I recently installed KDE Plasma to my Debian system after using Gnome my entire life. I still quite enjoy gnome, but I think that its workflow is better suited to a mobile system like my laptop.
Using Plasma on my desktop system has been revolutionary - there is a stupid amount of functionality in here. In particular, widgets, themes, and activities are just so well implemented for the most part - I really feel like I can tailor the GUI to my needs and wants, and I think this is an enormous part of what is making Linux a truly modern OS when compared to proprietary alternatives.
The more I tweak things, the more the system feels truly like MY system - something that I don’t think I could make work with proprietary software.
I was not a big fan of the splash screen until I found out that, of course, it can be disabled or customized as well - so now I find myself making vector graphics to customize that as well haha.
My only real regret is that having been on Gnome originally, some Gnome stuff can get in the way (though I do still kind of like using GDM instead of SDDM). Whenever I should do some big update/upgrade I am for sure installing plasma from the get go.
As someone who is new to KDE overall, and particularly with a system that has Gnome still partially installed, if there is anything I should know, I would appreciate it. Furthermore if anyone has any favorite widgets and whatnot, I would love to hear about them as well.
Thank you
I love plasma and now daily driving it for every system except games… Do agree I wish they’d make the splash screen more attractive, but like you said can kinda change it however you want so I just deal. Not a huge fan of the very pink lockscreen and I did change that. Once in a while it doesn’t catch the change and I end up with the default again for a session.
When I first installed it I was a little worried because I thought it broke my games, but then I quickly realized that Valve had updated their Proton release so all I had to do was roll back 1 version and everything started working again.
Proton is AMAZING! My issue was the window manager because I have dual monitors with different refresh rates I could just never get it to work right.
The other thing I ran into was that I couldn’t find anything that worked quite as well as Voicemeeter.
So until I get those two things figured out my gaming rig is still on Windows. I am amazed at how far we’ve come though. Even my work applications are compatible with linux now.
Ah yes, I also had to leave Voicemeeter behind when I switched. I’m aware that there are some softwares available that purportedly fill that gap (JACK Audio Server was one if I recall correctly), however I don’t think I could figure them out. Voicemeeter was really quite good as far as simplicity went.