Distribution Showdown - KDE Wins!!!!!!!

[NoWorries]

I have just read a very interesting article that compares KDE, Gnome 3, Cinnamon/Mate and Unity. You can find it at Datamation. The comparison categories with the winner in each are:

(1) Performance and Memory Demands - Cinnamon/Mate & KDE
(2) Ease of Use - Cinnamon/Mate
(3) The Desktop Design Philosophy - KDE
(4) Application Design - All Equal
(5) Unique Features - KDE

Lets hope that KDE continues to get better press

[Jimmy.P]

Nice article. I havs always liked kde best.

[bsniadajewski]

That is so cool!

[NoWorries]

Even though Unity rated so poorly, ie 13 for Unity and 6 for KDE, I doubt that our SABDFL will not change his approach. Instead he will probably devote more resources to Unity.

[dmeyer]

Even though Unity rated so poorly, ie 13 for Unity and 6 for KDE, I doubt that our SABDFL will not change his approach. Instead he will probably devote more resources to Unity.

Unity isn't that bad. Newbies seem to love it once they learn the basic ideas behind the DE.

[SteveRiley]

Unity, and Windows 8, show the result of what happens when you try to apply the phone/tablet metaphor onto a laptop or desktop. It doesn't work. Phones and tablets are two-dimensional devices with limited screen real estate. Laptops and desktops are three-dimensional devices (vertical output, horizonal input) with large amounts of screen real estate. They demand different UIs. Plasma gets this right -- we have Plasma Desktop, Netbook, and Active.

[dmeyer]

I would really like to get Plasma Active on a tablet but I don't see it happening any time soon.

[SteveRiley]

Regretfully, I think you're right. The Plasma Active guys keep cranking out code -- PA 4 was supposed to come out last month, but it's late I guess. Meanwhile, you can get builds of PA 3 for various devices, most of which seem uncommon. And the Vivald tablet appears abandoned.

[dmeyer]

Regretfully, I think you're right. The Plasma Active guys keep cranking out code -- PA 4 was supposed to come out last month, but it's late I guess. Meanwhile, you can get builds of PA 3 for various devices, most of which seem uncommon. And the Vivald tablet appears abandoned.

I do think they will get a tablet out "eventually" but it will be on such ****ty hardware that it will be as good as not having a device at all. I would love to see Plasma Active on new ARM hardware with full acceleration.

[PaulW2U]

Even though Unity rated so poorly, ie 13 for Unity and 6 for KDE, I doubt that our SABDFL will not change his approach. Instead he will probably devote more resources to Unity.

I think that's already started to happen with the recent changes that have been made to the release cycle and the way the UDS is held.

I don't mind the Ubuntu 12.04 version of Unity, I even use it occasionally on my laptop but I feel that the journey SABDFL is taking Ubuntu on is not a journey I want to be on any longer. I have little interest in an Ubuntu phone or the latest versions of Unity and have no desire for all my computing hardware to look the same. I like to use what works best for me at the time. So I'll continue to use Lubuntu on my netbook and Kubuntu with it's superior applications on my desktop although I do switch to Xubuntu from time to time. But whenever I use one of the other *buntus I find that there's a KDE application that works better and I'm wanting to switch back to Kubuntu.

I see a lot of posts on another forum which say that because Kubuntu is so heavy on resources it will slow your PC down so best not to use it. Apart from a recent aborted installation on my netbook I've never really found this to be the case. Such posts seem to be made by people who have read about resource problems rather than experienced them for themselves. Although I haven't read it in full, it's nice to see an article that reflects my own experiences.

But I'm obviously not the sort of user that SABDFL wants to attract anyway as I've spent most of this weekend using console applications for which I didn't really need a desktop environment.

[dmeyer]

I think that's already started to happen with the recent changes that have been made to the release cycle and the way the UDS is held.

I don't mind the Ubuntu 12.04 version of Unity, I even use it occasionally on my laptop but I feel that the journey SABDFL is taking Ubuntu on is not a journey I want to be on any longer. I have little interest in an Ubuntu phone or the latest versions of Unity and have no desire for all my computing hardware to look the same. I like to use what works best for me at the time. So I'll continue to use Lubuntu on my netbook and Kubuntu with it's superior applications on my desktop although I do switch to Xubuntu from time to time. But whenever I use one of the other *buntus I find that there's a KDE application that works better and I'm wanting to switch back to Kubuntu.

I see a lot of posts on another forum which say that because Kubuntu is so heavy on resources it will slow your PC down so best not to use it. Apart from a recent aborted installation on my netbook I've never really found this to be the case. Such posts seem to be made by people who have read about resource problems rather than experienced them for themselves. Although I haven't read it in full, it's nice to see an article that reflects my own experiences.

But I'm obviously not the sort of user that SABDFL wants to attract anyway as I've spent most of this weekend using console applications for which I didn't really need a desktop environment.

Kubuntu is heavy on resources relatively speaking but its not slow or laggy. Heavy on resources = bad iff resouces are in short supply. On any netbook or better from the last 5 years given 2GB of ram then Kubuntu will run perfectly fine.

[vw72]

Unity, and Windows 8, show the result of what happens when you try to apply the phone/tablet metaphor onto a laptop or desktop. It doesn't work. Phones and tablets are two-dimensional devices with limited screen real estate. Laptops and desktops are three-dimensional devices (vertical output, horizonal input) with large amounts of screen real estate. They demand different UIs. Plasma gets this right -- we have Plasma Desktop, Netbook, and Active.

Unity with it's bar at the side really isn't any more of the tablet approach than Mac OS X is with it's bar at the bottom. One can argue that the various lenses are, but even those are just variations on menu presentation and there are plasma plugins that do similar things. For most users the biggest complaint about Unity and even gnome-shell has been the launcher is stuck on the left of the screen. That works well for many scenarios that are wide screen but not others. Windows 8, definitely is trying to fit a mobile interface onto a desktop and laptop and without a touch device is frustrating to use.

Regardless, even if Unity is not a tablet interface, it along with Windows 8 suffers from the one size fits all approach and that is where KDE excels by providing a UI that is tailored to the device and use scenario at hand. But KDE is even better than that, because it doesn't limit you to those use cases. If you want to run plasma netbook on your desktop and plasma desktop on your small screen laptop/netbook you are free to do so. Plasma Active doesn't quite work that way, at least not yet, but it is pretty young. Maybe eventually it will, too.

[vw72]

I think that's already started to happen with the recent changes that have been made to the release cycle and the way the UDS is held.

I see a lot of posts on another forum which say that because Kubuntu is so heavy on resources it will slow your PC down so best not to use it. Apart from a recent aborted installation on my netbook I've never really found this to be the case. Such posts seem to be made by people who have read about resource problems rather than experienced them for themselves. Although I haven't read it in full, it's nice to see an article that reflects my own experiences.

I've seen those types of posts, too, and I don't understand them. While Kubuntu is not the fastest KDE distro, it is hardly sluggish unless something else is wrong with the system. It is true that Kubuntu has a lot of needless services turned on by default so that things just work for an inexperienced user (versus say openSuse not even having pulseaudio enabled by default), but it is easy enough to turn those things off. Ultimately, it is not the desktop that is the problem but the applications we run. If we are using a resource limited computer and running libreoffice and firefox simultaneously, then things will slow down.

As for the Kubuntu bashing, I think, in reality, it is just fashionable to bash anything remotely related to Ubuntu, and Kubuntu is guilty by association.

[vw72]

Kubuntu is heavy on resources relatively speaking but its not slow or laggy. Heavy on resources = bad iff resouces are in short supply. On any netbook or better from the last 5 years given 2GB of ram then Kubuntu will run perfectly fine.

Kubuntu is not heavy on resources anymore than Xubuntu, Lubuntu or any other *buntu is heavy on resources. It could be that when trying to run Kubuntu on low end hardware with limited memory, people forget to install the low-fat settings and to turn of the desktop search in KDE. But please quit saying that Kubuntu is heavy on resources because somebody failed to finish setting it for the hardware after post installation. Kubuntu runs quite well on 1GB of ram with an atom processor in an asus eeePC 1005ah. It will even run acceptably with 512K ram if you don't try and load Caligra or Libreoffice. Kubuntu does just fine on netbooks with 1gb ram. That platform won't let you play 3d games in an acceptable manner, nor would I want to recompile the kernel on a netbook, but that is a limitation of the hardware, not Kubuntu.

Things that slow down Kubuntu or any distro on a limited machine -- eye candy, particularly blur effect, desktop search, how many installed fonts, themes, decorations and the like there are and what plasma widgets are running. Turn off the stuff you don't want/need and Kubuntu is pretty swift. Not as fast as Arch, but that is the price you pay for convenience.

[vw72]

If there is Kubuntu bashing it is not because of it's Ubuntu lineage but more likely because there's a hard-core group of KDE haters, and I mean they hate it with a passion.
Some of it has to do with the original QT license, some of it with KDE being in their eyes too much like Windows and for others it's because they invested a lot in Gnome and just don't like any sort of 'competition'.
The argument KDE is heavy is a very old one, even though it has for years had a smaller memory footprint than any other full-featured DE, according to this study only 55% of Cinnamon/Mate while Unity is in another league of memory hogging.

If it were simply a dislike of KDE, then you would think that openSuse, pclinuxOS, Magia and other KDE centric distros would receive their fair share of bashing, too. But they don't. I don't deny there is a lot of dislike for KDE out there, but there seems to also be a disproportionate amount of Kubuntu dislike to go along with it.

The study really is invalid when it comes to the memory issue as they used different distros for the various tests. As such, you aren't really testing the DE, but the distro. To be valid, all of those DEs would need to be tested on the same distro. Since that isn't possible, then all but Cinnamon/Mate on Ubuntu and all but Unity on Mint. That way the DE resource usage could be compared among its respective distro and then you could even compare across distro (ie KDE on Mint versus Ubuntu). Throwing out the memory tests, though, the rest of the article is interesting.