On 07/31/17 12:27, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
Hi all.
For about the mid-nineties to the late aughts, I was a heavy-duty KDE fan. The integration and customization was what I needed, it was good looking and functional.
Then it started getting more bloated and slower, seemingly outpacing the increases in CPU speed and decreases in RAM cost. Or maybe it was just the Kubuntu implementation. But I found that it wasn't working for me. So I experimented for a while. Yech.
I found GNOME to be something of soap opera that required a whole set of sub-choices (GNOME 2? GNOME 3? Mate? Unity? WTF?). My first GNOME experiences (with the default position of icons moved from the sensible bottom to the left) seemed more like an exercise in social engineering (ie, what the devs wanted dumb users to do) rather than any real attempt to make my computer less intrusive in the path to doing Real Stuff.
And then I discovered Linux Mint and its wonderful little Cinnamon desktop. Yeah I know it's gtk based and has big chunks of GNOME in it, but its look-and-feel seems less ... disruptive. It's served me well for much of this decade.
But I still miss KDE. So I've been having another look. I've been reading that prefer the Linux Mint version over Kubuntu, and that it's still big but now much speedier.
I know it's technically possible to have both KDE and Cinnamon physically installed on my Mint desktop. But I've also been reading that the two systems are so different in default ways of doing things that switching between them is an invitation for grief that will bork things. Most of the forum stuff I've read says that it's much cleaner to do a reinstall.
Has anyone else here played with systems that can casually switch between KDE/Qt and GNOME/gtk? Is anyone here using current KDE?
Thanks!
- Evan
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I have been a long time KDE user and am using the latest KDE from Debian stretch. I find it frisky enough for my desktop purposes. My desktop has a four core i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10GHz, which cpuinfo shows as being loaded to 1.77 Mhz. Any complaints I have are more with the applications that run on KDE, most notably video editors such as openshot, kino and Kdenlive. I suspect that any instability is due to memory loss. I only have 8 GB on the system. Sometimes I find that chrome does not allow me switch to a new tab. A shutdown of that instance of chrome plus a restart and reopen of "recently closed" under history lets me continue. Besides that, I have noted that after 1-2 months of continuous operation, KDE may lose "cut and paste" ability from consoles to completely graphical applications. Another problem that rarely occurs is loss of "ALT TAB" for application switching. I treat these occurrences as signal to "apt-get dist upgrade". Things that KDE has learned to right IMHO are managing upgrades without losing audio device configuration or window treatment settings. I used to have to invest time to restore these after some upgrades but this problem seems to have faded. Disclosure: I run XFCE on the family media center (lightweight + 4 second boot to myth + no passwords). I run gnome on my laptop, when kde has a hissy fit with the bumblebee implementation of my video hardware. -- Michael Galea