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The KDE Plasma Experience is the Best One Can Find and It Continues to Improve




Top: My dual-head KDE4 set-up (secondary laptop). Bottom: My dual-head KDE5 set-up (primary laptop). There's another dual-head GNOME set-up (not shown here). Screenshots taken minutes ago.



Summary: A new version of KDE Plasma was released earlier today; it's time to discuss a decade of turbulence in the KDE project and ways forward (possibly a fork of Qt)

THE most advanced, at least features-wise, desktop environment is KDE. It's not running only on GNU/Linux. Some BSDs have it as well. No environment such as Windows or MacOS comes close to KDE. This is hardly a controversial thing to say; sure, there are some more complex or advanced tilting-type environments, but in terms of the number of features they're nowhere near KDE. Not even close.



I myself am a KDE user. Over the past two decades I've used it on and off, always on at least one desktop or laptop. My wife is also an on-and-off KDE user. She kept switching between Unity and KDE and nowadays she uses only KDE (although she has all the Debian desktop environments installed on her ThinkPad).

No matter what else I try, I always come back to KDE.

I was a huge fan of KDE3 and I last tried booting KDE3 on an old laptop about 2 months ago. It wasn't as appealing as I remembered it. Maybe being nostalgic caused me to think it was a lot better than it really was. Linus Torvalds was a KDE fan until KDE4 (he tried the flaky 4.0). I'd urge him to give KDE/Plasma5 another chance (maybe he already has). A lot of the work he does is in the command line either way. When I last met Dr. Richard Stallman in person he used a combination of GNOME and ncurses stuff (including CLI, Emacs, other stuff I could not quite recognise). No KDE...

The transition between different versions of Qt was rather disruptive to KDE development because applications needed to be rewritten and sometimes there was missing functionality following the 'upgrade'. Moreover, considering the licensing plans of Qt6 (there's a mostly polite/amicable controversy about it online), there's growing concern in the KDE project with... the possibility/prospect of forking Qt to ensure it stays truly Free software. Qt will probably figure out some sort of compromise at the end. KDE is a massive marketing tool for them.

"If people out there still say that "Linux sucks," then they're almost certainly trolling."Today's release of Plasma 5.19 (see the latest Daily List) excites us a bit. The version we currently use is already very stable and reliable; I love it!

If people out there still say that "Linux sucks," then they're almost certainly trolling. Either they didn't really try all the right things (patiently, learning all the pertinent features) or they're just opportunistic provocateurs. Nowadays a lot of games can also be run under GNU/Linux. The same could not be said a decade ago. So what are the remaining barriers anyway? Well, FUD for one thing. The perception that GNU/Linux is "difficult" or "sucks" (even if it runs most of the world's computers, barely named when and where it does). KDE does not spend billions or even millions on marketing (lying to people is antithetical in the Free software world). So people might not think it can be as good as stuff from Microsoft and Apple; but it's actually better. It eclipses both in terms of functionality.

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