# Summary of experiences

For the past few weeks, I've been using KDE for daily use on Arch Linux after using Cinnamon for the past 9 years. The reason for the change is concern that development, though focused on stability, has been outpaced by developments in the broader Linux desktop ecosystem. I'm trying KDE because of the consistently positive assessments I've read over the past two years, its larger developer and user base, and its similarity in appearance to Cinnamon. Below is my assessment.

## The good

1. Default theme is much better, so good I don't really want to change from it.
2. Wayland support. Cinnamon devs have no plan for it.
3. Adding network folders in Dolphin is easier than in Nemo.
4. 'Night Color' is better than GNOME's 'Night Light' because it allows custom temperature for 'Day.' Cinnamon requires one to install and configure Gammastep (or Redshift) manually.
5. The launcher, when file indexing (but not content indexing) is enabled, is better.
6. Getting consistent GTK / Qt styling is much, much easier.
7. Clipboard history is extremely useful.
8. The default system tray is much better than the one in Cinnamon.
9. More developers and users.
10. Theming and UI is stable, or at least more stable than that from GTK/GNOME.
11. WireGuard connections show up and can be toggled in the system tray's network applet. Cinnamon still doesn't support this. Its network manager applet was forked from GNOME before WireGuard existed, and it hasn't received substantial updates since then.

## The bad

1. Baloo at default is irrepressibly awful. It hogs 4-7 Gb of RAM and makes so many writes that it freezes the entire desktop UI. Only after disabling the indexing of file contents was it tolerable.
2. Sometimes, the launcher and system tray slow down. The window frame animation extends from the panel and freezes for a moment until everything is fully rendered. It makes the UI feel frustratingly sluggish. One way to 'fix' this is to delete ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc. Maybe another (I'm not sure) is to clear out the journalctl log. I've been keeping snapshots of the rc file to try to compare good ones versus one where the delay occurs, but it hasn't yielded any insights. There is a `PreloadWeight` field on some applets that keeps increasing over time. I have no idea what it does, but it doesn't seem to be the root cause.
3. `ctrl+meta` for switching desktops (workspaces in GNOME/Cinnamon) is hard to press. Maybe most KDE users also use Emacs and are therefore habituated to awkward pinky + ring finger shortcuts. Luckily the `ctrl+alt+direction` shortcuts are not used by default, so I remap them without issue.
4. The desktop switcher slide animation takes too long, and it blocks additional shortcuts (e.g. view all open windows) until complete. I switched the animation to `fade` as a work-around.
5. SFTP via `kio` in Dolphin cuts out during transfers. I have to instead use the Fish protocol or `sftp` from the command line.
6. Missing timed background functionality. GNOME uses XML files that allow one to set specific images at defined times *and* overlay one image over another to smoothly transition from one to another over a specified duration. This was very important to me because it allowed me use a program to set one image for day and another for night and transition from one to the other to match a computed time and duration of astronomical sunrise/sunset. This meant that as I watched the sun set outside, I could watch the scenes depicted in my wallpapers to transition from day to night. That doesn't seem to be possible in KDE Plasma. I've looked into making AVIF files with FFmpeg's fade filter, but that just isn't practical.
7. KDE Plasma is considerably less stable. I've had more sudden desktop restarts (including once while pacman was rebuilding the initial ramdisk) in the past month than I had in the 9 years I've used Cinnamon.
8. Difficult to configure. To figure out what files contain relevant settings, I had to monitor `~/.config` with `inotifywait`, change the setting in the UI, and then use the diff for what changed to create a `kwriteconfig5` command that I can add into a script. Another annoyance is that `kwriteconfig5` cannot write negative numbers as key values, so I had to use `sed` for those. This is in contrast to GNOME/Cinnamon, where for most settings, I can `dconf dump` and `dconf load` to export and import them, respectively.
9. The battery percentage label on the system tray battery icon is too small to read. Increasing it requires increasing the global small font setting, and when increased, the text ends up covering almost all of the icon. It's just awkward either way.
10. Cinnamon tiling logic is more intuitive. The keyboard shortcuts represent the geometric steps needed to move a window to the desired position. Plasma instead uses fixed shortcuts that work independently of the current window tiling position. For example:
- In Cinnamon, `meta+left` on a bottom right window will expand it leftward so that it covers the bottom half of the screen. Hitting `meta+left` again will contract the right side so that it is not bottom left. (Bottom left to bottom right is effectively `meta+left+left`.) In Plasma, `meta+left` on bottom right windows will tile them to the left no matter what. `meta+left` again will undo the former action. It's annoying. To move bottom left windows to the bottom right, one must press `meta+bottom+left` quickly so as to not cause the windows to tile to the bottom half and then the left half.
- In Cinnamon, `meta+up` on an un-tiled application tiles it to the top half. `meta+up` again maximizes it. (Maximize is effectively `meta+up+up`.) Plasma requires `meta+pgup`no matter what.
- In Plasma, to undo a tiling action, one has to press the shortcut that performed the action *again*. To un-maximize an maximized window, it is `meta+pgup` again. Not `meta+pgdown` --- that just takes the maximized window and minimizes it.
- Dragging a window to the top tiles it to the top half in Cinnamon (can optionally maximize it instead if desired). Plasma can only maximize it.
- Dragging a window to the bottom in Cinnamon tiles it to the bottom half. Plasma does nothing.
- The only case, I think, where Plasma is better is when converting tiled windows back to floating ones. It's finicky in Cinnamon but in Plasma requires at most 2 keyboard shortcuts.
11. Window shadows persist when tiled. Cinnamon will only render shadows on floating windows, not tiled ones. I like that behavior much more.
12. I like the icon+thumbnail alt-tab switcher in Cinnamon (and GNOME) more than all the ones available in Plasma.
13. The 'intelligently hide panel' option in Cinnamon is better than any option in Plasma. In Cinnamon, when a window is far from the panel, both remain visible. Dragging the window (or tiling it) toward the panel will cause it to hide from view. At no point will there be a window drawn over the panel. Plasma simply cannot do this. The options are 1) always on, 2) always hidden until mouse-over, or 3) draw windows over the panel. The Cinnamon implementation isn't perfect, though. It's not uncommon for it to glitch and not show the panel when it's supposed to until one manually moves the cursor over it to trigger it.
14. Cannot get automatic display resizing to work when Plasma is running inside a VM (`qemu`).
15. I don't like `ctrl` to copy, `shift` to move. It makes drag-and-drop in the desktop very unintuitive. I haven't been able to find a setting to change this behavior. These days, file managers have drag-and-drop move on local devices and copy on other ones. At least, that's the case in Nemo, Nautilus, and File Explorer. I'll admit this is worse than what Plasma does for people unfamiliar with moving files around and computers in general, but a settings to change this would be nice.
16. Default tab-switcher OSD is annoying. The timer is too short, so hitting `alt+tab` to quickly switch between two windows (e.g. two terminals) causes the OSD to distractingly flash on the screen. I couldn't find a GUI option to delay the timer, so I had to set:
```
kwriteconfig5 --file kwinrc --group "TabBox" --key "DelayTime" "180"
```
17. The 'Smart' new window placement is too aggressive at maximizing non-overlapping windows, in my opinion. I like Cinnamon's implementation more because it doesn't open windows on the absolute edges/corners of the display. It's less efficient in the sense that it won't fit as many windows at once, but it looks nicer and makes predicting where windows will open on an already-cluttered desktop easier.
18. The bouncing application launch animation is surprisingly ugly. I can disable the bounce and make it static, which looks better, but there is still a large gap between the cursor and the application icon. It just looks odd, especially when the loading spinner does not have that problem.
19. Using keyboard shortcuts to move the focused window to the next desktop sometimes results in it being drawn under the focused window in the destination desktop. I haven't been able to trigger the bug consistently.
20. Backgrounds / wallpapers are poorly done. First, they are not set through the System Settings application but instead through an application launched through the desktop right-click menu. The wallpapers themselves are also surprisingly low resolution. I use a vertical monitor, so most of the available wallpapers appear blurry when using the default 'cropped and scaled' display option. The default light and dark wallpapers are fine. In contrast, GNOME backgrounds are higher resolution and don't have this problem.
21. Settings sometimes don't stick. Once, power to my external monitor was unexpectedly cut. When restored, some of my changes to the default Desktop settings (arrange icons top-to-bottom and disable icon previews on folders) were undone. Others (e.g. disable scroll-on-desktop behavior) weren't. No idea why.
22. When I connect my laptop to an external monitor, turning the monitor off doesn't automatically revert to the integrated display settings. To do so, the monitor needs to be disconnected entirely. Cinnamon doesn't require this. For all practical purposes, though, I don't think this difference in behavior matters.
23. Splitting system settings in so many text files seems very wonky to me. I get that it's more Unix-ey, but for UI applications, it means in practice that logging in, browsing settings, opening and closing applications, and so on involves a lot of reads and writes involving binary internal application states and ASCII-format outputs. I have a sneaking suspicion that the general perception that Plasma has sped up so much over the years is in no small part due to more and more people using SSDs.

## Features that would be nice to have

1. Battery high level notification. It's possible to set notifications for battery level low, critical, and full, and an additional configurable one for a 'high' charge. That way,I can get a notification to unplug a laptop at 80%, for example, rather than rely on an external Bash script to do so.
2. Better CLI interface than `kwriteconfig5`.
3. Global mouse/touchpad settings. Plasma creates per-device configurations in ~/.config/kcminputrc. I'd like this mainly for scripting the enabling of natural scrolling on touchpad, increasing pointer speed, etc.
4. An launcher indicator for when an application fails to open. The launcher animation (bouncing icon by default) is a neat touch, but a very useful feature would be a visual indicator that indicates failure. Right now, one is left confusedly wondering why a UI hasn't opened yet and then trying again from the command line to read the `stderr` output.

## Misc.

1. KDE Connect is very cool. It doesn't sync phone notifications/SMS 100% of the time, though.
2. Okular blew me away. I can highlight a table, fill in the row and column boundaries it doesn't immediately guess, and then extract the delimited contents of the table to the clipboard. I've wasted so many years using Evince.
3. I like eog more than gwenview. The former is lighter, and I can use it to view a list of files returned by `find`. I've haven't been able to accomplish the same with the latter.

Overall, KDE is fine. I'll keep using it for now, but I don't know if I'll stick with it. I'll probably hang on long enough to experience a major update and assess version-to-version stability.

Right now, the show-stoppers for me are 2, 6, 14, 19, and 21.

There is no such thing as "a KDE", KDE is the community behind the software, I guess you talk about Plasma and individual applications made by the KDE people.
Then, if you give your opinion, please always specify which version you have been testing, on which distribution, as the user experience can vary greatly depending on both version and /or platform. With Arch using sometimes inconsistently applications actually older or just in Beta stage it is hard to asses your Plasma experience, you might get a different picture if you use Kubuntu or Opensuse or Fedora or Gentoo or Manjaro or KDE Neon....

Ah, someone else looking at KDE as a replacement for Cinnamon Desktop.

A major reason I'm looking at KDE is to get awat from the severe (and sometimes intentional) breakage of GTK3/4 by the GNOME folks. They have this odd idea that a desktop should be nothing more than grey-on-grey-on-grey-on-grey, foreground and background windows should be indistinguishable from each other, screen elements should never have texture or shading, and titlebars should be forever banished.

In theory some parts of this could be fix in the GTK CSS code, but the formatting and syntax of that would first have to be comprehensible. And I'm sure they've made sure any system element like a titlebar is nonexistent in the spec.

I have on many occasions tried to set up KDE to my liking, and eventually given up. I can almost get it the way I want now, but already I've hit one particular issue, which may come down to KDE using different terminology for what I'm seeking. In Cinnamon what they call a "window list" is not what KDE thinks it is. KDE has one that brings up a menu listing of open applications, while I want one that shows the individual applications across the panel. I'm sure this must exist, I just haven't found what KDE likes to call it.

OK, so working with KDE for a couple of weeks, I'm finding it can be about as much of a pain to configure theming as with GTK now that the GNOME folks have intentionally broken it.

Colors: so I have "Mint-X-Brown" selected as my color scheme in the Appearance settings. Many applications seem to cooperate on that. But then there's applications like Dolphin that don't quite get there, and their colors look just that little bit off.

Speaking of Dolphin, just HOW do you get rid of those alternating colors in the sidebar and the file pane? The only suggestions I've seen is editing the Color settings, but there appears to be NO way to edit a color scheme. You can only select a pre-existing scheme and you're stuck with it's decisions

All the newer theme components are designed with the horrible abominations of Metro/Material Design's flat/fugly/featureless look, with little more than grey-on-grey-on-grey. I'd install one of the older themes that actually had some texture to them, but the theme browser can't sort on reverse order, and it takes far too long to scroll through (it shows me 5 or 6 themes, then has to load the NEXT 5 or 6, and then another 5 or 6, etc). I'd use the KDE-Look site, but many of the theme elements I find there only have download links, not Install links. Which would be fine if I could find where KDE wants them extracted to (I've made some guesses, none worked).


Now, I WILL say I like the way KDE integrates with various applications. It actually interfaces with Firefox and Thunderbird, which the GNOME/GTK folks seem loathe to do. Even *if* I can't find a Window Docoration that can match my old "Esco" Metacity one, in KDE it's at least dtill possible to change them; it has been intentionally broken in GTK since the GNOME folks seem to think themes (or ANY level of customization) are an affront to their uber-eliteness.

Seems to me you need to look up some. Actually, a whole d..n lot. Anywhooo..about the alternate colors: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=224&t=176809
About the overall coloring. Although I agree kde has implemented some halfbaked **** in terms of ..um...let's call it "customization", you can tweak, edit, create nearly every single bit of it. Good luck doing that on cinnamon. Spoiler alert...you can't. Not by really really far.
Not only can you alter any given color (well, most of it) but change the application style, window decorations ( some regular, some advanced), create a ton of service menus ( which in nemo are an utter mess).....etc. Here's a simple example. Nearly everything is custom made. Plasma theme, icon theme, custom desktop/panel applications, custom kvantum theme, custom application style, a loaded with scripts fm....... You cannot, not now or in the near future, do that in cinnamon. As a matter of fact, and I've doing linux since 2005-ish, it's safe to say that in terms of personal customization/functionality, you can do more on, say, xfce than on cinnamon. If there are two DE's that are locked down, it's, imo, cinnamon and budgie. https://imgur.com/a/E1CH8kR And mind you, I'm actually an openbox freak.
Ps: A window list is exactly what it is, a LIST. Cinnamon has it wrong. What you're looking for are TASKS.https://imgur.com/a/CzAS6zr

Just for the sake of it, I got the mint brown gtk and color scheme. Unless you're talking about the inactive color change, which is caused by the halfbaked custom highlight thing they implemented, I don't see any "off". You can still make your own color scheme ( which will be in ~/.local/share/color-schemes) and you can do whatever you like with it. In the same way you can make any color scheme you want and, unless you're gtk theme points to entire different theme, your gtk apps will adopt as such. Furthermore, you can set the gtk environment (theme) to any gtk application, regardless of what is set in the gtk in system settings. Like so: Exec=env GTK_THEME=whatever theme whatever application.
The qt apps can be run in different environments as well. Like so: QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=(for example)kvantum whatever application.
https://imgur.com/a/7JQWihu

In knowing/doing that you can make an entire mix of layouts in the same session. In the screenie: Lightly application style, klassy window decoration,kronometer running in a kvantum style, audacious in yet another and zenity in a specific gtk theme. https://imgur.com/a/CHfPj7q