Why I Switched to KDE

… and why I don’t think I’ll switch back.

As a relatively recent Linux user (I began using Arch Linux, my first distro, full time in 2013), I’ve spent a lot of time exploring and developing my tastes in Linux Desktop Environments. Lately though, I’ve settled on KDE, and I think that this time, it’s permanent. This is a pretty big deal to me, because I love exploring options a lot more than I like settling. So I’d like to explain why I chose KDE. To do that, I’ll need to give a little background on why I made the switch to Linux.

In early 2013, I was in my second semester of college. Windows 8 had just been released, and being the early adopter that I was, I had to install it on my computer. Back then, Windows 8 was rough. The tablet oriented interface was not suited for laptops, and Windows 8.1 hadn’t come around to right some of the wrongs against laptop and desktop users. So I was frustrated that Microsoft had taken my operating system and thrown out things I liked. Me, a loyal customer who was proud to use Windows, and might one day graduate to write software for Windows, or even work at Microsoft. It was disturbing that the creators of my OS had overlooked my needs in order to serve their own goals (in this case, a converging interface between tablets and PCs).

Being a CS major, I knew about Linux. I knew that it was open source and offered a lot more control than Windows did. And I knew that I would have to have a good knowledge of it in order to be a good candidate at many jobs. So, I figured, what better way to learn about it than to use it as my daily OS? And that’s what I did.

My first Desktop Environment was GNOME 3. It’s a little funny to me, because I switched to Linux to get away from having my interface “dictated.” But what GNOME 3 gave me was not much different in those terms. GNOME 3 was in a cycle of feature removal, in order to make the interface fit a particular design goal. Many people were outraged and upset, but nonetheless, the GNOME devs kept at it. I realized that I hadn’t really gained any control over my computing environment, if its features were being stripped away at a similar pace to Windows 8. I decided I needed a more customizable desktop environment.

So, I switched to XFCE, in order to get a little more of the freedom I was expecting. I chose it because it is GTK based, lightweight, and pretty heavily configurable. I enjoyed it for a while. I exercised the customizability to make my desktop my own. I learned GTK theming, found good applications, and learned how to tweak things how I liked them. But at the end of the day, I still felt like something was lacking. Despite my theming and customization, XFCE still looked like something straight from the late 90s or early 2000s. It’s just a lightweight desktop environment, and I wanted a pretty interface that was both customizable and modern. My criteria were getting more selective.

I took a shot with Cinnamon, which was my last DE before KDE. Like XFCE, I really liked it. Cinnamon has a traditional interface layout, but with a modern look, and all the modern code behind GNOME 3. But no matter what I did, I always felt like I was running a bastardized version of GNOME 3. It didn’t feel cohesive. There was a Cinnamon settings program and a GNOME settings program. Some things worked in one but not in the other. Some things were only in one. It felt jarring and incomplete. So I added “cohesion” to the list of things I want out of a DE.

And that’s what brought me to KDE. After “playing the field” of GTK DE’s (well, a selection of the field) I decided that I should try out KDE and the Qt framework. This was a difficult transition. Few of my GTK programs looked very good in Qt. I ended up switching to native KDE programs for some things. I found that for most of my needs, there were programs just as good, but written for KDE. For instance:

• I found KMail to be a solid replacement for Thunderbird. It’s lightweight and quick to start, but it has a solid selection of features, making a perfect balance for me. PGP/MIME is built-in, without need for any plugins. It even supports shelling out to external editors like Emacs for composing mail.
• XChat seems to be a well-known standard IRC client in the Linux world, but I found that Konversation had a reasonably similar level of features.
• Dolphin is comparable to Nautilus and Thunar in terms of features. Once you get used to the “single click to open” paradigm, it’s a great file manager.
• Many of my other standard programs work well enough with KDE that I didn’t need to find an alternative. Chrome works great, and Emacs works nicely too, especially when you disable toolbars and menu bars.

But what shocked me more was how KDE satisfied the criteria I had picked up from my experiences trying other DEs.

• KDE is incredibly customizable.
  • Its settings app feels like it offers endless opportunities for making things your own. It has in-depth lists of items that can be configured; especially when it comes to keyboard shortcuts and startup applications. Based on my prior experiences with GNOME 3 and some similar DEs, you would need a good long while with Google, a text editor, and a specialized configuration editor to get the kind of results in GNOME that you can with KDE’s settings.
  • Taskbars and desktop widgets can be added and removed at will. I don’t remember GNOME 3 offering that (Cinnamon and XFCE do, though).
• KDE has a very nice look. While theming support is available with KDE and Qt, I haven’t yet found that I need to deviate from the default styles.
  • In GNOME 3, the defaults were good looking, but also very vertically padded, which bothered me a bunch.
  • XFCE has a very simplistic and lightweight look, which feels very 90s ish. It’s built-in theming had a collection of similarly outdated looks. I spent a while searching through themes to find one that was nice.
  • Cinnamon has nice defaults, but I did end up changing them as well.
• KDE is cohesive. KDE offers a lot of services to applications, and most applications seem to make use of them.

But maybe the biggest deal to me is the philosophy that seems to be behind KDE. There is no removing features because a developer doesn’t think they’re necessary. While I’m not a Mac user, this is the sort of philosophy that Apple has been using incredibly successfully with OS X in the face of Microsoft’s jarring changes to Windows. Why create dramatic changes to the desktop, when you could further develop and enrich your current interface? This sort of user first philosophy is the reason that I will more than likely remain with KDE.

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