i used cinnamon in 2016 (worst time i think), then i briefly used gnome in '23. i’ve been using kde since '25 and i regret i have no desire to use anything else anymore.
want a tiling wm? - just install a plugin and customize kde within 5 minutes
want to build a mediabox with a simple ui for use with a remote on a tv? - just adjust the sizes and find one of a million widgets!
do you want the ms win98 look? - it’s 3 clicks away!
i am sure other DE’s may be better for my specific usecases. but the flexibility of kde gives me good enough results within a familiar environment. i can change my whole computer experience in a few clicks and revert whenever on the same de!
Well, tiling window managers exist.
Khe Khing Kabout KDE Kis Kits Kobsession Kwith Kits Knaming Kheme.
I just install 1980s pong OS. Humans should have stopped at this, So much is simplit times for us yes.
I’m still stuck on i3 and sway. I hear there’s a version of KDE that is tiling…? But I haven’t found anything definitive on that.
Kwin supports tiling, although nothing stops you from replacing it with i3.
Cinnamon > KDE
We only need xfce, let’s delete the others
“Am I interested in other DEs?” and “Will I install them?” are two different questions though. Yeah, I had fun running i3 years back, but i3 isn’t the new hotness anymore, and there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of me feeling like I have the time to learn and configure another WM. Absent my suddenly striking it rich and having entirely too much free time, I sincerely doubt there will come another time where I feel like I have that sort of time and nothing I’d rather use it for than such a mundane and endless task.
Just switch to sway. As far as I know, the config should be compatible (if you swap the complex utils for Wayland ones). But I haven’t tried it (I do use river and really like it though, so I do recommend sway).
niri forever
Cinnamon is my favorite. KDE is #2. Not crazy about Gnome or Cosmic.
Any i3 lad around?
I would love to give GNOME an honest try, but there are so many ways in which it feels like it’s actively working against me. In KDE I can for example create as many panels as I want on as many monitors as I want. On GNOME? There’s an extension to put the panel on another monitor, but then you can’t use the dock. I guess the GNOME developers don’t use multiple monitors? I mean you can’t even set different wallpapers on different monitors without a third party application.
As for Niri, Hyprland and all that… Yeah, they’re cool, but I’m too old nowadays. I just want shit to work, even though I do miss some of the functions that exist e.g. on Hyprland that doesn’t exist in KDE. But on the other hand, the developer of Hyprland is an asshole, so I wouldn’t really want to promote or use the project anyway.
Did anyone only just realise the smoking man in the background
I’m waiting for Cosmic to mature
It has so many great ideas, all it needs is time and polish.
I tried Cosmic for a week. It looked nice but I returned to LXQt because I want:
- To display time in ISO 8601 without also messing with locales
- To customize my file manager columns
- To use Emacs in a terminal emulator
- To not have my windows scattered to the four winds every time I lock my screen because the fancy window tiling feature is half-baked
- To have the X window manager back. I’m sure some people with use cases besides mine that are compatible only with Wayland, but I simply don’t see the need nor do I wish to be a guinea pig submitting bug reports when so many guinea pigs before me had years of their lives sacrificed polishing X.
Also, the performance of programs like the default Cosmic file manager was much slower then comparable alternatives like pcmanfm-qt which I know run fast even on 2005 Compaq laptop hardware.
Plasma is great. But it’s missing an important feature. Apps, such as backup or sync, cannot navigate to network shares, to use as a backup target. Dolphin sees the shares ok, but its important to backup. Windows lets apps select network targets. Plasma should too.
Dolphin shows you places that are not in your file system, such as network shares or your phone‘s media directory. Those are fake files, illusions of Satan, temptations designed to stray you from the path of God. Avoid anything that is not opened with
openand not read withreadsystem calls, for doing so is a sin before eyes of God (fopenandfreadare permitted). Mount your network shares usingsudo mount -t cifs.hear me out. what do you do when the network share server is not always available? like because your system is a laptop, or because you are doing maintenance on your server and its off.
what I do is suffer the consequences of many software that does not handle it well, and freeze for a minute (or worse) when it tries to open the mounted share even when it shouldn’t even try. multiple KDE apps are guilty of that, including dolphin and kate, but to some extent almost everything else too.
but that is not ideal.My answer is
killall -9
It’s a shame Dolphin gets it wrong. I hope that bug has been reported. And I’d love to find a way for non IT users to mount the share as a workaround to the missing functionality. But that’s missing too.
Dolphin does mount it …somewhere. Supposedly. I expect only KDE developers know where exactly. You can get the same functionality using Gnome file manager and
giocommand, and you get your network share properly mounted in a file system, but then you won’t be using KDE.dolphin manages your connection with kio, but only those things can use the share that are aware of kio. so qt apps mostly.
I use Nixos, but my ssh mount and nfs and samba mount can be selected as backup path for kup.
Nice. Kup actually lets me see the Network. But then complains if I select a samba share. There is a popular bug report about this. I prefer sync backup to access documents directly, instead of kups scrambled backup files.
What do you use for backup?
Kup currently also does not satisfy my needs, but I am not sure what else I should use.
