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

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…

I’ve been using it on two older systems (4-8 y) one without a ssd or graphics card and it works flawlessly. As others suggested maybe you check your graphics drivers. I used to have problem with kde some time ago but since coming back it’s been nothing but smooth sailing.

If KDE works for you, do you use a preinstalled distro and which one?

Has largely worked fine for me on Tumbleweed.

There is/was an issue with launching some of the ‘K’ apps causing the desktop to hard lock. But this happens very rarely.

Haven’t experienced problems like what you’re describing though.

watch grep -e Dirty: -e Writeback: /proc/meminfo

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.

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.

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.

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.

Look at the reddit called “unixporn” and search for Xfce. You ll see what’s possible with Xfce. For me the KDE crashes are a dealbreaker. My Xfce setup is so simplified, that nothing can be ugly. I use Bspwm for the windows and stripped down Xfce panel (dont touch third party status bars, such as polybar, its waste of time if you already have Xfce). No menu such as Whisker menu, but Rofi instead. I got Xfce stability without the old looking.

I don't like it, too much desk space wasted on useless crapola. I use Mate, a nice clean desktop with a simple pull-down menu leaving the majority of the space free for work.

I use it daily and it occasionally may crap out, but it may happen maybe once every few weeks. Can’t comment about GPU and the likes as I only have an Intel iGPU which works just fine.

Give Cinnamon/Budgie a shot, (I recommend in a vm and see which one you like)both are based on gnome(cinnamon personally its like a combination between gnome 3 ane xfce).
I have the same experience with kde personally(Like it crashes sometimes,looks dated,etc it didnt crash that badly for me), and I decided to desktop hop to Cinnamon.

Yes I have Nvidia

I have non of the issue on my Starlite (Kubuntu)

My PC with the newest Arch Linux seems to have sometimes issues with sleep and freezing on waking up. (Intel CPU + AMD GPU)

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.

Well, before wayland I always used fluxbox (eventually with picom compositor, which previously was compton). Then now on wayland I’m using sway with fuzzel, yambar and others.

I’ve always felt both gnome and kde, as well as most other DEs really bloated. Gnome used to be more stable on wayland, and as of Today with better support for nvidia AFAIK, but KDE is quickly catching up.

Not sure why the hate on gnome (and I guess on GTK as well). It doesn’t offer all the customization by default, but you can get it through extensions while available. But on KDE one really needs to see a pletora of dependencies each time one adds a simple module or application. Both are improving gradually to become less intense on resources being KDE more advanced on that.

But hey, both are bloated compared to non full DE compositors such as sway or labwc. BTW I use sway with tabbed mode (not actually tiling) and some tweaks, and I prefer that over stacking compositors, but if wanting one labwc is pretty cool.

On X11 there’s a huge amount of window managers plus compositors plus several other applications which altogether can give a similar sense to a DE but way less intense on resources, and for sure way less bloated. To me DEs are overrated to answer your title, but perhaps that’s just me, :)

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.

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.

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.

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

It is great.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Yes, that’s what its always done.

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

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

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

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

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

In my experience KDE on OpenSuse and probably Fedora are rock solid. The first and nowadays probably also the second (which has moved to first tier instead of being a sub-distribution) are considered reference implementations of industry strength distros.

My thought would be that you’ve added something slightly broken to the mix which breaks KDE. It can happen. Linux is complicated, KDE is also complicated, what annoys one desktop can be ok with another. If you want to figure out what the problem is, you’ll have to go through your various system logs to see what fails.

Sounds familiar. I have tried it with many distros and it just isn’t usable. Gave up and ended up liking cinnamon more anyway.

You say KDE hangs, but what component hangs actually? It it plasmashell (other apps work but panel is dead?)? Kwin (windows move/respond to input?)? KDE apps?

I would suggest you to install a distro with kde (fedora KDE edition or open SUSE, not neon) if you’re not confident with administration. Use something like Kinoite for accidental breakage protection, or if you want to keep /home as is, install fedora 42 inplace (the new installer).

Not only my experience but also that of many KDE devs say that fedora KDE is probably the best mainline KDE experience (ignoring niche distros or customized KDE).

Also, don’t use xorg session. Always log in to default wayland session unless you have incompatible usecase (in that case you know what you’re doing).

Xfce user, here to represent!

I love it and haven’t had any trouble. Try it out!