I’ve always been a Gnome fanboy and couldn’t imagine using something else.

I’ve dabbled into KDE every few months (by rebasing from Silverblue to Kinoite for example) and I’ve always switched back after a few weeks.

I always wished I liked KDE, because it’s more powerful, but there always were show stoppers. Inconsistencies, bugs and crashes, too many options, cluttered UI, and more. My main argument to dislike it was that KDE tried to do everything all at once, but fails everywhere because nothing is polished and only 90% there.

Gnome on the other hand was simple and just worked, because every feature has been worked on thoroughly and integrated perfectly.
Still, there are just a few things I dislike on Gnome, especially the core problem of “sleeping” devs who decide against implementing stuff like fractional scaling or a good app tray.
The lack of modularity in Nautilus is also hugely annoying, especially when working with RAW pictures, where you don’t see a picture. I had to install a photo viewer that is basically a second file manager just because of that. Dolphin does that out of the box.

Still, Gnome felt like the lesser evil for me.

This has changed now!

I rebased to the newest F40 beta (including KDE 6) and WOW!

Everything feels so polished and reworked. I have the feeling, on Plasma 5 were a lot of innovations and new features, but they were just thrown into the room incoherently.
Now, those have been reorganized and finished.

  • The design language is almost the same, but cleaned up and less cluttered,
  • I don’t feel the need to change my themes, only the accent colour and the GTK theme. Breeze looks very mature and good now.
  • The gestures are pretty much on par with Gnome, which means A LOT.
  • It works pretty reliable, even though it’s a beta and I will report bugs if I can.
  • Future stability should also be better now, due to the bundles release schedule like on Gnome. Devs had a hard time with that in the past, and I think many bugs were caused by that. Now, Plasma might ship as the default DE for some distros.
  • The settings are way more legible now and everything is easier to find.
  • I also liked KRunner more than Gnome’s search and Dolphin is way better/ capable anyway.
  • And much more!

To the developers, you did a fucking great job! Keep going!
KDE feels SO professional now and finally reached its potential in my eyes. The last days have been very pleasant and I can’t wait to rebase my devices to the stable release in 1-2 months!

  • sturgax@sh.itjust.works
    12·
    9 months ago

    I moved away from plasma a few years back. I can’t remember the reason(s) why. I think it was I just wanted to use a tiling wm. Either way, I decided to pop on the unstable NixOS channel and give plasma6 a go. I ain’t going back to no damn tiling shenanigans.

    What the plasma team did here is what, I think, a lot of people have been waiting for. It feels very polished and refreshed. I’m so damn impressed by it.

    Either way, I agree:

    Developers: You did something amazing here.

  • const_void@lemmy.ml
    91·
    9 months ago

    Everything feels so polished and reworked.

    Strange that you say this because not much changed in this release. It’s mainly an update to Qt6. No big UI or UX. What specifically feels different from Plasma 5?

  • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
    7·
    9 months ago
    • The gestures are pretty much on par with Gnome, which means A LOT.

    Are the gestures (I’m assuming trackpad gestures) finally customisable now?

    • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.deOP
      6·
      9 months ago

      Sadly, they still aren’t, but at least, the overview and grid view are now combined, just like on Gnome.
      Before, they were decoupled and unintuitive, and now, they got a rework.

      • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.deOP
        2·
        9 months ago

        I’m not missing anything, they are great. I always found the separation of desktop oberview and window overview a bit weird, and now, with the newest release, they got merged as one thing with one coherent trackpad gesture, which I love.

        • Dennis@lemmy.kde.social
          1·
          9 months ago

          Me too. Plasma 6 feels pretty complete and intuitive to me. But I’m very curious what d3Xt3r is missing that he wants to add/reconfigure it manually. ;-)

          • carzian@lemmy.ml
            2·
            9 months ago

            The main gestures I’m waiting for are two finger left/right swipe to go forward/back

              • carzian@lemmy.ml
                1·
                9 months ago

                I’m not too familiar with the gesture stack, would it be possible to have a small app that just listens for that gesture and emulates a back/forward mouse click?

                • Zamundaaa@discuss.tchncs.de
                  2·
                  9 months ago

                  There is no gesture, only horizontal scroll. The app has to scroll when there is content to scroll, and interpret the horizontal scroll as a gesture thing when you can’t scroll anymore. Firefox has that implemented, and every app that wants this to work needs to implement it for itself.

              • Dennis@lemmy.kde.social
                1·
                9 months ago

                I didn’t know that it’s an option on Firefox, but I’m not wondering that it’s disabled by default as it would conflict with horizontal scrolling. 😉

  • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml
    3·
    9 months ago

    Oh dear, does this mean KDE6 has lost the characteristic Windowsy feel that I switched over from GNOME for?

    • ProtonBadger
      7·
      9 months ago

      Wait I though it was Windows that had a KDEy feel? Anyway it shouldn’t matter whether UI’s have some common features if they’re good, only whether we like one regardless. You enjoy GNOME, great, that’s a very slick desktop too.

      Plasma has a lot of things that puts it above Windows in my book.

    • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.deOP
      3·
      9 months ago

      It still has the same vibes and is the same KDE we love or hate, just better.

      It definitely feels way more polished and now has some MacOS vibes to be fair.
      Not as minimalist as Gnome, but the insane amount of features got “hidden” a bit user friendlier. I think that if you apply some icon themes and a top bar + dock, it will be indistinguishable from MacOS for many casual users.

  • greencactus@lemmy.world
    2·
    6 months ago

    Thank you - I’ll try it out again. I had exactly the same feeling about KDE5 - too fractured, too inconsistent, too many weird options. GNOME just was more polished in that regard. But your post makes me hopeful that KDE 6 fixes these things :)

    Overall I’m just happy that Linux has multiple competing DEs which often inspire each other and give great new design ideas. As long as we have GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, Budgie, Pantheon etc., I will be happy. I have learned lots of things in regards to my design preferences (and about quality of design in general), and I’m glad knowing that I can switch DEs anytime. RIP for Windows/Mac users who don’t have thus luxury.

  • mFat@lemdro.id
    1·
    9 months ago

    Plasma has been mature, complete and smooth for ages. IMO it only lacks a more professional, enterprise look and feel. The icons are too colorful and childish and font smoothing is slightly worse than gnome.