Why I Like KDE

2021-06-06

I've been using the KDE Plasma desktop environment for almost 6 months now and it's quickly become my favorite ever.

With other desktop environments and window managers I've tried I usually run into different versions of the same problem: I can't get the level of customization that I want. This might be because it simply isn't very customizable in the first place, or my customizations are brittle and break with every upgrade, or customizations just take too much effort.

KDE hits that sweet spot for me. Available options and tweaks are easy to find and there's absolutely tons of them. It might be slightly intimidating to newcomers who aren't used to such deep customization (it was to me when I first tried it a few years ago), but it's certainly better in that regard compared to window managers that need you to dive into a lengthy config file to change anything. You can get just about any workflow you want by tweaking KDE for a few minutes.

And that sort of brings me to my second point. With KDE I'm able to get the perfect balance between keyboard-driven and mouse-driven workflows. With the Krohnkite KWin script I get really capable tiling window management with plenty of keyboard shortcuts -- and I came from i3. But my main machine is a laptop that I need to sometimes connect to a TV, and that's when I think keyboard-driven workflows start to become a pain. Fortunately it's still easy to navigate around multiple workspaces and launch programs with only a mouse, and KDE Connect lets me do it by using my phone as a touchpad.

Long story short, KDE is super versatile and surprisingly user friendly for how much control it offers you. Give it a try if you haven't and are looking for something new.

- moddedBear

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