"KDE Is Old, Buggy And Outdated"

Key Takeaways

KDE looks old and outdated. KDE is buggy. If you are anywhere near KDE, whether that be in forums or comment sections, you are going to see people say this oftent times without any context on why they are saying so. Now, personally, my experience on KD was pretty good. I didn't stop using it because I thought it was bad. I stopped using it because something else caught my interest. Yes, it has bugs. All software has bugs. Early Plasma 6, there were some pretty bad problems which eventually got ironed out and since then it was perfectly fine for me. As for the look, I don't think it looks outdated. I think it looks timeless. I am not a fan of a lot of the modern design decisions being made and I don't want to see everything look like that. So, as people throw this around all the time, I did the one thing that I can do, and that is ask random people on the internet why they think it's old and outdated, why they think it is buggy. And I got a lot of responses, a lot more responses than I had expected. And uh there was quite a bit to filter through. To be fair, when I do this same video on why people keep using X11, there are more comments, so keep an eye out for that one. Now, of course, some people didn't understand the task. Looks outdated is such a dumbass complaint to have about software. It really just means doesn't conform to current Silicon Valley trends. In my opinion, default KD looks nicer than anything Microsoft or Apple released in the past 10 years. Not that that's a high bar to clear. Now, I agree. absolutely agree, but I'm looking for people who actually have issues with it. Now, I've tried to filter out the ones which I know for a fact are just blatantly wrong, are based on ancient versions of KDE that are not true at all anymore, but there might still be some which are not entirely correct. But I wanted to get a general feel for the vibe people have with KDE. Now, here's the problem we have when we talk about a desktop like KDE. There are people that have issues with their environment, but those issues are not actually present anymore in KDE. Great example being this one. My only beef with KDE is that on Wayland when I unplug my dock, most my windows get stuck off screen and I have to restart them from the taskbar. This is an issue that was reported and this is an issue that has been fixed. It was fixed in 6.0. I have a feeling this is a user who is on an LTS DRO running 527. This is a problem that KD has to deal with and it sort of muddies the water on the current state of the environment. Gnome has the same problem as well. It's just Gnome doesn't for whatever reason have this reputation of being buggy. For some reason that exists with KD. I don't really know why, but there are people running 3 4year-old versions of KDE who they have a very different experience than what someone's going to have if they're on something like Arch. Let's go to this one. SDM is easily the worst part of the experience. This is a totally fair take and the KD developers agree with you as well. This is why they're trying to work on a better display manager than using STDM. The reason SDDDM is bad isn't because SDM is bad. The reason it's bad is it's not as tightly integrated as what GDM is over on the Gnome ecosystem. SDDDM is a third party solution that you can use with anything. As such, there's only so much that KDE can do to make it nicely interact with what they're trying to do in the environment. With GDM, they have full control over it and they have it as a core part of the environment. I personally think the biggest fault with how KD looks lies with the default color schemes and more specifically breeze dark. Breeze dark and KDE feels like an afterthought. Comparing how KD looks on breeze light and dark makes you feel that most design decisions were made with the light mode in mind without much thought to how it looks like in the dark mode. An example of this are the small colorful icons that are used in the settings menu. They look nice enough in breeze light but look downright hideous and outdated in breeze dark. Another example are the lines that separate various panels in KDE apps. They are often too thick and look outdated in the dark mode, but look just right in the light mode. Now, maybe this is a hot take, but personally, I really like Breeze Dark. I always ran it. I never really found a reason to change the theme of KDE. It was a perfectly good dark theme. However, I have heard a lot of people say very similar things to this. They like breeze light. They think breeze light looks really good, but breeze dark, there's just something off about it. I'm not a designer. I don't even have issues with breeze dark personally, but I know a lot of people have said very similar things. For me, it's just the looks. I simply have a strong preference for how Mac looks/ looked before Liquid Glass and how Gnome/ Limid Waiter look. This is totally fair, right? I understand that people who aren't designers can't really articulate exactly what about the design vibes with them more, but there is a reason why Gnome looks the way it does. There is a reason why Mac OS looks the way it does. The reason why it looks the way it does is there are people that think that is a better design direction. I would disagree. I like KD's look myself, but if that's what you vibe with more, hey, that's totally fine. And here's a more concrete example. First thing that comes to mind is that it has too many high contrast hairlines in the UI. KD makes use of a lot of line separators between UI elements. I really like this because it gives a clear visual distinction between UI elements. This is nice and this is what I like to see. But what you see in a lot more quote unquote modern UIs is this sort of open free flowing thing where there isn't a clear visual distinction between each element. Mac OS does this. Gnome does this. And if that's what you like, I get why seeing something more Windows 7esque is going to seem weird and out of place. The icon set I feel made slightly more legible. The restart icon or the sound icon are some examples of this. Make it flat or not, but make it coherent and clear. And this is not the only person that complained about the icon. The default thin line icons are very ugly. I was playing around with theming and even just changing icons to any smoother ones and changing the font to a nice semi-bold in modernizes the look significantly. And this one, the default iconography, yes, we can change them, but that does not change the fact that the default icons look outdated. Obviously, when you hear something like it's outdated, it's kind of hard to take that feedback and really do anything with it. But at least this is pointing to a specific thing that users have an issue with. It is the icon set. There is something about the icon set which doesn't align with modern design standards. It might be trying to go for that, but it doesn't entirely get there. Honestly, I do not like how QT looks in general. Application theming is inconsistent due to no real centralized design standard. I think they're hitting on a real point here, just in the wrong way. KD has a problem where there's three or four different ways to style an application. This can lead to inconsistencies in theming. This is a problem the KD devs are well aware of and something where solutions being worked on. This is how you get union. The UI is regularly pretty overcluttered. I do see a lot of other people saying that there is a lot of buttons, a lot of UI elements. And if you're someone who is expecting something again more akin to Gnome where there's a very sparse UI with a lot of functions removed, yeah, I understand why going back to something more again Windows 7esque absolutely is going to feel kind of cluttered. And on the topic of clutter, the last time I used it, it was very customizable, but just not in the ways I wanted. I'm not going to call it outdated. The apps and menus look like a teenager's bedroom. There are too many menus and buttons everywhere you see, and the order they're in are not intuitive and look messy. The devs probably can make sense of it, and maybe a longtime user, but a new user is definitely going to struggle a lot. KDE has too many options. You right click anywhere and it's 34 items. It also looks like Windows 7. Not saying it's a good or bad thing, just not the current trend. Now, KDE is never going to be an environment where there's just not many options to select. KDE is the environment you go to if you want to configure a lot. At the same time, the devs have acknowledged that there are some settings which are redundant and don't really need to be there. As an example, there is no reason to offer settings where there is a factually incorrect one where you can pick a setting that is going to be broken. That is something that should be automatically selected and the selection of it should not be in the control of the user. As for a lot of other things, with there being a lot of customization, with there being a lot of menus, yes, it's not the current design trend, but at the same time, I'm happy that KD has accepted that this is the direction it wants to go. It does not want to accept that we have to strip out a bunch of functionality, that we have to make a very simple environment. It is trying to cater to people that want a lot of options. For me specifically, it's the borders, outlines, which we've already talked about, and the fonts. The fonts and button sizes never match up. The font gets cut off in buttons at times. The font sizing doesn't match at times. It's not consistent throughout. I care about font and spacing a bit too much. The outlines and separates just look outdated. That's it. I personally don't really care about fonts that much. It's just never really been something that really appeals to me. I did switch to in at some point. It frankly looked exactly the same as the prior font. I'm sure it was different. I know it was a big deal when in came along. I literally couldn't tell a difference. For whatever reason on my laptop, it's really laggy and slow while Gnome runs smooth like butter. The funny thing is in the past it was exactly the opposite on the same machine. I have a feeling they might be using early KDE6. I never really had lag issues myself, but early KDE6 had some really bad caching problems. And this goes back to what I was saying before where there are users who were going to have problems and are going to keep complaining about problems even though in the project and in a lot of distros like Arch, Fedora, Gen 2, the problem has been fixed for a long time. I do like Katie in many ways though its touchpad gestures suck compared to Gnome and the reply is saying basically the same thing. They use XFC on their desktop and Gnome on their laptop specifically for this reason. I am not a laptop user nowadays and even when I was I didn't really care about touchpad gestures. I was happy to have scrolling and right click. That was all I cared about. But I know there are people that really like that touchpad experience, really like to be able to control things like that. And if you feel like it's not as good, I get it. It makes sense. Personal experience, it crashes a lot for no reason. I've had issues, not a lot, but I've definitely had issues where it just crashed when I was playing a game. It's like once every 2 or 3 months now. Is it because of the game? Is it because of the GPU drivers? Is it because of KDE? It is really hard to say. Like random inconsistent crashes, it's really hard to point out exactly where on the stack it happens. What I can say though is since I've been on Neri, I haven't actually seen problems like that. I also like my menu bar to hide automatically and it bugs out whenever it does hide or when I need it to be shown. Yeah, I have the opposite problem where I want it to be hidden. Like I want it to hide automatically and for some reason it just reappears again. I don't know why it reappears. I don't know how to get it to unreappear because it will just stay there even though there is a window directly where the trigger point is to make it hide. And here's another one talking about crashing. Occasionally KDE Plasma crashes and the screen becomes messy and I have to wait until I can use my computer again. And that might be because I'm using Arch. So in this case, I'm going to assume they're on a fairly up-to-date version of KD if they're on Arch. Again, my experience hasn't been that crash heavy. This might be the specific GPU they're using. Maybe an Nvidia GPU, maybe an old GPU where there's problems that aren't really being addressed. Again, I had crashes. Everything crashes at some point, but it wasn't enough to be a problem. On a wide enough screen, I'm assuming like a ultra wide or super mega ultra wide, whatever the the really ultra wide ones are, the taskbar gets really laggy. It has an invisible border for determining if there's a window close to it to hover or lay flush with the bottom of the screen. Moving windows around trigger this and causes massive lag spikes. You can turn the floating off, but the lag still occurs. The only fix is to create a small window under the dock to force detection to short circuit. Huh. I don't use any really mega crazy wide screens. I have a regular 60 by 9 screen. It's 1080p. This sounds like it might be a GPU issue though. It might be an issue with it not being very well optimized on slower hardware. And this is a problem that I have seen in various other things with KDE like the caching issue where it was lag spiking real bad on mechanical hard drives. KD suffers from really serious font rendering issues in fractional scaling. Really, every time I tried KD on a device where it's necessary to use fractional scaling, letter shapes are just all over the place. No matter if I used Arch of Adora, no matter which laptop I used, fonts don't render correctly unless fractional scaling is not used, which obviously is not a good thing if you want to use fractional scaling. Um, frankly, the solution to this problem is just don't need fractional scaling. This is like the reason I don't ever want to get a 4K screen. I'm gonna wait until I know fractional scaling is perfect before I even remotely think about it. Here is more discussion on clutter. I find KDE cluttered. Although it has great features, the focus on many apps like mail and others which other desktop environments do as well is a waste of time. Now I I look every environment has their own reimplementations of applications. I do think yeah in many ways it is a waste of time but you can't really find KDE to be at fault when literally everybody does that. Despite some lack of features, I went to Gnome for a more cohesive design and a less cluttered interface. Here is another one. KD has a fundamental flaw, which is its adherence to Windows design language based on a billion cascading context menus. Unless they change that, I'm sticking to Gnome. And really, if you want to do what KD is doing and have a lot of things you can do, there's not really a good way to do that without it feeling cluttered. Because what you end up having otherwise is really really annoying to use interfaces where you have to scroll way too much to get to information. I think in the case of KDE unless they want to go and strip out a bunch of functionality the clutter is actually better. Now there is a kind of button you can remove and that is the apply buttons. This is something a lot of software is doing, a lot of environments are doing where instead of having an apply, it will just do an autosave. I understand why people like this. I understand why this is the direction that things are going. At the same time, however, it can create problems like in Cosmic where you try to change a setting and even though they have optimized quite a bit, the settings menu is still incredibly laggy. And that is just by the very nature of every time you change a setting, it automatically saves. So trying to change the same setting a bunch of times creates a giant lag spike. I prefer apply buttons because everything is done all at once. As for other buttons, everything is a button. Again, like the whole clutter thing, I get it. I know a lot of things are kind of moving away from that idea and stripping things out, but I don't necessarily agree that this is a good direction to go with things. Now, DRO packaging and this is something I have talked about in the case of Arch where you can install a minimal plasma experience and you can use that. But because you're in a minimal plasma experience and that is not the way that it intends for you to do it, there is a lot of random things that break without any real indication that they were going to break. There's no warnings over packages missing things like that. In some cases there are now as they get pointed out but KD allows for a minimal experience but is not tested for a minimal experience. It is tested in something like Neon or Fedora where everything in the suite is available. KDE is lacking in accessibility features. The fact that I can't get an on-screen keyboard that isn't buggy shitty touchscreen focused and KD and Wayland is complete I've heard a lot of people say that the onscreen keyboard experience on Gnome is vastly better. Frankly, from what I can see, the Steam Deck and Steam OS is basically the only really good onscreen keyboard we get. Unless you look at the mobile Linux space, simply CSD. I don't know if they're saying they like CSD or don't like CSD, but it is a trend in modern applications to heavily make use of CSD. It's the case over on Mac OS. It's the case over on Gnome. And I get it. I personally don't like the trend. I feel like these applications end up just feeling really broken outside of the environment they're designed for. But I get it. We've talked about a lot of these things already, but KDE wallet, this feature is so absurdly intrusive, awkward, and a pain to disable that it's borderline malware. Now, I think that's going way too far. It actually is quite easy to disable. It's just not something that is often talked about. There is a single line setting you can make that completely disables it. The wallet is an important thing, right? I I get it. I know why the wallet is there. It is so you can actually encrypt passwords that are saved locally on your system. At the same time, if you don't save passwords locally on your system, it's really really annoying that everything constantly bugs you about it. Now, for some reason, I forgot to save the link. Um, it was somewhere a bunch of people mentioned the same thing, though. Uh, they've had issues with drag and drop. Now, drag and drop issues aren't necessarily KDE. That's more of a Whand in general issue and is something that definitely needs to be properly ironed out. The last one I want to show you isn't actually on YouTube. This one is over on Blue Sky. I did actually post this over on Twitter and Blue Sky as well. It's just a lot of the same things had been said. This person had issues with the fact that a lot of the buttons are rounded, but you have these square corners, so it feels kind of inconsistent, right? Like you've got rounding in one place and then right angles in another. I'm sure that there is a lot more that could be said. At the same time, though, I don't want to be for like 3 hours reading 700 comments. I think we've hit on most of the main things that were brought up that weren't just people running old versions and had old problems. KDE is a really good environment and I personally really like it. I think right now it is the best desktop environment available on Linux. At the same time though, I understand why some people might have issues with it and why some people might feel like it's buggy in some cases because there are bugs, but many of those are people running old versions. As for the look and feel, I understand why people think it looks outdated. It's not following the latest design trends. Like the person we saw at the start saying, it's not following those bubbly Silicon Valley design trends. And if that's what you're looking for, this is not going to be what you want. At the same time though, if you're someone looking for something that is not that you want to go back to a, in my opinion, better time in computing, I think KD has a lot for you. It's not necessarily outdated. It's a different direction that things could have gone down. But what do you think? Do you actually think it is outdated and buggy and all these terrible things and it's a horrible environment? I'd love to know your thoughts down below, especially if you're involved in KD in some way. Do you want to see some sort of design changes? Do you feel that a lot of these criticisms were fair or unfair? I'd love to hear what you say. So, if you like the video, go like the video. If you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here, check out the Patreon scribes barrap linked in the description down below. That's going to be it for me and KDA. [Music] [Music] something like this.