Developer Nate Graham has highlighted more recent work for the KDE Plasma desktop environment (the one the Steam Deck will come with) and it's all sounding great.
Continuing their effort to prevent breakage, just like stopping the Discover software centre removing your desktop, Discover now cannot uninstall itself. That's right, previously Discover was able to end up removing itself from your desktop! Now though, it won't as there's new checks in place.
Discover is also seeing something of a UI overhaul now too for application pages. So when you click on something in Discover you're interested in installing, you'll now get clearer information on each app like the size and version information.
It's really nice to see so much effort being put into Discover, since that is the way users are supposed to find and install apps on Plasma. Even more fixes came in like it no longer crashing when you install or uninstall more than one Flatpak app at once, showing the correct size for "very very large" packages, a better screenshot pop-up for applications when you're viewing their page and the list goes on.
Wayland improvements continued apace too like Kate (the text editor) no longer flashes when you hit Ctrl+S to save your changes and dragging-and-dropping various things to XWayland apps no longer sometimes makes them stop accepting clicks until the system is restarted.
Dolphin (the file manager) improvements coming along too like it no longer crashing if you cancel an archiving job in the middle that was initiated from one of Dolphin’s context menu "Compress" items. The list goes on, as Graham mentions the blog posts only scratch the surface of the working going into KDE Plasma.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: JarmerI'm surprised the Steamdeck team chose KDE for the DE, and not something simpler and less resource heavy like XFCE. Being that it's a battery powered device (sometimes) I would think they'd want to squeeze every single compute cycle they could and isn't KDE the heaviest DE out there?
I used both on the same system:
XFCE on Manjaro: ~700-800 MB RAM
KDE on OpenSuse (TW): ~1 - 1.1 GB RAM
Pretty comparable, I'd say. As much as I prefer the simpler XFCE, KDE does have more modern features and support.
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Quoting: Guestfirst impression here is more important that slight better performance.
^^^This soooooo much!!!!^^^
If the first batch don't nail it in one hit with the users/press the steam deck will fall flat on it's arse ! Irrelevant of what distro/DE/ or whatever they use. How good it becomes at a later date will not matter.
This is where I feel proton could be the achilles heal if Valve are not completely on it!
I am hoping that game devs at least do native ports targeted/optimized at the deck as if it works on the deck it's a safe bet that other distros/hardware will work fine too.
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no_information_here Feb 7, 2022
Quoting: areamanplaysgameI keep giving KDE another chance every few months, but it's just never been a good experience for me. I love a lot of the KDE ecosystem, but for some reason basic stuff that just works in GNOME, like pairing a Bluetooth gamepad or, like, playing audio in Firefox, does not work in KDE on the same machine for no reason I can easily discern. And then, when I go back to GNOME, I have to spend extra time fixing the stuff KDE broke that it shouldn't have been able to break.
As mentioned above, you cannot judge KDE if you installed it over top of a default Gnome setup. This is true the other way around, too.
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slaapliedje Feb 8, 2022
Quoting: CatKillerQuoting: Mountain ManKDE for some reason has the reputation of being a "bloated" desktop environment
KDE 4 had the same problem as early Gnome 3: it had bugs that affected performance, which led people to assume that it was too heavy for their machine, and it's got lots of options so it must be heavy, right? They fixed the bugs and KDE 5 is an entirely different beast to KDE 4, but once you've decided that something's a particular (and unappealing) way, it's very unusual for anyone to check it again.
Yeah, Gnome 3 and KDE 4 both were very much "We're not ready yet!" for the first few point releases, but distributions packaged and shipped them anyway...
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slaapliedje Feb 8, 2022
Quoting: no_information_hereThey both do things to various settings, like mime types for programs. Though KDE seems to be a little worse at 'oh, you loaded me last, I'm changing your settings!' than Gnome does. Example of this is Okular, log into KDE, open something that opens Okular. Log out, log into Gnome, your default PDF viewer will now be Okular. If you change it to Evince in Gnome, going back to KDE will still want Okular.Quoting: areamanplaysgameI keep giving KDE another chance every few months, but it's just never been a good experience for me. I love a lot of the KDE ecosystem, but for some reason basic stuff that just works in GNOME, like pairing a Bluetooth gamepad or, like, playing audio in Firefox, does not work in KDE on the same machine for no reason I can easily discern. And then, when I go back to GNOME, I have to spend extra time fixing the stuff KDE broke that it shouldn't have been able to break.
As mentioned above, you cannot judge KDE if you installed it over top of a default Gnome setup. This is true the other way around, too.
(Please note that example of Okular may be the incorrect one, but it's something similar to that).
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Quoting: slaapliedjeWellll, not all distributions. That's about when Mint got going with Cinnamon and Mate, I think in good part because Clem thought Gnome 3 sucked.Quoting: CatKillerQuoting: Mountain ManKDE for some reason has the reputation of being a "bloated" desktop environment
KDE 4 had the same problem as early Gnome 3: it had bugs that affected performance, which led people to assume that it was too heavy for their machine, and it's got lots of options so it must be heavy, right? They fixed the bugs and KDE 5 is an entirely different beast to KDE 4, but once you've decided that something's a particular (and unappealing) way, it's very unusual for anyone to check it again.
Yeah, Gnome 3 and KDE 4 both were very much "We're not ready yet!" for the first few point releases, but distributions packaged and shipped them anyway...
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slaapliedje Feb 9, 2022
Quoting: Purple Library GuyHa, Mint literally spawned from Gnome 3's creation. It didn't exist for it to be there to make the decision too early to upgrade to Gnome shell. Of course that still left us with the split of Mate and Cinnamon (I can never remember which decided they wanted Gnome 2, but with GTK2 and one wanted GTK3). But aren't they both now based on GTK3/4?Quoting: slaapliedjeWellll, not all distributions. That's about when Mint got going with Cinnamon and Mate, I think in good part because Clem thought Gnome 3 sucked.Quoting: CatKillerQuoting: Mountain ManKDE for some reason has the reputation of being a "bloated" desktop environment
KDE 4 had the same problem as early Gnome 3: it had bugs that affected performance, which led people to assume that it was too heavy for their machine, and it's got lots of options so it must be heavy, right? They fixed the bugs and KDE 5 is an entirely different beast to KDE 4, but once you've decided that something's a particular (and unappealing) way, it's very unusual for anyone to check it again.
Yeah, Gnome 3 and KDE 4 both were very much "We're not ready yet!" for the first few point releases, but distributions packaged and shipped them anyway...
We should really be all VERY thankful for the Gnome developers! Without them we wouldn't have Mint Linux, Mate, Cinnamon, Budgie, etc. Like seriously, how many DEs were created because people hated Gnome Shell!
Last edited by slaapliedje on 9 February 2022 at 3:59 am UTC
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areamanplaysgame Feb 13, 2022
Quoting: no_information_hereQuoting: areamanplaysgameI keep giving KDE another chance every few months, but it's just never been a good experience for me. I love a lot of the KDE ecosystem, but for some reason basic stuff that just works in GNOME, like pairing a Bluetooth gamepad or, like, playing audio in Firefox, does not work in KDE on the same machine for no reason I can easily discern. And then, when I go back to GNOME, I have to spend extra time fixing the stuff KDE broke that it shouldn't have been able to break.
As mentioned above, you cannot judge KDE if you installed it over top of a default Gnome setup. This is true the other way around, too.
If it can't perform in that kind of setup, then why is installing more than one DE an option? I have literally never once anywhere seen anyone discourage doing this before.
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areamanplaysgame Feb 13, 2022
Quoting: GuestNot linux user will
1. switch to windows
This might be true for a PC gamer who builds PCs, etc. The average console gamer, and even a less experienced PC gamer, is unlikely to install a new OS. The overwhelming majority of PC users never do.
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Quoting: areamanplaysgameMany don't know what an OS is.Quoting: GuestNot linux user will
1. switch to windows
This might be true for a PC gamer who builds PCs, etc. The average console gamer, and even a less experienced PC gamer, is unlikely to install a new OS. The overwhelming majority of PC users never do.
1 Likes, Who?
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