The state of the Linux desktop: Are KDE 6 And GNOME 46 any good? [NOT IMPRESSED]

18 thoughts on “The state of the Linux desktop: Are KDE 6 And GNOME 46 any good? [NOT IMPRESSED]”

• Using LXQt in Lubuntu. Preferred LXDE and still have that on one machine, but what can you do.

• Dude, I watched a few of your live kernel coding sessions, and you are good at it, I’m not gonna say otherwise. But this, what you’re doing here throwing shovels of shit on KDE, what the fucking fuck!? It’s YOUR implementation that looks like shit; it’s YOUR implementation that is ass-broken. Have you tried latest Fedora 40 Kinoite, or NixOS, how well both Plasma 5 and 6 work? It’s AMZING how performant those are and how little resources they need when you take into account the

• rene if you want to be cool you have to add hyprland into your distro. make it so people can have an easy way to try out hyprland and then your distro will blow up

• I feel like in general many linux people get their feelings hurt if you discuss how lacking the DEs are even in basic things. But denying the problem or saying "what do you need <basic feature> for" only hurts linux in the long run. You can't improve if you dont admit the facts. Anyway I have long since abandoned the DEs and now I just use i3 and terminal.

• I daily use the latest KDE (Debian) on a 17-years old ThinkPad X61s (a low-end Core2Duo). It is usable and needs about 300MB of RAM. With an SSD it's not even slow. The window manager itself feels quite snappy, even with whatever crap integrated GPU this poor laptop has. Both X and Wayland work. So no, you don't need a last-gen Ryzen or Vulkan shaders to run KDE, it is somehow compatible with legacy hardware. But once you open Firefox or anything from JetBrains or Eclipse — it's an instant reality check. That's where it becomes barely usable. Still — it works, just requires a bit of patience. At the same time, I remember that in the 90s compiling C++ in Visual Studio 6 required similar patience, so I don't complain.

• One of the few of your videos I'm leaning more towards thumbs down than thumbs up (decided to do neither because it was still interesting to see the dependencies packagers have to deal with). You're not only comparing apples to oranges, but you're also putting them into the same basket (for example KDE Gear/apps aren't part of the KDE Plasma Desktop). Also which desktop environment on Linux, Apple, Android, Windows comes with it's own a full blown office suite???
  Plasma and Gnome are supposed to be full blown desktop environments and in this day and age it means there are supposed to be able "to do everything". I'm not software engineer but to me that alone means dependency hell. In comparison to that Xfce is supposed to be a light weight desktop environment -> naturally less dependencies. But then you must not get angry when it's filemanager Thunar can't even create a desktop share (it could in the past AFAIK).
  Nautilus also really sucks when using it (forgot the many small issues I had with it, but not purely judging filemanagers on looks like you did in this video) and so does Dolphin in many ways (Windows Explorer, too, btw), but still Dolphin has many very useful features. It would already be much better if it's default settings wouldn't be as awful as they are.
  You also never seem to have used a current KDE Plasma 5 or 6 desktop, otherwise you wouldn't complain about lack of progress. Yes, KDE Desktop 2 was faster and better read-able, overall friendlier to the eyes and had less dependencies, but the rest of it can't keep up with a current version.
  You also seem to have missed that Plasma can now adopt to mobile devices, no need for a totally separate mobile system anymore.

• Linux on desktop is a joke but this rant about the number of dependencies is equally inane.

• GNU/linux is not a commercial product, when I hear about the year of Linux on the desktop it makes me vomit.
  If you like it, use Linux, if you don't like it, use Windows, it's just a sometimes forced choice, since Windows is pre-installed on all PCs. Gnu/linux is not an obligation and does not have to be free Windows.
  But I also have to make a criticism… making a video where you see KDE in that way is misleading and incorrect, no distribution distributes KDE Plasma like that. Doing a minimal install and then complaining that it sucks and things don't work is just ignorant.
  At least you say it… but it's not done! It's just a scam.

• Need a English version.

• XFCE winning once again

• "latest and greatest" (looks slightly different)

• Long time linux user here Rene .Desktop linux don t have a future ?Yes it has a bright future .I am very confy with my distro -light ,no full of spyware like windows .It has a friendly interface and a strong comunity.Of course is not for everyone daily OS ,but man ,when you learn it …..

• Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster. You've pretty well explained the why and how here.

  If it didn't, how would they ever sell anything new?

• Rene, I maybe you should do a video on building and setting up Serenity OS (sure it looks like windows and this might not bee your think but it seems like you'd be ok with it in alot of other aspects).

• I love KDE 1… I had it installed on my gentoo box untill they broke the packages sigh. KDE 2 acutally does have some things KDE 1 doesn't…. KDE 2 has better fonts. But yeah everything after that is not very useful.

• I hope you're doing well <3

• For ordinary people like us who can't program, we will use linuxmint directly. It was because I couldn't stand the bloat and roughness of gnome that I turned to the cinnamon desktop.

• I think the problem is nested abstraction. When an API is clumsy to use, they create a new abstraction on top of it, rather than throwing away the abstraction (and maybe the one below it) and fixing the problem there. In reality, each abstraction layer is it's own system to learn, and it would be more efficient to simply have no abstraction at all (although 1 to 2 abstraction layers is probably the ideal amount).

  For example, building your desktop in html. In theory, it makes it simpler since everyone knows html. In practice, it would be simpler (and more maintainable) to have a format that directly maps into the rendering engine. Yes, it would break your design layer when you had to change the renderer, but updating your design layer with the rendering layer would still be simpler than managing all of the interplay between html/css (an abstraction intended for static documents no less and certainly not GUI design) and the hardware.

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