this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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Hello folks. I use many distro from Debian to Fedora to OpenSuse and Arch. I also use many window managers like i3, dwm and qtile. On desktop environment, I use XFCE the most. Currently, I am looking to try something new, hence KDE.

I am looking for something with a beautiful UI and works out of the box. So, something on the same spectrum as XFCE but more pretty.

I tried out the distros with preinstalled KDE: Fedora KDE, Manjaro KDE, Kubuntu.

The good: KDE is beautiful and very easy to use. I actually enjoy using my computer more.

The bad: it crashes.. a lot even when I turn off all the animations. My system is not that slow: AMD 7 Pro with 64 GB of RAM. Some examples:

  • Logging in, KDE hangs for 30 seconds. Even when I finally see the desktop, I would need to wait a further 10 seconds to finally able to interact, i.e. click and open stuff.

  • After resume suspend, system would hang and there is nothing I can do except for a forced reboot.

  • Browsing the web with only 3 tabs opened, KDE also hang.

As much as I hate GNOME, everything just works. I installed the GNOME flavors of above distros and never experience any hiccups.

If KDE works for you, do you use a preinstalled distro and which one? How about if you install KDE from scratch, like Arch?

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[–] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 1 points 19 minutes ago

I've never had those issues with KDE. I use Garuda dr460nized and Mokka. Both are based on Arch and use KDE.

[–] KernelTale@programming.dev 2 points 4 hours ago

KDE is just KDE. It has clear pros and cons. Hopefully one day they will take care of the cons.

[–] pineapple@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 hours ago

Kde works great for me, I don't have any special hardware. I have used it with fedora and bazzite.

[–] 737@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 hours ago

no, if you have qtile set up, it will be a better experience

[–] easily3667@lemmus.org 4 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

I think Linux nerds are clowns who don't understand that not everyone wants to learn what -xvf means just to extract a goddammed file.

Kde is solid and requires zero fuckery in my experience to work well. This is in fedora, suse, arch (endeavour), void.

[–] nafzib@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

KDE just works on my machine, which is lower specs than yours. I've never had it crash. I use Endeavor OS, so it came with it by default (which was part of the reason I chose it).

Edit: I don't do much tweaking of the KDE settings other than the main color scheme. I also have never had an issue with waking from sleep on Endeavor (but I recall in years past that was an issue with most distros I tried and unrelated to KDE since I was less a fan of its style back then and didn't use KDE). My set up is a normal desktop PC that I use daily for everything, including gaming.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 3 points 8 hours ago

I use KDE with Chimera Linux which is only in beta. Rock solid.

[–] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 3 points 8 hours ago

I've been using KDE for over 4 years on over a dozen different machines and 5+ distros and I've never had major problems with crashing.

I do experience small bugs fairly often. Maybe once every month or two, little glitches or odd window behavior. Nothing huge, but they do happen. To be fair, I like to modify and customize KDE quite a bit, so that is probably causing some of my issues.

In my experience, Cinnamon is the most stable DE I've used by far. Least amount of random bugs, simple but stable. I don't think I've ever had Cinnamon crash on me actually.

[–] JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago

Yes, that's what its always done.

[–] nayminlwin@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 hours ago

I used to have hang on suspend resume problem on my Thinkpad E15. It somegot got resolved in later updates. Might be a random firmware problem, that's really hard to track down. So may be it mostly comes down to luck.

[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 0 points 6 hours ago

I use arch and so I get the latest kde releases and sometimes things are buggy. But usually those are fixed next update. But yes, it is beautiful but man it's not as stable as something like gnome

[–] JTskulk@lemmy.world 5 points 13 hours ago

I've never had issues like that on Kubuntu, Debian, or EndeavourOS. KDE is great and I love it.

[–] Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Vanilla Arch is much easier to install than it used to be. Connect to wifi via terminal commands or connect ethernet, enter archinstall and go down the list.

I've only ever had the waking from sleep problem, but it's consistent in other DE's for me. I have a desktop so I just turn that and hibernate off.

I had a known problem with krunner not opening after first run unless you killed the process, but I got rofi and customized it to the teeth instead. Found out that I love rofi. I probably won't go back to krunner even it gets fixed now.

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Arch is much more difficult to install now than it used to be as well. I remember when Arch had an installer.

[–] 737@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

Huh? Interesting, guess I'm out of the loop, since the install guide doesn't mention it I didn't even realize this got added back to the iso. When was that? I should check this out, I really missed the installer all these years, I understand why they did removed it originally, but if you know what you're doing it's just tedious work.

[–] Glifted@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

I have never gotten KDE to work well... but I'm a shitty user running on shitty hardware so grain of salt and all...

[–] IcyToes@sh.itjust.works 1 points 12 hours ago

Most of those issues I do not have. By waking from suspend, do you mean hibernate? A system d update broke that last year in OpenSuse and I'm assuming other distros. I sleep now and it wakes fine.

I've been using Fedora KDE for...months? Maybe a year now? And I've yet to see it hang or crash.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 8 points 20 hours ago

openSUSE has the best integration of KDE, but I wouldn't expect to see issues like yours on any distro, really...

[–] fushuan@lemm.ee 3 points 16 hours ago

I had issues like that about a week ago, when gaming the system was super sluggish. It turns out that an update put the render under CPU instead of GPU, as in, without hardware acceleration, or software based.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 41 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Those aren't normal issues.
It sounds more like a driver or hardware issue which may only pop up in KDE (Wayland) and not in your other WMs (X11).
As a first step, try logging into the KDE (X11) Session and see if it still happens.

[–] jadsel@lemmy.wtf 9 points 23 hours ago

Very much agreed. I ran into some similar issues for a while on KDE Wayland, also with strange freezes--and was concerned that it might be a (fairly new at the time) hardware issue. No, it was evidently some weirdness involving the then-current NVIDIA drivers, which was thankfully fixed not that long after.

If you do have NVIDIA graphics, you'll probably want to make sure it's using the latest drivers from them--and maybe particularly on Wayland. More stable distros do tend to ship older versions.

[–] clmbmb@lemmy.dbzer0.com 43 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Do you have an nvidia GPU? It's the most important thing to know.

[–] Morotsgubbe@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 day ago

Agreed, have had issues with especially older nvidia cards, 840 and 970. Atleast until I switched to prop. Driver

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 5 points 20 hours ago

In my experience, KDE can run just fine, but it is seemingly pickier about drivers and hardware (I've had a loose DisplayPort connection crash it several times) than other desktop environments.

[–] Veraxis@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago

I have been using KDE on Arch across several machines for about 3 years now, then Manjaro for a year before that. At no point have I experienced instability or issues like that. Especially that last one; I'm the sort of person who regularly has 10+ tabs open on laptops with a fraction the amount of RAM that you have.

I would say that is definitely not normal. If that happened to me, I might search online or check journalctl -b -p 3 to see if it yields any clues.

[–] stembolts@programming.dev 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

KDE Manjaro running on 4 or 5 of my machines, pure stability. It sounds like a hardware issue.

Here are my suggestions to diagnose this.

Option 1. Setup an ssh server, connect from a second computer (or phone via Termux), execute $journalctl -fe, and observe the journal from your second device when the crash occurs. That should help pinpoint the issue.

Option 2. If you don't have a second device, use a non-gui tty, access via Ctrl+Alt+F1. (Usually terminals are available F1 thru F6). Once again execute $journalctl -fe and observe it during the crash.

Tbh option 2 may just be easier especially if you have minimal knowledge of ssh. Good luck, ping me back if you find this helpful and would like more perspective, and apologies if this doesn't help you.

If the entire computer crashes, boot into a terminal and browse journalctl history of previous boots, sorry I don't have these commands off the top of my head but if you need them and ask I will get them for you.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 2 points 17 hours ago

journalctl -xb-1 where 1 is last boot, 2 is boot before that, etc.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 day ago

had a couple of crashes when 6 was released, but they were fixed pretty quickly and has been rock solid ever since. Those crashes probably had more to do with my nvidia card than kde itself, tbh

[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

I've had no problems with Plasma on Debian. I think the problem is probably the ubuntu, fedora, etc.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 4 points 17 hours ago

Fedora's KDE is bulletproof on any of my installed systems (8 or 9 of them, completely different hardware including AMD). Now Kubuntu, on the other hand, has always been a shitshow, I've never had it work right for more than a couple days at a time.

[–] Obin@feddit.org 1 points 20 hours ago

I'm using plasma on Gentoo, Arch and Ubuntu with barely any issues, on desktops, work laptop and older Thinkpad, Nvidia and AMD. Since 6.1+ and on wayland even the multi-monitor stuff works as expected.

The only thing I'm still missing on 6.x and wayland is a replacement for khotkey.

[–] AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 3 points 21 hours ago

So far, as a more casual user, using the preconfigured Plasma on MX, I have had only minor grievances that truly effect me and only somehow only broke it maybe 1-2 times.

[–] heythatsprettygood@feddit.uk 4 points 23 hours ago

I've been daily driving Fedora KDE on two different systems (both all AMD, one laptop and one desktop) for nearly half a year and have experienced almost zero crashes or other issues. Maybe it's something to do with your hardware? I do know of some issues with NVIDIA graphics cards on KDE, so that might be a cause.

[–] lattrommi@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago

There is a bug that is open right now which sounds like it might be one you were experiencing or possibly explains part of the issues.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501073

Like the web browsing might have been from middle clicking, which causes a lengthy hang and resuming from suspend and powerdevil are a prime suspect for it.

The login wait might be an issue I vaguely recall about the splash screen and that disabling it removed the startup hang.

I've been exclusively using Manjaro KDE since September of 2021 and the linked issue I started getting a couple months ago and it's gotten bad enough to make me want to start hopping again.

[–] krimson@lemmy.world 4 points 23 hours ago

I gave KDE a serious go again recently but it has some really annoying bugs on multi (3) display systems that affect me but probably not the grand majority of KDE users. Reported the issue, debugged it extensively, pinpointed the exact problem in the bug report and how to reproduce it (found out it also happened on dual screen setups). Then nothing happened. Ticket went quiet and it has been several months now.

I also had plenty of crashes in KDE apps.

I completely get the volunteer basis that KDE builds on, and I am not complaining that my issues do not get fixed. I understand it is being mostly built and maintained by people in their spare time and my issues are probably low priority. But for me personally it is stuff like this that makes KDE unusable as a daily driver.

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 9 points 1 day ago

For what it's worth, I experience none of that. My laptop is absolutely rock solid with KDE, it's like a MacBook you pull it out of your backpack and it's ready to go before I'm even done opening the screen.

My desktop is currently just over 5 days of continuous uptime (no sleep). I've crashed more often because of ZFS than KDE.

Both are ArchLinux. I also have a friend on Bazzite that doesn't have issues with KDE either, and it runs great in my VM.

Those all sound like possible graphics driver issues.

[–] pogodem0n@lemmy.world 2 points 21 hours ago

It is great. I have been using Linux for about three years and majority of that was with KDE Plasma and its Wayland session. Most of that time was with Arch and Fedora and it was all smooth sailing.

It was faster and smoother than GNOME Shell, Cinnamon or any other desktop I have tried.

It may have slightly more bugs compared to GNOME Shell due to sheer amount of features it has.

As others have mentioned, you might have a hardware issue that coincidentally pops up with Plasma.

[–] highduc@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Is KDE actually good or it is overrated?

That's like a trick question 😀
If I say it's good, and that contradicts your own experience with it, you can say "see it's overrated, people say it's good, but in fact I know it sucks."

I use it on Arch but I've seen people using it on Fedora and it looked good and stable.

Did you try to look into it, see what's causing the problems?
In my experience having used Linux and KDE Plasma for about a decade now, if you wanna have a good time you're going to have to figure stuff out, check the logs, troubleshoot, look it up online, etc.
If you expect to go through different distros to find one that "just works" you'll be disappointed, and you'll be wasting your time. Issues can be hardware-specific, maybe you just need to pass a parameter to the kernel, or change a config somewhere or something like that...

[–] corvus@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 day ago

I've been using Debian with KDE Plasma for over a decade and I can count the crashes with the fingers of one hand.

[–] _donnadie_@feddit.cl 1 points 19 hours ago

Plasma 6 started very prone to crashes in my laptop when it released. I like how it works a lot more than Gnome, but Plasma tends to be buggier for me too.

This last month I've been having rendering issues in a lot of software, like Firefox and Okular in Fedora 41 (and now 42). I don't know where they came from as it was pretty much perfect last month.

Sometimes I think I'd prefer to return to xfce in laptop (like I tend to use in desktops) or use labwc.

I use Fedora KDE, and I don't think ive ever seen crashes that bad on my system (AMD CPU and GPU). I used to have a small problem with RADV crashing during video playback, but that solved itself after a few updates.

[–] geoma@lemmy.ml 2 points 23 hours ago

It is great.

[–] the_visitor@sh.itjust.works 1 points 20 hours ago

It has many preloaded features. You will use only a few of them.

[–] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago

I've used it on Endeavour for about a year and on Tumbleweed for eight years before that with no real problems other than plasma-shell occasionally restarting. I have Nvidia and the open drivers.

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