Why Isn't KDE the Default?

[Music] on paper at least KD plasma is the best desktop environment out there it has the most flexibility when it comes to look feel and functionality it has a ton of options and most people would probably argue that it has too many options but it really does allow a lot of flexibility when it comes to how it looks but if you look across the distro landscape what you're going to find is that most distributions don't use plasma as their primary desktop environment now sure most of them do offer an option with plasma but most of them have gnome as their primary desktop environment so the question I have to ask today is why is in plasma when it is so theoretically Superior to everything else not used more often when it comes to primary default use on distros before we jump in if you'd leave a thumbs up on this video I'd really appreciate it it really does help the channel so why is plasma not used more often well that question can be answered and that's what we're going to talk about today so this right here is my plasma desktop I've been using plasma off and on now ever since I started using open Souza almost a month ago and I keep coming back to it because I want want plasma to be good so I've talked about plasma and my experiences with it several times on the channel before but most of my experiences I've kind of boiled down to me just having bad luck when it comes to plasma there are certain things that just always happen on plasma for me usually it has to do with monitors not going to sleep and I've talked about that ad nauseum on YouTube and on Mastodon and even on Twitter back when it was still a thing so usually my poor reaction to plasma can be boiled down to the fact that I have bad luck with plasma I don't ever think that it's that plasma itself is actually bad so to answer the question why isn't it more popular we have to dig a little bit deeper a little bit beyond my experiences with with it so let's first talk about why I think it should be more popular and that all lies in this little baby right here this is the plasma system set settings panel now inside of this gem you're going to find a ton of flexibility over basically every corner of your desktop environment you can change how it looks how it feels how it functions basically Anything You Can Dream up you can find inside of this plasma settings panel and you can change it and tweak it and even if you can't find it inside of this application there's a good chance you can go to something like get new Global themes and find yourself a new theme or find yourself a new kwin script or whatever you know there are a ton of these extraneous panels littered throughout the settings panel where you can add things to your system from the KD store and there are hundreds upon hundreds of options that you can add to it and that is even beyond the hundreds and hundreds of options that are already built in so the reason why I think plasma should be more popular is because it offers distro maintainers a ton of flexibility if you want to change your theme it's much easier to do it in plasma than it is to do so in Gnome in Gnome you have to literally hack the system in order to theme it it's not meant to be themed at all plasma is on the other end of the spectrum it's way easier to theme you can theme everything here whether you want to do a overall Global theme or you want to change your plasma style or just individual colors or you want to change the window decorations or the fonts or the icons the cursors or whatever you can change everything down to the most minute detail so when I say plasma should be more popular the reason why I say so is because it gives distrainers a ton of options when it comes to setting up their default look and feel we know that distros want this power we know that they do all you have to do is look at Ubuntu Ubuntu does not use the standard genome layout they have done a lot of work in order to make genome look and feel like Ubuntu and it would be much easier to get that look and feel on KDE plasma than it is on ganome because on gnome you have to install a ton of extensions you have to build in the ability to theme in some fashion whether that's using gnum tweaks or some other hack in order to actually get your theme to work you have to do all of these things whereas all of that functionality is built into plasma so that functionality is something that distro maintainers definitely want so why don't they use it well the answer to that question and the answer to the question of the day is that there are actually many reasons why KD plasma isn't more popular but there are two or three main ones so the first one and this is one I've talked about before is that KDE is definitely not the most stable of desktop environments it's sad to say but it's not as stable as gnome it just is not because of all the features and stuff that they have built in that has brought in more bugs than what you see on genome it doesn't mean that gnome is perfect okay we're not gonna toot their own horn too much but it is more stable than plasma right out the gate that's one of the reasons why but I don't think that it's the biggest reason why because distros could maintain a older version of plasma they just could use the LTS version or whatever and that'd be very stable and honestly to tell you the truth I have been using Plasma on this machine since I started using open Souza off and on I've been using quinoa over on my standing desk for months ever since George Castro pointed me towards the you blue stuff I've been using quinoa over there it's a rebased version of silver blue and it that KDE over there has been phenomenally stable it's been so stable it's been the best KD experience I have ever had it's been so good so stability while is a reason why it's not the reason why the thing about desktop environments and distros in general is that when you have a distro you want it to be as approachable as possible you want a brand new Linux user to be able to come in and use your desktop environment slash distro and not have a ton of support questions you don't want to have them look at something and think oh my goodness I'm so lost how am I supposed to do this this this and this right everyone wants to be able to turn their computer on for the first time even if you're just learning a new operating system and you want to be able to use it you want to be able to in general know exactly how to do everything you need to do now obviously I don't think that this is the right way of going about things I think that if you're going to learn to use Linux you should learn to use Linux and you should expect to learn new things but most new users when they want to switch to Linux they want to have a very simple experience it doesn't mean that they don't want to learn new things it's just that they don't want to be overwhelmed with a ton of options now that is the biggest problem when it comes to KDE they have too many options now for the KDE lovers out there all the options make KDE KDE it makes it The Lovable desktop environment that we want to use but for new users who take a look at this and they open up the settings panel and all they want to do is change the font you know this is going to be very overwhelming for them all of these functions and features and little doodads and stuff that you can change just adds on to their confusion and their inability to see past the idea that this is a desktop environment just like everything else it just offers you all the power for most people who are just coming into Linux they don't want to to have to go spelunking into a settings panel to make one little change they don't want to have to scroll all the way down to change their display resolution when it should probably be towards the top now I understand as someone who loves to tweak and theme and all that stuff the appearance is awesome to be at the top but I don't think it's the most important setting that they should have right it's not the most important setting it's just not okay the most important settings are going to be for your network it's going to be for your input devices and your display those three things are the things that most people are going to want to see when they first open up a settings panel but they're at the bottom for whatever reason they've decided to put those three most important settings down here at the bottom now it doesn't mean that if you I mean really all you had to do is scroll down of course so it's not that hard and they've properly labeled them and you can search if you wanted to search so you can find them it's not that hard but it still feels like they've buried the lead when you come to this page here they do a fairly good job of having stuff on the quick settings page here so they do have display configuration but network network configuration is not there also the display configuration is just one little button again they've prioritized the look and feel over things that you probably want to actually see if you're coming here most people I know it sounds weird if you're if you're someone like me who likes to theme you can tell I like to theme my desktop environment this is this is Grove box I've spent quite some time making it look really nice but most people aren't like me you're right most people aren't interested in how their desktop environment really looks now I'm sure they want to choose between light and dark fine making that to open Center but they don't care about anything else right away eventually they'll get there maybe but really when they open up a settings panel they want to see you know the display options they want to see input or they want to see the network connectivity settings right they don't need all the other frivolous stuff until they've decided that they need them so the biggest hurdle KDE plasma has when it comes to adoption is the amount of features that they actually have the thing that makes KDE plasma special is also the thing that holds it back the most District maintainers don't want to have to support this many features and while I know what you're saying Matt they don't have to support them they can always Point people towards the Upstream support they can you know go to the KD forms or whatever but when you have a problem with Ubuntu you don't go to The Gnome guys for support you go to Ubuntu okay you go to the azkaboon 2 or the Ubuntu discourse or whatever it's called these days you know you you go there and you ask for help and you probably will get it but when you have a system here that has so many potential failure points so many potential confusion points you're going to discover that your users end up needing support more often the more support they need the more support you have to give or at least the more support that is expected that you have to give and District maintainers don't want to have to take on that burden because it would be a burden it would cause them to spend time and effort on explaining how things are supposed to work now I don't think that it would be as bad as this argument often makes it seem so this argument has been around for a very long time and it's one of the reasons why KDE has basically never been a primary desktop environment for many disk shows now back in the day like like I'm talking about back in like two early the early 2000s it used to be pretty normal to get a distribution that had both gnome and Katie installer on it out of the box that's that's the way Souza was back in 2003 when I first tried it it had both gnome and KD on it for you to try these days you don't see that anymore because first of all having both of them installed side by side not that great of an idea you're gonna have a lot of duplicates and stuff like that but beyond that fact most distros have chosen to go they with a simpler option simply because it means less work for them in terms of support and maintenance and all of this stuff it just KD has become too feature full and it sounds horrible to say because features are the reason why KDE has become KDE over the years it's one of the reasons why people like Katie so much is one of the reasons why I like Katie so much it gives you all of the options that you want and you can basically change anything it's what makes it so good but it also prevents it from being user friendly and user friendliness is one of the things that District maintainers really look for when it comes to a default desktop environment it's just the plain facts now if we're going to look at all of this cynically there is another reason why plasma hasn't become more popular when it comes to being the default on distributions now I I say cynically because genome is more locked down than plasma is I don't think that anybody can argue that genome is not as customizable it has one basically one way of using it without extending it to high heaven and it's just either you'll like it or you don't right now Ubuntu has done a lot of work to make it as customizable as possible but even their version of gnome still is locked down you can't go install your own theme without doing some extra work you can't change the icons without doing some extra work and when I say extra work basically what I mean is hacking it because the options to change those things are hacks and not meant to be officially supported even by a distro maintainer so if we're looking at it cynically the lack of options and the lack of customizability when it comes to gnome is a benefit for district maintainers because it allows them to have more control over the look and feel and it means that users can't make changes which they would then expect the distro maintainer to support So if you for example decided to go into Ubuntu you're using the gnome version which is the main version and you decide to install gnome tweaks and you install a theme from some random GitHub repository and it breaks your system chances are you're not going to go to that random GitHub repository for support you're probably going to hike it on over to the Ubuntu forums and ask for support there by having it as locked down as possible it means that those tweaks probably aren't something that most people especially new users are going to actually go out and do and that means that that support is not going to be something that they have to focus on very much on their forums which is going to save them time and effort so if we're going to look at it cynically the more closed nature of gnome is a benefit for many distro maintainers simply because it allows them to have the control instead of the user when the user has all the control like they do in plasma it off it causes more confusion I would say also more support opportunities I would say so you can look at it cynically like that as well as the reason why KD plasma hasn't become more popular when it comes to Linux distros so overall the argument here is that when District maintainers are choosing their desktop environments they're probably choosing it for the most user-friendly most widely user-friendly opportunities as they can so they want something that most new users are going to be comfortable with and for whatever reason they've chosen you know now see I am an anti genome guy I don't like gnome at all despite what they other people might say about me I'm not a gnome guy now I understand you know much more than I used to I I understand the workflow a little bit better because I have actually used it for a little while and I can understand the workflow but I don't care for the workflow and because I'm an anti you know guy I would argue that genome is actually less user friendly than KD plasma is out of the box now Ubuntu is actually an example against this argument simply because they've made changes to gum to make it more user-friendly but if you go if you go use the Fedora version of gum which is basically stock vanilla genome I don't think that that's very user friendly at all where are the icons how are you supposed to know how to get to the icons where's the app launcher how are you supposed to do any of this stuff because it doesn't I mean yes there's a tour but it's the worst tour you've ever seen it's really bad now you'd have to know you're supposed to go up there and click the activities button are you supposed to hit the meta key you're actually supposed to know what the meta key is so I don't think I don't particularly think that vanilla ganome is actually all of that user friendly but that's just my opinion and I will freely admit that I'm highly biased against gnome because I don't like it so just take that opinion with a grain of salt so that's it for this video if you have thoughts on KD plasma and why it's not the most popular you can leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you you can follow me on Mastodon or honestly those links will be in the video description if you haven't already hit that thumbs up button it really does help the channel thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon YouTube because they're all absolutely amazing without you the channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now so thank you so very very much for your support truly do appreciate it you guys are awesome thank you so Barry very very very very very very very very very very all the berries very much thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time foreign [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: The Linux Cast

Views: 27,633

Keywords: linux, open source, apps, the linux cast, thelinuxcast, kde plasma, kde, kde neon, kde project, kde linux, kde tutorial, kde vs gnome, gnome, kde desktop environment, kde plasma 6, kde plasma vs gnome, kde plasma rice, kde rice, kde theme, kde settings, kde easier, easier kde, kde install

Id: aRXDUA4OKxw

Length: 18min 26sec (1106 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2023