I finally got fed up with tweaking Arch/DWM and switched to Manjaro with KDE on my main machine, I went through all the versions of Manjaro and all had their problems and I finally settled on KDE.

Looks good, allows me some tweaking, runs surprisingly light. Although, still some annoying bugs, the most annoying being when I open an application on my 1440p screen, KDE often opens it on my second monitor for no real reason.

> Although, still some annoying bugs, the most annoying being when I open an application on my 1440p screen, KDE often opens it on my second monitor for no real reason.

This here is my most hated thing about KDE. I run it on Debian so my version is pretty old compared, has it been fixed in newer versions? I have been thinking about switching to Neon, but I don't care for the Ubuntu base verses vanilla Debian.

No it hasn't, it's very inconsistent though. Emacs and some other software does it everytime, although most seem well behaved. I'm on 5.20, probably not the latest version I'd have if I were on Arch though.

Neon is not that much better and doesn't fix a lot of the issues.

I've found XFCE and cinnamon are the most stable/reliable DE's. I'm rocking Manjaro cinnamon right now.

XFCE had some weird virtual desktop behaviour where when I opened an application from the tray, it would open in my current desktop and not the desktop that I'd placed it.

Aside from that it was great, and there was probably some configuration option to stop that behaviour but I could not find it.

Actually I quite enjoyed Cinnamon, I cannot even remember what things I disliked but I'd just saw the new release of KDE and those small niggles were enough of an excuse to switch back to KDE hah.

I love KDE and think it is the best Linux desktop in terms of features and customization. Unfortunately it's just so damn buggy. Not in in unstable way, but there are just enumerable ways you can break it. It gets to the point that when you try something new that it has, you pause and think "Is this gonna break or stop working thus ruing my workflow again?"

It's why I went back to cinnamon. I mean in the realms of the phrase "Fuck, marry, kill", I'd fuck KDE, marry cinnnamon, and kill MATE.

If you hare looking for a more arch experience again, check out endeavouros. Phil and the Manjaro group have increasingly proved their incompetence.

There is funny business going on at manjaro, but by god do they deliver! I run 5 linux computers at home for various ends and I got tired of putting a new Ubuntu on them every now and then. At the time I looked at manjaro, other rolling distros couldn't even survive an update from the latest installation media to current (sidux). Arch is/was a hobby in itself and the opposite of what I was seeking, but it is an excellent foundation. Manjaro has kept these 5 machines for over 5 years through every possible update and it never broke them. Kernel switching is a joy. Driver installing switching is a joy. This is a very tall order.

That said I do hope endeavouros or others can fill Manjaro's immense boots.

Might I suggest Arcolinux to you? It sits closer to Endeavour and Arch with its packages, but also comes with many things preconfigured.

KDE maintainers have been pretty responsive when I opened bug reports, so if you haven't tried that avenue, it can't hurt.

I'll have to try KDE again, I always found it really messy and disorganised (but that was many years ago).

It's really hard not to have some bias, but I used OSX for work for about five years, currently been using Windows at work for about two years, and I still find Gnome to be the most usable and aesthetically pleasing desktop by far.

Do give KDE a try. I recently helped a friend migrate from Windows 10 to KDE. I have personally been using i3, XFCE and GNOME back and forth during the last decade, and the one time I tried KDE a few years back, it did not boot to desktop so I just switched back to GNOME.

After helping my friend setting up KDE I discovered the level of polish and customizability that KDE now offers. That same day I installed KDE on my own machine and soon after removed every GNOME component from my system. I have been using it the last few weeks and really feel at home!

Yeah, I was a Gnome user for past years ago along with Fedora. And I share the same Greg K.H feeling about that such big change called Gnome 3 that honestly I was not able to track it at all from UI perspective on a Fedora machine at that time. They together never convinced me for my daily job. In the other hand, KDE has evolved without that big major difference like Gnome 3 and now with Plasma 5 we have a very polished interface with great performance resulting is a pleasant experience on my daily basis. Basically now with ArchLinux + KDE on my laptop I have everything that I want as developer: an OS performing and booting at high speed (around 10 secs the whole OS + desktop env) and a great desktop experience. Such experience that you can not afford it using Windows or "even" Macos.

That's Linux empowering your computer. So that simple.

> I'll have to try KDE again, I always found it really messy and disorganised (but that was many years ago).

This was my reason for not using KDE for years. The UI these days is cleaner and leaner, rivaling XFCE in resource usage.

> I still find Gnome to be the most usable and aesthetically pleasing desktop by far.

This was my initial impression, as well. But if you want to do something that the GNOME team feels is superfluous, you're either out of luck or depending on some plugin that will break your DE if you upgrade GNOME.

On Plasma Desktop, almost everything is configurable, but it isn't overwhelming and disorganized like it was in KDE 3 & 4. There's a considerable amount of polish. Plugin bugs don't take down the entire desktop environment, either.

Have you tried Cinnamon? I would recommend Mint for trying it, you can install newer Kernel via Update Manager there.

Mint is great and I recommend it too for using Cinnamon but it's not remotely the only viable choice to try it out. Cinnamon works just fine in Debian/Devuan, and in Fedora, from my experience.

It still is tbh.

So you install Linux to install a bunch of proprietary software on it? I don't get the point.

Linux with a few blobs is still light-years better for your freedom than osx or windows. Plus, from a platform perspective, software built on windows or osx is categorically not free (in the strictest sense - even if the software is gpl, if it's built for a nonfree os, it's still not very useful in the grandest scheme of things even if it's better than if it were proprietary as well). However, software written for linux can be truly free.

Note when I say "written for" I'm not even really speaking very technically - lots of programs written nowadays won't really have any particular dependency on a library that's only available on a certain OS. But if you're using an application that's written in a platform-agnostic way but the programmer only develops it and uses it on a Mac, it's usually easy to tell. Both in terms of system interop/integration and how bugs are prioritized.

So, even if people do things you don't like on their linux install, it's still far better to have as many people on linux as we can get.

Linux isn't just an OS you use because you want to use free software.

For a good number of people it's just better than Windows and macOS.

Maybe so, maybe other people just don't know, for those who don't know it may be good to read how this all got started, so here's my two cents: https://www.gnu.org/

I understand this, and I am someone who started using free software for philosophical reasons. But if you're interested in free software succeeding, it's a better strategy to meet people where their needs are rather than push any particular selling point. If someone switches to Linux because their Steam games run smoother than on Windows, more power to them! And then we can sell them on all the free software that their distribution just happens to come with, and also educate them about the philosophical underpinnings along the way.

This is the way.

Even if you keep all of your proprietary applications, switching from Windows to Linux still means your system is less proprietary than before, so it's still a step in the right direction.

I'd prefer not to use Zoom or Slack, but my clients use them, so I end up using them, as well. Matrix is getting better, and I've heard good things about Jitsi and its clones, so hopefully one day I can ditch the proprietary apps for open ones.