Weekly Journal 24 - KDE

Synopsis

GNOME 40 broke a number of extensions I use, so I decided to give KDE a try.

GNOME 40

I have reached an age where I no longer have interest in messing around with system administration. I would much rather use my limited free time working on programming and hobby projects, or playing games. Tweaking my desktop or fiddling with kernel modules for my video card just isn’t fun for me.

In a similar vein, I have not been a fan of GNOME since they started their crusade to remove all the good features. While GNOME is a nice-looking desktop, it’s a usability nightmare. However, it’s popular, mainstream, and well-supported so I have used it for the past few years mostly because it requires a minimal amount of messing around to get it working. To help with the usability, I rely on the Dash to Panel shell extension to give me a proper taskbar and dock on the desktop screen. Unfortunately, GNOME 40 broke a number of extensions and it is taking some time to get the extensions updated.

KDE 5.21

I have used KDE as my desktop in the past, but stopped using it when Plasma v4.0 was introduced many years ago now. Since GNOME was beginning to annoy me, I decided to through caution to the wind and install KDE instead. I am happy to report that Plasma 5 is a much better experience than I remembered from the past. It has a nice clean look, it feels snappy, and it works flawlessly with my work laptop and multi-monitor setup. My only hassle was getting my audio devices setup initially, but now that I have that figured out it has been running great for the entire week.

I also had some issues with KDE running under Wayland on Fedora 34, but switching back to Xorg made all of those issues disappear. I have heard that KDE v5.22 fixes a lot of Wayland-related issues, and I will give that a try once it lands in Fedora. For the foreseeable future, I think I’m going to stick with KDE.

What’s Next?

I’m hoping I can get back to my Ansible playbook for setting up iptables rules, for real this time.