GNOME use here, freshly moved to KDE. Not really a newcomer per se, I have been using plasma a long time ago, switched to GNOME and stayed there for years. A lot of positive feedback online made me want to try KDE out, so here i am. Seems a lot has improved in stability and wayland support. Not so much in visuals.
Starting KDE i decided to list things that would need some improvements, personal thoughts or otherwise a suggestion. This list is a trimmed down of a bigger list, but are to the point and not as subjective / opinion based. Not sure if the opinionated view from a user coming from another desktop would be appreciated, so i left it out. If this is something desirable, i can add more details in the comments.
Two days in, I cannot say for sure if I’m going to stay, this is still an evaluation phase. What i find absolutely missing - and this is really bothering me - is pressing “meta” to go to overview. This GNOME workflow is something i find really nice/revolutionary and it is the same moment like i had on android when I turn on the gesture navigation: going back to buttons really seems regressing.
Anyhow, here be dragons:
- Colors in System Settings with the dark theme: the sidebar selection uses “Plasma blue” with white text. Both background and text are too light, which hurts readability. Comparison to mac is below - they use darker blue, so it kind of works. Dolphin sidebar is inconsistent (meaning color).
- When typing in Overview or in the start menu, there is a delay between key-up and the result list being displayed. Coming from GNOME, I’m used to typing “settings” and pressing Enter partway through — it opens System Settings. In KDE this opens debug settings instead. The ordering of search results matters. Disabling everything except Applications in KRunner/PlasmaSearch settings fixes the delay… “Disable all” and “Enable all” buttons would be helpful there.
- I have a dual-screen setup with both screens being 4k. After installation, scaling defaulted to 170%. The default should be 200% (integer scaling). Otherwise, maximized windows aren’t drawn correctly: the window maximizes but leaves a 1–2px gap at the bottom showing the background.
- Fedora packaging bug?:
System Settings → Keyboard → Shortcuts → [Keyboard, Shortcuts]:qrc:/kcm/kcm_keyboard/main.qml:57 Cannot assign object of type “Kirigami.Action” to property of type “Action_QMLTYPE_435*” as the former is neither the same as the latter nor a sub-class of it. - Happened once: in Dolphin, right-clicking “Trash” in the sidebar shows “Empty” as disabled, while the same action in the toolbar is enabled and works. Maybe a bug? But i cannot reproduce it anymore.
- In dual-screen mode, snapping a window to the right edge of the left monitor works as expected, but the outline/window border of that window is drawn on the right screen. In the picture below, you can see how the pixel outline of the left window crosses and is shown over vscode sidebar? VSCode was maximized on the right screen and the left window (which says “games”) was snapped on the right edge of the left screen.
- Dolphin’s
Settings → View → Iconslayout looks thrown together with no visual design thought. - Similar to the previous bullet, Kate’s configure dialog wastes a lot of space in the sidebar, and the icons are listed in a cramped way. Same is for
Configuration → Appearance → Statusbar, the panel is scroll-able even though all elements are compressed in the top-left corner. I understand this is due to other tabs, but the UX feels wrong. - In
System Settings → Application Permissions, there’s no way to tell Flatpak and RPM apps apart without clicking each one and checking for “Flatpak settings.” - Clipboard manager should be disabled by default. Advanced users could have this somewhere enabled extra. This also is a common behavior in other desktops - simple by default, advanced users have to extend themselves. KDE’s “simple by default” kind of breaks here. The problem: if i c/p a password from a password manager like bitwarden, it will be shown there.
- There is a few bullets above that fit into “conventions” used by other operating systems. One additional is that both windows and gnome use e.g. Alt+PrtScrn to make a screenshot of an active window. KDE opted with Meta+PrtScrn. Can KDE adopt “industry standard” for some established and working conventions like this?
- Animations seem off. Probably should be shorter. Example: right-clicking the desktop and then left-clicking elsewhere to dismiss the menu — the fade-out is too long. Or there should be an animation curve?
- Disabling shadows in window decorations didnt disable shadow from the taskbar. This seems inconsistent.
- Starting a development really needs some (bigger) environment setup. I cannot just clone the repo, install dependencies and start. Tried it on system monitor.
