Hello folks. I use many distro from Debian to Fedora to OpenSuse and Arch. I also use many window managers like i3, dwm and qtile. On desktop environment, I use XFCE the most. Currently, I am looking to try something new, hence KDE.

I am looking for something with a beautiful UI and works out of the box. So, something on the same spectrum as XFCE but more pretty.

I tried out the distros with preinstalled KDE: Fedora KDE, Manjaro KDE, Kubuntu.

The good: KDE is beautiful and very easy to use. I actually enjoy using my computer more.

The bad: it crashes… a lot even when I turn off all the animations. My system is not that slow: AMD 7 Pro with 64 GB of RAM. Some examples:

  • Logging in, KDE hangs for 30 seconds. Even when I finally see the desktop, I would need to wait a further 10 seconds to finally able to interact, i.e. click and open stuff.

  • After resume suspend, system would hang and there is nothing I can do except for a forced reboot.

  • Browsing the web with only 3 tabs opened, KDE also hang.

As much as I hate GNOME, everything just works. I installed the GNOME flavors of above distros and never experience any hiccups.

If KDE works for you, do you use a preinstalled distro and which one? How about if you install KDE from scratch, like Arch?

  • @stembolts@programming.dev
    13•2 days ago

    KDE Manjaro running on 4 or 5 of my machines, pure stability. It sounds like a hardware issue.

    Here are my suggestions to diagnose this.

    Option 1. Setup an ssh server, connect from a second computer (or phone via Termux), execute $journalctl -fe, and observe the journal from your second device when the crash occurs. That should help pinpoint the issue.

    Option 2. If you don’t have a second device, use a non-gui tty, access via Ctrl+Alt+F1. (Usually terminals are available F1 thru F6). Once again execute $journalctl -fe and observe it during the crash.

    Tbh option 2 may just be easier especially if you have minimal knowledge of ssh. Good luck, ping me back if you find this helpful and would like more perspective, and apologies if this doesn’t help you.

    If the entire computer crashes, boot into a terminal and browse journalctl history of previous boots, sorry I don’t have these commands off the top of my head but if you need them and ask I will get them for you.