Given, you are talking about the OS UI Plasma... It's very customizable. You can make it look like whatever you want... Like MacOs, like Windows 10, 11, etc....
that's amazing that it's still usable today after 14 years, gives me hope that I can keep my t430 running until a similarly good device appears on the market
It's not my main machine but it is my only laptop, and sticking an extra 8gb of ram and an ssd in it was all it needed to become very responsive even for modern software. Unless you're playing video games or doing some heavyweight media editing projects, those older CPUs and GPUs can cope better than one might expect
Eyy a fellow t420 user in the wild! There is the rare game that can be played on it, I once survived off of Minecraft and holocure when my desktop's motherboard decided "no" and it was my only machine until I could get a replacement
sure. idk about "the most", i haven't seen it do anything that other DMs can't do with some tinkering. hell just installing cairo-dock yields a very similar ui experience imo.
usable
i can't agree, my experience is things not staying where i put them, random crashes, layout and themes not "sticking" between logins, and occasionally the entire session crashing - all this from a fresh install on an untinkered-with system, and it's been a consistent experience through the years. maybe you're luckier than i am?
best applications
i never met an application i wanted to run that i couldn't because i had the wrong DE. what are you talking about?
integrated intel graphics, actually. some people are poor you know. though back in the day when i had a 390 it failed to impress then as well. what a weird association to make.
Honestly, I'm using Cinnamon, it has all the stability and practicality of old style gnome with the eyecandy of KDE. However I also use MATE and XFCE if I wanna be frugal on resources.
nice assumption. i'm a brokeass who typically runs hand-me-down hardware, stable all day.
also that copyright license is hilarious, you know it's the neckbeard equivalent of posting "i do not consent to my data being collected" as your fb status right? or are you going to take a giant company to court for copying your nerd insult from lemmy?
Hard disagree. My desktop is as stable as it's pretty and I find it really good that both me and a friend of mine that uses KDE have very different workflows that KDE is able to adapt to. I am quite the fanboy of KDE tbh. It never failed me and is s dream to use everytime I turn on my PC
see i hear things like this but when i install it's basically the same resource-hungry unstable mess as it was the first time i checked it out over a decade ago. i figured maybe it's me and tried some distros that come with it preinstalled and it's not any different. are you running a supercomputer or what?
I always hear about people saying KDE breaks too easily. I've literally used it for years and I've never had serious issues outside of the Plasma 6 Beta for obv reasons. Like what are y'all doing to your DE?
Being on a rolling release I get a similar feeling, it just works and any noticeable bugs gets fixed pretty shortly
even upgrading to KDE 6 was hilariously smooth, almost scary
I think most issues with KDE are from fixed point release distros which just don't bother with backporting minor bug fixes
Man, I don't understand this sentiment at all. I don't know what would be different from my setups, but KDE has always been rock solid for me. Back when I used it on Mandrake Linux and today.
KDE on Arch + Nvidia Wayland was a buggy experience for me a few months ago. But honestly, even X11 on Intel integrated graphics gets a few buggy releases every couple months.
I had KDE on Arch with Nvidia Wayland going pretty well on Lenovo ThinkPad with a 4070 in an eGPU, until an update borked it. The only thing I couldn't figure out was hot plugging my laptop dock, and not having the integrated Intel pick up in absence of the eGPU. But taking Nvidia out of the equation resolved all that. I then picked up a Radeon 6650, and I can't even get the stupid thing to fire off at all.
I think I'll be better served just building a dedicated rig for my multi monitor desk setup.
it's something I've been pointing out for almost half a decade now, the main problem with KDE isn't any of the bugs, it's the lack of vision of what the project wants to be
it ends up being a mix of windows with now GNOME's design due to it never being able to say no when people want "more features and more preferences"
it's been the same buggy mess for as long as i've been using linux, always with the promise that the next update will take it from "neat tech demo" to "suitable permenant DE", i'm just really confused why it's the hot shit right now because my experience with the current release was literally identical to the first time i tried it way, way back on maverick meerkat. if i didn't know any better i'd say they changed the version number and nothing else.
Does that mean you're on Kubuntu? Which would mean you haven't even tried Plasma 6 yet right?
Honestly Plasma is moving so fast it feels like the experience would unironically be better on something like Arch or Fedora where you get new updates almost instantaneously. Anyway, I'm on Fedora and Plasma is pretty stable for me, especially since Plasma 6. Some minor annoyances I encountered are also getting fixed in 6.1.
it's a project with a cohesive idea of what it wants to build, to a certain extent they are perfectly right to stand with "their way or the highway"
this isn't an apple thing, it's just that in the operating system market there isn't any other example of someone having a defined idea of what they want to build
KDE tries to be all of those things, but trying to cast too wide of a net just gets you a mess of settings and unfortunately buggy experience overall
small edit: I have a ton of respect for the KDE devs, I just realized I've been sounding too negative about them, I just don't like the end product
