NOTE: I'm strictly talking about stock GNOME and stock KDE.

As someone who has tried GNOME and KDE both, I don't really understand what people on reddit mean when they say "GNOME has a more consistent user interface" or "GNOME is more polished". Don't get me wrong, this is absolutely not a hate post on GNOME. I have been a GNOME user for a very long time (still use it on my laptop), I'm mentioning this so that it that gives me some credibility to say what I'm about to say. Almost all posts fail to point out concrete example(s) as to why they think GNOME's UI is more consistent than KDE.

Is simplicity being equated with consistency here?

If not, then I don't really think GNOME and adwaita applications are as consistent as KDE applications.

Most KDE applications tend to have the same the decoration, whereas a lot of GNOME applications are yet to be ported to the GTK-4 libadwaita design (take gnome-boxes for instance). On stock KDE, I have yet to see an application that doesn't naturally fit into the aesthetics of the system. For me, UI consistency is just "having the same aesthetics and experience everywhere", then wouldn't KDE and its ecosystem be more consistent then GNOME's ecosystem?

I did feel like KDE's applications are a bit cluttered at first because of the amount of options available to me and the fact that I'm used to the simplicity of GNOME (I call it simple because it intentionally exposes fewer options to the user and implements limited features in its core applications). However, I don't really think having a lot of settings that the user can change and is natively exposed by the desktop environment makes it any less inconsistent or consistent. I have been overwhelmed by the extent of configurability, sure, but I haven't experienced any noticeable inconsistency on KDE.

What am I missing?

Is my definition of consistency incomplete?

Even libreoffice (which looks quite dreadful in GNOME) looks quite polished on KDE.

GNOME's core applications are highly polished and consistent with the new design but I have noticed more inconsistencies on GNOME than I have on KDE. That's not to say either one of them is inconsistent, both of them are fairly consistent, but it's just that when people argue that GNOME's UI is more consistent than KDE, I don't really understand how or why they think that.

I would like to hear if you have encountered anything that you would consider to be inconsistent on KDE when compared to your experience in GNOME.

No AI was used in the making of this post! (if that matters)

Hi everyone!

A new release of Material Decoration, the KWin decoration with application menus and action search integrated into the titlebar, is available.

Tiling popup

The biggest addition is a Windows 11-style tiling popup. Press and hold Maximize/Restore to choose where to snap your window. Alongside the usual halves and quarters, the popup displays your current screen’s custom KWin layout, which you can edit with Meta+T.

You can also enable opening the popup simply by hovering over Maximize/Restore. This is optional and disabled by default, with a configurable delay. The popup supports both mouse and keyboard navigation.

Uniform colors

Now Menus can follow the decorated window’s color scheme. Enable “Menus follow decoration colors” under Menu and Search, either globally or through a window-specific exception. It is disabled by default.

Other changes you’ll notice:

• Material’s menus no longer appear as separate windows in Overview and Grid View.
• More informative tooltips explain the available press-and-hold actions and point you to Meta+T for editing custom layouts.
• Dragging from Minimize, Maximize or Close no longer accidentally triggers their press-and-hold actions.
• The decoration preview in System Settings renders correctly, without the gaps and visual artifacts reported previously.
• The KCM configuration module uses the modern KDE tab style.

There are also fixes to menu updates and search, including more reliable results when applications change their menus and better handling of open search and overflow menus.

A couple of things to know when updating:

• The tiling popup uses the included Material Tiling Popup KWin script, enabled by default. After its first installation, log out and back in so KWin can discover it.
• For security reasons and to simplify the codebase, Window exceptions now offer exact matching or plain-text substring matching instead of regular expressions. If you used regex-based rules, please review them.

How to get it

• Build from source: https://github.com/guiodic/material-decoration
• On Arch and derivatives, install material-kwin-decoration-git from the AUR. Precompiled package is available in chaotic-aur. There is not yet a PKGBUILD for the stable version, it will be available soon. The -git version can be regarded as effectively stable, as it is used by the developer on a daily basis in a work environment.
• (K)Ubuntu (26.04+): a deb package is available: https://github.com/guiodic/material-decoration/releases/tag/26.10.28

Requirements

• Plasma 6.5+ for the master branch, working older versions are in other branches but are not updated/maintained.
• Works both on Wayland and X11 session!

Feature requests? Bugs?

• open an issue here: https://github.com/guiodic/material-decoration/issues

Anybody who is currently running Plasma Bigscreen having a problem with changes to System settings within the Bigscreen settings not saving once you back out? Any togglable setting changes get changed back when I back out.

Changes are saved everywhere else, just not any changes I make specifically under the 'System' tab within the Bigscreen settings menu.

The only setting I am able to change within this menu is the theme. I also can't set any shortcuts.

I achieved this in GNOME with an extension very easily but am completely new to KDE and it's kind of a make or break thing because it's such a good workflow for me.

This has been going on for about 2-3 weeks now. I'm on Fedora KDE, and if I put the computer from sleep, next time it wakes up, I get a black screen, and the RGB on my keyboard doesn't turn on. The fans spin and the computer is powered on, but nothing is happening.

I finally tried gnome just to see, and it worked fine there.

Is this some KDE issue then? Anyone else having issues with it lately?

I'm not home now, but I'll post a few journalctl logs when I can.

https://reddit.com/link/1xgyof5/video/ki38i08im1yh1/player

Hi! I’m the author of Shiftray, an app that puts asusctl and Cardwire into one small Qt window that opens at the tray icon. I use it daily on a TUF Gaming A15, Fedora 44, Plasma 6 on Wayland.

This is update on how the user may use the app.

It follows your Plasma theme. Every change it makes to the system is listed in Extra → System changes with an Undo button.

GitHub: https://github.com/sprinterz5/shiftray

It’s an early release and so far tested on one laptop, so I’d love feedback from other ASUS users: what’s missing, what breaks?

This is a shout out to the wonderful plugin for Dolphin called KFind. Why it is not installed by default on every KDE distro, I am not sure. If anyone has any ideas as to why this would be the case, do let me know. It can be run as it's own application, but its real value is its integration with KRunner and especially Dolphin. It's amazing how such a simple application can be so powerful. And I shake my head at forums who instantly recommend dropping to the command line to search for files or folders. I mean, yeah, that's impressive, but this is real world mother-in-law territory that make up the majority of computer users!

I think one of the most powerful features which I never used until I knew it existed was the ability to search by time constraints. For example, only search files touched in the last two days or two hours. If you haven't used it, give it a go. I think you'll really appreciate KDE all the more for it.

Web: https://apps.kde.org/kfind/

Also, around a month ago, there was a general advise post on advanced wildcard usage:
https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1wsqy0o/comment/pcohh48/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

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A month ago I posted WE Span, which runs Wallpaper Engine as a real Plasma 6 wallpaper on Wayland. Since then, Proton, Wine, PipeWire and Steam each found their own way to break it, so here’s what changed:

• Workshop browser built into the app, plus folders, favorites and per-wallpaper settings
• smoother scenes (WE’s frame limiter under Proton can’t count to 60)
• fixed: picture stuck in a corner after a monitor wakes up, Plasma slowing down after a few hours (my fault), scene clocks showing 1859
• new: if Steam gets stuck before launching Wallpaper Engine, WE Span now restarts Steam by itself, instead of you doing it while swearing

Still zero bug reports on GitHub. Either it’s perfect or nobody installed it 😂

github.com/Chaussure-sous-tes-pieds/wespan

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Hello all,

With the upgrade to Plasma 6.8, I have noticed a severe 3D performance degradation. My Superposition benchmark numbers went from 190ish fps to about 130ish fps. I have noticed several similar complaints. First my system info:

As you may have noticed, I am running an eGPU setup with a Radeon 7600XT as my gaming GPU however the display is connected to the iGPU via DisplayPort. To make matters worse, I have a Virtual monitor configured via amdgpu driver parameters to keep the eGPU from shutting down because a display is not connected.

This is NOT a bug report or anything, I am just putting here my observations on how I got 90% of my previous performance (Plasma 6.7.5) back so people can do the same until the bugs are identified and patched.

1. System Settings / Display & Monitor -> Display configuration

The main culprit is the setting named Color accuracy:

Setting this one to "Prefer efficiency" increased my fps from 130ish to 150-155. This setting is the main culprit. Setting it to "Prefer color accuracy" will erase also the gains from disabling compositing effects below.

1. System Settings / Window management -> Desktop Effects

DISABLE all effects. This disables most of the compositing going on and this added another 20fps so I went from about 150-155ish (after the Color accuracy change) to about 175ish.

I have seen some reports about setting the variable KWIN_DRM_USE_COLOR_PIPELINE=1, this does nothing in my case. My primary card is already set by the system to the eGPU:

$ qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin supportInformation | rg -i drm
Name: DRM
OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT (radeonsi, navi33, ACO, DRM 3.64, 7.2.10-1-cachyos-bore)

I did experiment with KWIN_DRM_DEVICES but that obviously did not do anything. Now the only remaining issue for me is that the displaying iGPU is still presented to the programs so f.e. Superposition will give me a memory warning (I have 512MB of memory allocated in UEFI) which can break some games. If anybody has a hint how to change that (short of connecting the display to the eGPU) do let me know.

I am aware there's a color pipeline handling fix ready for 6.8.2 but that will only help with part of the performance degradation, the compositing part will still remain.

If anybody has a clue how to disable compositing for fullscreen applications do let me know. I tried searching for the answer but that gave me no usable solutions. Oh, I am using DRI_PRIME variable to redirect the rendering to the eGPU before starting games/benchmarks. Maybe that is wrong now with X11 gone but it still seems to work (or I am missing again something).

EDIT 27.10.2026: I have managed to fix my problem by excluding the eGPU from KWIN_DRM_DEVICES. I can still redirect rendering to the eGPU via DRI_PRIME but kwin does not use it for any compositing. So I went back to 6.7.5 performance level even with Color accuracy set to "Preffer color accuracy" and all the default compositing effects enabled. I guess anybody with a single GPU will not be that lucky.

Spectacle's text extraction (with Tesseract) is near unusable that I end up just taking my screenshot to an LLM and telling it to extract the text. It also doesn't handle QR codes. These shortfalls have me wondering what solutions other people use for text and link extraction. Thank you!

i have arch with latest plasma

    Plasma Version: 6.8.1
    KDE Frameworks Version: 6.31.0
    Qt Version: 6.12.0
    Kernel Version: 7.2.11-arch1-1 (64-bit)
    Graphics Platform: Wayland

and i disabled titlebars in the window-decoration by using the windowclass (org.kde.*|systemsettings) as a selector to disable the titlebar.

with normal breeze i can drag windows like dolphin because there is a place next to the location bar where you can drag the window. same with konsole and almost all other windows. in most applications you have some areas where you can drag.

but as soon as i use "Breeze(union)" this dragging stops.

is this a bug or a feature? would be great to know if the new behaviour (no dragging) is by intention and the current one (breeze: dragging without a titlebar is possible) is an unwanted sideeffect.

i always can use META-key+mouse but with breeze(union) this is the only option when there is no titlebar.

It's 2026 and KDE Mouse Settings still don't work for me.

I have "Invert scroll direction" enabled under System Settings - Mouse, just as I have it enabled for the Trackpad.

Inverted scroll works on the trackpad but not on the mouse, even after rebooting or toggling the setting all the way off and back on again.

It's as if the setting does nothing at all. And I miss X11 :(

EDIT: Resolved. For some reason my "Mouse" settings show 5 different mice connected to my laptop. I enabled "Invert scroll direction" for all five of them and now I can scroll in peace.

It seems that the automatic generated calendar items from Google, like appointments or reservations are not imported into Merkuro or KOrganizer. Manually created items do work. Anyone know why this is happening? Limitations of Akonadi or something else going on?

I wrote a small bash script that prints CPU, RAM, temps, GPU, battery and network speed as one line, so I can use it in a Plasma command output widget. It mostly reads from /proc and /sys, so no lm_sensors needed.

This is my first repo ever, so any feedback on the script or the README would help. I’ve only tested it on my own laptop (EndeavourOS + KDE) and my GPU shows N/A, so I don’t know if the NVIDIA/AMD part works properly. If you try it, let me know how it goes.

edit : adding the link https://github.com/YNGVI-OPS/dynamic-metrics-bar

Check replies of original post for second issue

I'm running the latest KDE Plasma Neon. I'm having some trouble with Thunderbird and looking in Discover for which one I've installed I see a package named "Firefox and Thunderbird Archive". I don't recall seeing it before. I've installed perhaps all of the versions of the Thunderbird packages from Discover at one time or another. Maybe it came in with one of those.

I can't remove it. Dependency resolution failed.

What bothers me about the package is that it has ONE review, which gave two stars. It has FULL ACCESS to the system. It has an unknown author. The description says:

Adds the Mozilla Firefox debian archive to the sources.list.d of apt if it isn't already present.

Is this a legitimate package?

TIA,.

There is a way to make the taskbar dodge the windows, but is it possible to make it get smaller?

hello everybody, since there's a bug that freezes some laptops that use kde plasma, i've decided to switch to niri for a bit until it gets fixed.

Currently, I'm having problems changing theme aspects using the nwg-look software, everytime i apply changes they don't happen globally unless I restart the system, and only happen instantly on some apps, like libreoffice, but not on dolphin or konsole.

So I'd like to ask if there might be some interference from something that gets installed along with kde plasma or a config of some sort.

I'm not well versed in the technicalities of many things on linux desktop, so any help is appreciated, thanks!

Also, im using the environment variable QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk3 so that qt apps follows gtk themes.

Does anyone know if weyland based Krdp will support log in pages for remote connections or is there a weyland alternative that allows this fuctionality. Worried about the dropping of x11 and dont really want a loginless machine that i need to leave open when im away from it.