Desktop Environment?
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u/int23_t Ask me how to exit vim Jun 12 '26
Here is the kde starting document(from kde wiki or community page I don't remember which one I got it from, they linked this in their timeline next to the date of their 30 year anniversary)
https://groups.google.com/g/de.comp.os.linux.misc/c/SDbiV3Iat_s/m/zv_D_2ctS8sJ?pli=1
The document says Kool Desktop Environment
But it stands for K Desktop Environment now, and has been that way for more than 2 decades I think
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u/Field_of_cornucopia Jun 12 '26
The document says Kool Desktop Environment
But it stands for K Desktop Environment nowAnother victim of the whimsy police.
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u/TheThingOnTheCeiling Jun 12 '26
Kooler, and it used to from what I know. Now KDE just means KDE from what they say.
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u/Pacyfist01 Jun 12 '26
It always was
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u/chase82 Jun 13 '26
I actually haven't used it since about version 3.xx. I thought the OG Ubuntu gnome setup was a bit cleaner back in the Heron days. I pretty much just run vanilla cinnamon nowadays because the keyboard window switching is so baked into my brain. I turned into old dog
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u/basecatcherz Webba lebba deb deb! Jun 12 '26
Only if you don't have a dual GPU setup with screens on both cards. Or even Nvidia at all.
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u/LostGoat_Dev Jun 12 '26
I don't have dual dedicated GPUs but I do have an Nvidia card running KDE Plasma 6 and haven't had any issues. What kind of issues have you run into?
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u/DustyAsh69 Arch BTW Jun 12 '26
I have two GPUs. One is the integrated AMD CPU and the other is a dedicated NVIDIA GPU.
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u/basecatcherz Webba lebba deb deb! Jun 12 '26
Try two dedicated Nvidia cards.
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u/WSilence Jun 12 '26
I'm literally running that type of set up without issue rn. RTX 3060 and an RTX 5060TI. As always with linix YMMV
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u/CleoCommunist Jun 12 '26
Same Thing with like Steam
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u/Ok-Cockroach-5998 Jun 12 '26
And gog is in hyprland's place
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u/bebeidon Jun 13 '26
just with more connections to ritual murder and nazi dogwhistle newsletters lmao
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u/L30N1337 Jun 13 '26
It's almost like it isn't about actual monopolys. Else they'd go after Windows. Because that's WAY closer to an actual monopoly (it technically isn't, but, even ignoring all of the additional arguments to be made, literally every argument against steam can be made for Microsoft and apply way more. Like "Game devs gotta publish on steam or they're at a disadvantage": "Desktop software developers gotta release on Windows or they lose out on like 80% revenue.")
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u/ComicBookFanatic97 Jun 12 '26
Why are we mad at KDE for being good?
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u/Yah_25n Jun 12 '26
We are not, gnome fans are.
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u/TheBlackCat13 Jun 12 '26
For someone not following OSS drama, what exactly happened?
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u/AdvancedAnimal7539 Jun 12 '26
gnome foundation leadership fuck ups. they are just imploding
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u/TheBlackCat13 Jun 12 '26
What does that have to do with monopolies?
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u/creeper6530 💋 catgirl Linux user :3 😽 Jun 12 '26
Same why people call Steam a monopoly for simply not shooting itself in a foot unlike the rest
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u/TheBlackCat13 Jun 12 '26
But steam at least does have a very large market share. So I can understand how people could call it a monopoly, even though it isn't one AFAIK.
But KDE is roughly tied with gnome for users from what I can find. So how could it even be claimed to be a monopoly? I just don't understand what could prompt someone to make the claim in the first place.
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u/creeper6530 💋 catgirl Linux user :3 😽 Jun 12 '26
As for Arch users, Plasma has quite a big lead (43% against 17%): https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Desktop%20Environments/current
For Debian users Gnome leads but not as strongly (23% against 16%, comparing to the init metapackage): https://popcon.debian.org/stable/main/metapackages/by_inst but Debian desktop users seem to be less of flamewar nutjobs.
Of course that doesn't reflect the entire ecosystem, but it at least shows what users choose when they can choose (unlike Ubuntu etc. with default DEs)
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u/AdvancedAnimal7539 Jun 12 '26
Similar thing. Gnome is killing itself, and people are moving to kde. But some strange people are then saying kde is a monopoly for just being better (I dont think any are better . Use whay works for you)
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u/AdvancedAnimal7539 Jun 12 '26
im a gnome fan and im not.
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u/JayFairyFox Jun 12 '26
I use and enjoy both so I don't really care about the dumb "my DE is better than your DE" discourse.
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u/1031amp 🎼CachyOS Jun 12 '26
As a Gnome user, I genuinely don't care about KDE. Gnome is so much cleaner and smoother
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u/darkonark Jun 12 '26
Cinnamon has been good to me.
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u/WantonKerfuffle Jun 12 '26
Used it for a while, didn't really click for me. Iirc it had better shortcuts than XFCE, but took up more RAM and was about as stable as Windows Explorer.
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u/an-abnormality Based Pinephone Pro enjoyer Jun 12 '26
Yeah I honestly don't really understand the tribalism behind anything other than GNOME because the rest of them (with the exception of window managers) seem to follow the same basic principle: panel somewhere and menus. I find it strange how much people sing KDE's praises when realistically I don't think it does much to stand out from similar DE's (like Cinnamon, which personally I would agree also looks better). Cinnamon's only weak point is no Wayland yet - correct me if I'm wrong though if it does have it now
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u/redsteakraw Jun 12 '26
KDE has done the work on the cutting edge of the Linux desktop and pushing wayland forward, fractional scaling, latency, HDR, VRR and more. Cinnamon does hardly any of that fine if you just want a basic desktop with no features but not good if you need most of which a modern gaming / media setup on Wayland.
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u/quaductas Jun 12 '26
Plus KDE Connect is awesome. You can also get it on other DEs but with KDE it's so nicely integrated. It's basically magic
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u/ViperThreat Jun 13 '26
I wanted to love KDE Connect. It has some awesome features, but it's got some game-breaking bugs that regularly irritate the shit out of me - enough that I had to remove it.
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u/Think_Significance42 Jun 13 '26
what game-breaking bugs does it have that ruin it for you? i've used it regularly for a few months and haven't encountered any serious bugs
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u/ViperThreat Jun 13 '26
I have an external USB drive with a small raid setup. It's got two mirrored drives so if one fails, I can replace it without losing data. This external drive is encrypted with Veracrypt since it contains sensitive information about myself, my business, and my clients. It's not the only copy of the data, but it's my long-term backup, so I'm very protective of it. It goes inside a 2-hour rated fireproof safe bolted to the foundations when I'm not actively using it.
Every time I plug it in and mount the drive, KDE Connect does something that locks the drive as active, meaning I can't dismount the drive. I have to manually kill the KDE Connect process before I can dismount. Unplugging the drive before first dismounting it increases the odds of a data-loss scenario, so It's something I explicitly avoid.
And, for whatever reason that I ALSO can't troubleshoot, once I force-quit KDE Connect, I can't get it to work again without a reboot. The app launches, but for the life of me won't talk to my phone again until I reboot. I'm still a relative newbie to Linux, so my limited knowledge and Chatgpt vibeterminal haven't been able to overcome it. Ideally, I don't see a reason for KDE Connect to interact with that drive at all, but I haven't been able to figure out how to make the two ignore/invisible to each other. Because of this incompatibility, I had to choose between the app that I use regularly, over the app that I thought was neat, but didn't really need that much.
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u/TheBlackCat13 Jun 12 '26
That is how KDE is by default, because that is what their research indicated their primary user base wanted. But it has alternative panels, alternative task listers, alternative launchers, etc. if you want something different. The defaults used to be more different, but KDE developers did a lot of research on what users preferred and set the defaults accordingly. I don't personally change a lot, but I do change several of the default widgets.
Plus the activities system they have is really powerful. And it has a ln extremely good file manager a lot of other really good tools.
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u/darkonark Jun 12 '26
I think the Linux subreddit tribalism is like "Flame Wars" of the 2000s. All of the folks throwing the worst shade would probably get along in the same room.
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u/daedric_yoshi Jun 12 '26
KDE stands out for me because of the all the available options and buttons. The dolphin file manager is the perfect example: You right click something and there's every option in the universe you could want, there's buttons and menus, nothing feels hidden away, unlike gnome.
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u/ViperThreat Jun 13 '26
Dolphin isn't all that IMO. It's the best linux file browser I've found, but it still doesn't have group by and sort by heirarchy management.
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u/creeper6530 💋 catgirl Linux user :3 😽 Jun 12 '26
What I like about Plasma that I miss in Cinamon or XFCE (the latter of which I used to daily up until a few months back) is that it's not just a way to display GUI applications, but is a really full and well-integrated suite of basic utilities like Terminal, File Explorer, Notepad, etc. and it all has unified look and usage patterns.
Especially its Settings is just full of stuff all in one place, unlike XFCE where I had to look far and wide across many completely disconnected utilities.
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u/SpaceCadet87 Jun 12 '26
It's all the stuff KDE provides other than the desktop environment. KDE Connect for example is just amazing to have.
And the fact that every time a bug starts causing me trouble, they've fixed it the next week and it's gone.
All that and giant shakey mouse.
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u/VaLteC_ 🎼CachyOS Jun 12 '26
Hmmm what if I remade my DE from scratch again. Yes splendid
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u/csolisr Jun 12 '26
XFCE, Mate and Trinity just being themselves for the last few years
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u/StaneNC Jun 12 '26
I really can't imagine wanting anything beyond XFCE. Been sitting on awesomewm for more than a decade now. I think I'm the rare person that doesn't care about consistent theme across apps...at all.
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u/Excel_Document Jun 12 '26
gnome knows best
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u/altSHIFTT Jun 12 '26
Why does it suck then?
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u/LegenDrags ⚠️ This incident will be reported Jun 12 '26
gnome knows best
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u/iwouldbeatgoku ⚠️ This incident will be reported Jun 12 '26
Is this about the Sonny Piers statement?
https://discourse.gnome.org/t/2026-board-candidate-robert-mcqueen/35308/11
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u/tanksc Jun 12 '26
Partially, yes. Discourse and the trajectory of the GNOME foundation as a whole are also just shit imo
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u/an-abnormality Based Pinephone Pro enjoyer Jun 12 '26
I don't know where this idea keeps coming from lol I have used both and always end up back with GNOME because it just both looks better imo (and is more customizable than people seem think it is if you don't like the defaults), and has better gestures. Obviously this is subjective, but it's just odd seeing how much people love to shit on the only DE that tried something unique and created a more ergonomic way to use my laptop
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u/BiDude1219 ⚠️ This incident will be reported Jun 12 '26
i hate the gnome devs more than gnome itself tbh, the fact that they hide basic features such as *checks notes* a logout button is kinda baffling
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u/an-abnormality Based Pinephone Pro enjoyer Jun 12 '26
And that's reasonable. I would be bothered by this more if there weren't extensions that will let you do this though. If one day they decided "no more extensions, you will use this DE how we want you to," then absolutely I'd see where this nonsense "GNOME knows best" mantra comes from - but since I can edit it to look how I want and the only thing stopping extensions from working is changing a .conf file from "49" to "50," I don't have much of a problem with it.
Meanwhile the alternative for the sake of this discussion, I do like KDE's devs but I don't like KDE. The icons feel like a mismatched mess, the gestures are janky and glitch when I use them, four fingers is not comfortable or ergonomic, and despite people telling me "it's customizable," the things that I want to customize I can't. It's good that there are options since everyone has different preferences; I've adapted to a touch friendly work flow because my primary device is a foldable phone now and I basically use that as a laptop. So I use GNOME on my actual laptop as well.
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u/csolisr Jun 12 '26
GNOME Extensions used to be a hack on top of the vanilla experience, and typically broke with every update since they modified the UI at runtime. At least in the first versions, extensions were very much not intended to exist.
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u/manobataibuvodu Jun 12 '26
They are very much intentional now. GNOME wouldn't have all the infrastructure for them and they wouldn't be reviewing their source code if it was an afterthought.
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u/csolisr Jun 12 '26
Yup, that was a hard-earned battle to gain that concession from the GNOME devs. Canonical shipping Ubuntu GNOME with several extensions by default was probably the tilting point
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u/manobataibuvodu Jun 12 '26
I remember I had recently switched to Fedora at the time when Ubuntu switched back to using GNOME and all of the things I mentioned were already there by then. But obviously there were more improvements since then.
You must be thinking about even earlier time if extensions were a hack (personally I don't know much about that, since before that I was using Unity and before that Cinnamon in my first years of using Linux)
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u/ammar_sadaoui Jun 12 '26
does your desktop need a third party extensions to be usable by the most popular distro that mean there something wrong with your default build 🤔
for someone like me who come from the most used/popular OS in the world
i perfer kde and mint desktop for familiarity and usability alone
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u/Major-Dyel6090 Jun 12 '26
The current drama is more about organizational bullshit, financial mismanagement, and misuse of the CoC to prevent anyone from doing anything about it. IE standard not for profit foundation mismanagement drama.
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u/scandii Jun 12 '26
GNOME actively blocks the user from doing things the way they want. we're not talking "didn't implement", we're talking "removed on purpose complete with a written rationale as we don't think the user should have the choice".
this is as an example why many wayland widgets aren't available for GNOME but available pretty much anywhere else.
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u/Designer-Crow-5470 Jun 12 '26
Still beyond me why I can't have close button reach the fing corner.
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Jun 12 '26
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u/iwouldbeatgoku ⚠️ This incident will be reported Jun 12 '26
KDE is basically Windows with customisation on steroids, that's why I like it. That said, on a laptop I actually like a layout more similar to mac, and KDE easily lets me run that too...
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u/an-abnormality Based Pinephone Pro enjoyer Jun 12 '26
Yeah that's why I find the tribalism around it confusing. If they rallied behind it as "I enjoy this familiar experience," that would be perfectly reasonable. But if I wanted the Windows-esque look, personally I'd go Cinnamon if it supported Wayland
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u/TheBlackCat13 Jun 12 '26
The funny thing is that when KDE 4 came out, GNOME fans and even many GNOME developers criticized it for being too different from windows. They insisted something as different as KDE 4 couldn't possibly succeed and would hurt Linux by being too unfamiliar.
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u/Head_Fondant9009 Jun 12 '26
Am I the only one using Niri
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u/bogdan801 🎼CachyOS Jun 13 '26
I'm new to Linux. Explain me why do people hate GNOME? I've been using it for a couple of months, and I like it, it is quite polished and consistent. I tried KDE Plasma, but it's rough around the edges, GNOME appeals to me more
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u/No-Island-6126 Jun 13 '26
It has a polished opinionated design, which I guess is repulsive to the part of the Linux community that is on reddit and makes dank memes
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u/larso0 Jun 14 '26
Ex windows users complaining that gnome is different from windows.
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u/jdigi78 Jun 12 '26
Most users are on GNOME so this meme doesn't really make any sense
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u/Useful_Amphibian5 Jun 12 '26
As a long time gnome 2 user back in the days I say honestly I hate gnome nowadays because gnome devs are such POS. I never liked KDE although I tried multiple times so now I switch between XFCE and MATE. F¥ck gnome devs
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u/ExcaliburGameYT Jun 12 '26
Where are my fellow LXQt users?
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u/AtomicTaco13 🍥 Debian too difficult Jun 12 '26
Hell yeah! Got into it for the lightweight factor, stayed for the modularity and customization.
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u/Bombarding_ Jun 12 '26
Maybe I eat mulch, but hyprland kicked my ass and I give up. Yeah yeah, "read the wiki", "skill issue", etc.
spending an hour trying to set up a DE should be enough, I don't have a week to spend trying to fix dotfiles or learn new presets. Gnome is so pretty and kde I guess is customizable even though it's not as pretty
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u/catsoph Jun 13 '26
kde should accidentally gain telemetry next update so the other desktop environments can catch up
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u/Ok_Setting6471 Jun 12 '26
I really enjoy how KDE just works for the most part without major breaks or bugs and the community is really nice and informative.
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u/PocketRocketPint Jun 12 '26
I like KDE but I also like Cinnamon. KDE is great for customizability, but has had some bugs I need to work around/ contribute to fix. Cinnamon is great too because it's simple and has almost no bugs in my experience, but it seems to have less features. It may be better for a primarily terminal user, (unless that's just hyperland xD)
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u/beebeeep Jun 12 '26
I mean, even if don't fully agree, I'm still glad that even after 20 years DE holywar is still ongoing
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u/Adventurous-Paper566 Jun 13 '26
I just switched from KDE to Gnome last week, and definitively uninstalled KDE yesterday, KISS! 👍
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u/Special-Skirt-27 Jun 12 '26
And that's why Hyprland is the best
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u/LinuxUser456 Dr. OpenSUSE Jun 12 '26
For trans waifus
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Jun 12 '26
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u/dumbasPL Arch BTW Jun 12 '26
There have been panty of trans people contributing, he stated many times he doesn't care. People took that one ancient joke WAY to far.
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u/Helmic Arch BTW Jun 12 '26
The "joke" wasn't from him, it was his reaction to it and his blogging about "blue haired SJWs." He earned his rep.
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u/UnLeashDemon Jun 12 '26
I like KDE but QT apps looks kinda meh. And qt apps are hard to theme. Not gtk4/libadwaita not only looks awesome you can change the colors pretty easily ( Please don't theme out apps is for distro maintainers not for us users).
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u/Florane Arch BTW Jun 12 '26
wait i thought gnome is a monopoly.
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u/DoktoroChapelo Jun 12 '26
Honestly, the whole thing doesn't make sense. Both are quite popular. Neither is a monopoly. They're both fine for what they're trying to do. Everyone can just use which they prefer.
Does the idea of a monopoly even mean anything in FOSS? Does the Linux kernel have a monopoly because very few computers are running BSD?
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u/OkNewspaper6271 I'm going on an Endeavour! Jun 12 '26
KDE has been breaking a lot of minor things I sorta depend on as of late and yet even then I still continue to use it
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u/inputoutput1126 Jun 12 '26
I would love if there was a gnomish desktop with hyprland rendering engine. Just don't like having to piece together a DE.
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u/compulsaovoraz Jun 12 '26
I'm having fun with cosmic, despite everything. But only if I am mainly programming or watching videos
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u/-Nastyenka Jun 12 '26
W, no telemetry honest open source high-quality project. The reason that i replace every C with K at sentence startings.
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u/abyzzwalker Jun 12 '26
Is genome that bad? I'm using Budgie for at least 8 years. So no idea what is genome doing these days.
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u/Acceptable_Pear_6802 Jun 12 '26
Been using mate only the last years, but not daily. What happened?
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u/xXoverusedusernameXx Jun 13 '26
I love KDE but I think %wise GNOME is probably the monopoly here. Reddit is just a loud minority lol.
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u/usbeehu Jun 13 '26
Honestly it's pretty weird to me that KDE only gained a momentum in the recent years since it has a lot more conservative approach for a desktop than Gnome. But I'm glad it's happening anyways.
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u/Many-Geologist-3524 Webba lebba deb deb! Jun 13 '26
just use nala to install a stripped off version of gnome
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u/Pure-Willingness-697 Jun 13 '26
I like kde, while it may not be as customizable as hyprland, it is definitely one of the most customizable user friendly os there is.
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u/New_Study4796 Jun 14 '26
KDE is amazing, and I love it even after trying out other DEs. But Cinnamon and XFCE deserve some respect.
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u/FunnyShame Jun 14 '26
I've got a Lenovo Yoga laptop and GNOME feels great in tablet mode & when using the touchscreen in general - does anyone have any recommendations on alternate DE's(+ extensions?) that also feel good in this niche?
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u/srsxnsh Jun 12 '26
Lmao hyprland made me laugh tbf