I haven’t tried Linux in a while and only really played around with XFCE and Cinnamon and reviving my old laptops, but I’ve just tried KDE Plasma and GNOME for a bit and DAMN they look good. Modern looking and not the weird Mica effect that Windows has. Very clean!
They both look great and I wouldn’t say one looks better than the other, just preference probably, just that GNOME looks more bubbly + rounded + bit like MacOS in a good way and Plasma looks more blocky + similar to Win10 taskbar
The touchscreen buts still appear to need a bit of work, on both Plasma and GNOME I made it freeze. For Plasma I opened the launcher button and tried to use the onscreen keyboard, and it kept on opening and closing very quickly, for GNOME I did the three finger swipe up gesture and everything became unresponsive. Also, Bluetooth weirdly doesn’t work on KDE but does on GNOME. Huh. Maybe just my device?
I really want to switch soon, maybe during the holidays I’ll get round to it :D
edit: I think it’s pretty crazy that a relatively small team (compared to the likes of Microsoft) can offer such a good UI and overall user experience! That’s insane! The people who help make the distros are doing very good work and I wish them the best of luck! Hopefully the weird quirks and compatibility issues will iron out and Linux becomes mainsteam :D
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i had the same exact impressions when I first installed Linux, it’s seriously insane how much the volunteers behind these projects get done!
like, it’s an entire OPERATING SYSTEM! ofc the people who help make excellent open-source software that can handily compete with the big companies are awesome too!
Bluetooth probably needs to be installed and activated on KDE.
KDE and Gnome are both great - I would say pick KDE if you like customizing things, and Gnome if you trust the defaults
Ahh that’s why. Okay gotcha that makes sense. If I do switch, I’ll probably test both a bit more to see which I like using the best. I just booted the live usb and played around for a bit, testing things like touchscreen support and auto-rotate
Auto-rotate probably won’t work because it seems like the acceleramoter isn’t supported by the kernel, but if you really wanted to debug it, run
monitor-sensorand rotate your laptop around. If you see the numbers change, it means your hardware is supported and you might just need a package (although it’'s also possible that Gnome and KDE don’t support it).I think it might not be supported. My device is an Asus Zenbook 14 Flip so might not be supported compared to something like a lenovo yoga or the tuxedo flip.
That’s actually a common misconception. Gnome is just as customizable as Plasma (I like both for different reasons, so this is not a “reeee gnome best” critique). It all comes as extensions, which can be off-putting to people, but it has the benefit of having more consistency than Plasma, in my experience. It also works better for atomic distros, generally.
If ricing is your jam, you really can’t go wrong with either one. Plasma is much easier to grasp for theming, though, and I think that’s a pretty big benefit when it comes to helping people get over the different learning curves.
also one annoying thing is that normally on windows, since my laptop is one of those flexy 2-in-1s, it auto-rotates depending on how you put it (like “tent mode” or “book mode”). On both KDE Plasma and GNOME, it doesn’t work. I guess my specific device isn’t supported? I can live with that though, I can rotate the screen manually and don’t realistically rotate the screen all too often.
Hmm, which distro did you try it with? I believe, KDE should support auto-rotating the screen in the newer versions¹. If you tried it with Kubuntu LTS, for example, that would’ve still been an older version, which does not use Wayland by default.
¹) More precisely: it should support it when it’s being run under Wayland, which is the default since KDE Plasma 6.
Fedora. I thunk my device might not be supported, or maybe there’s some software I need to install to make it work. Not a huge deal though.
Hmm, Fedora should have the newest version of KDE. Yeah, hard to say why it’s not working then…
Cinnamon with Mint is still great UI, it just feels slightly less modern in my opinion. Still much better than Windows with their pre-2000 UI once you go deep enough
Definitely worth playing around with either on bare metal like an old laptop or something, maybe in the holidays like you mention. I switched to Linux on my main gaming PC a year and a half ago, and just installed EndeavourOS (with Plasma) on my new Framework laptop
I’ve installed Ubuntu on both of my old laptops but they are so old that I can’t effectively daily drive them (they are heavy, thick, terrible screen, battery is dead, etc)
I’m thinking of switching to Linux for my newer laptop, but I want to wait until the holidays. Hopefully the bugs around touchscreens will be fixed soon!
