Shoutout to the work done on Fedora KDE over the past year

The Water Cooler
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Not long after I started exploring different operating systems (because Windows 11 was so painfully slow on what I thought should still be a modern PC), I was attracted to the beautiful + professional interface of KDE Plasma - it just felt like a comfortable and pleasant place to spend time in while using my PC.

I was coming from Fedora Workstation, so I first tried to install the Fedora KDE Spin - which left me with an unbootable system. Kubuntu installed nicely, though, and I then shifted over to openSUSE Tumbleweed to get more up-to-date KDE software.

While the interface was wonderful, in practical usage, the number of papercuts seemed to keep building. I have Nvidia graphics cards in both of my regular devices (AMD/Nvidia hybrid laptop, Nvidia-only desktop/server), which no doubt led to some additional struggles, but the number of interface glitches, shell crashes and performance gaps seemed to add up to a frustrating experience overall. I’ve ended up using Ubuntu Desktop for the past 9 months or so, and it’s been solid overall.

While working on a relative’s PC, I ended up with an extra SSD leftover and, rather than returning it, installed it in my laptop so I could try out actual installed OSes on “bare metal” without any disruption to daily work. After seeing interviews with and posts by Nate Graham and @ngompa, I thought I’d give Fedora 40 KDE Spin a try again…

It is legitimately amazing the amount of progress that the KDE community, and the Fedora KDE SIG, have made with almost entirely volunteered development time over the past year. Of all the papercuts that I recalled from using Plasma 5 on openSUSE before, I haven’t been able to reproduce any over the past couple days of using Fedora 40 KDE heavily. The routine actions that made plasmashell crash last year don’t seem to cause any trouble now, everything in the interface just feels “smoother” somehow, and graphical performance under KWin+Wayland matches exactly what I saw using Mutter+Wayland on GNOME. I know there will always be some bugs, but the impact of taking care of so many prior issues is hard to quantify but easy to “feel”.

I’m sure things will get even better graphics-wise with the coming improvements to the Nvidia drivers, but it feels like someone (i.e. the KDE + Fedora communities) took the beautiful environment I remembered, and removed a ton of obstacles to navigating through it.

tl;dr Thank you to all the folks who come together to make life that much easier/faster/better for strangers across the world!

5 Likes
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It is a bit funny that we can have opposite experiences just because of different hardware combinations. I came to Fedora from Debian and Ubuntu because my all Intel low-end computers either could not even boot into the GUI or crashed while setting up the printer. Since then I have always found hardware support in Fedora (regardless the DE) much better than Ubuntu. Debian is like pedaling your bycicle.

I agree on KDE and Fedora KDE “spin” progress.

I am still kept away by the Kontact suite I really dislike. Honestly I don’t get why KDE project still maintains that and why it is included by distributions. Strangely, stuff like Kmail is NOT included by default either in Kubuntu or Neon.

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Thank you for your comment! We have put quite alot of work in plasma 6, and this is really appreciated!

@lendenu As far as your question about Kontact, have you tried to replace it with Merkuro? It’s a new software released by KDE last year that I believe (…may? …will? Who knows, honestly) replace Kontact just as it has replaced Kalendar.

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I will try that.

Problem is Fedora ships some sort of “vanilla” KDE so I would have to uninstall - install lots of things.

I got a bit discouraged so I did not feel like experimenting, maybe installing Plasma from a “core” Fedora or from “Everything”.

I really believe the whole “linux ecosytem” needs something else than Gnome on the same level of polish (at least). I have written it several times already but we need a big player to chose KDE as primary desktop like Gnome for Fedora.

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When I had problems with Kontact some months ago I wrote about them in the KDE forum. Nate Graham (KDE) joined the discussion and he expects Kontact to disappear in the near future cause it is getting less and less attention.
I then switched to Thunderbird, managed to transfer all my mails in a POP account from almost 20 years and I am happy. Thunderbird works great, it has changed a lot over time since I used it.
I have never heard about Merkuro, will have a look at it, who knows, maybe it is Kontact Vs.2.

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I do have max respect for the people who spent time on the Kontact suite.
I don’t know how to write this without being harsh…
My opinion is the whole KDE is like over-engineered and the PIM software is among the things that suffer the most because of it.
I know we can look at the over-engineering as the best selling point for KDE because there are so many options and that is a very sharp contrast with Gnome.
But it seems to me that above some level it becomes counter-productive.
Maybe I am just being old, because I still believe software should be optimized somehow in a world where hardware is cheap.

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Maybe by refraining from writing it. It is not really related to the topic at hand. Which was a shout out to the very people you are now … disparaging. Please stop this behaviour.