You say KDE hangs, but what component hangs actually? It it plasmashell (other apps work but panel is dead?)? Kwin (windows move/respond to input?)? KDE apps?

I would suggest you to install a distro with kde (fedora KDE edition or open SUSE, not neon) if you’re not confident with administration. Use something like Kinoite for accidental breakage protection, or if you want to keep /home as is, install fedora 42 inplace (the new installer).

Not only my experience but also that of many KDE devs say that fedora KDE is probably the best mainline KDE experience (ignoring niche distros or customized KDE).

Also, don’t use xorg session. Always log in to default wayland session unless you have incompatible usecase (in that case you know what you’re doing).

Sounds familiar. I have tried it with many distros and it just isn’t usable. Gave up and ended up liking cinnamon more anyway.

Kde works great for me, I don’t have any special hardware. I have used it with fedora and bazzite.

I think Linux nerds are clowns who don’t understand that not everyone wants to learn what -xvf means just to extract a goddammed file.

Kde is solid and requires zero fuckery in my experience to work well. This is in fedora, suse, arch (endeavour), void.

In my experience KDE on OpenSuse and probably Fedora are rock solid. The first and nowadays probably also the second (which has moved to first tier instead of being a sub-distribution) are considered reference implementations of industry strength distros.

My thought would be that you’ve added something slightly broken to the mix which breaks KDE. It can happen. Linux is complicated, KDE is also complicated, what annoys one desktop can be ok with another. If you want to figure out what the problem is, you’ll have to go through your various system logs to see what fails.

Do you have an nvidia GPU? It’s the most important thing to know.

KDE is just KDE. It has clear pros and cons. Hopefully one day they will take care of the cons.

I’ve never had those issues with KDE. I use Garuda dr460nized and Mokka. Both are based on Arch and use KDE.

I use KDE with Chimera Linux which is only in beta. Rock solid.

I’ve been using KDE for over 4 years on over a dozen different machines and 5+ distros and I’ve never had major problems with crashing.

I do experience small bugs fairly often. Maybe once every month or two, little glitches or odd window behavior. Nothing huge, but they do happen. To be fair, I like to modify and customize KDE quite a bit, so that is probably causing some of my issues.

In my experience, Cinnamon is the most stable DE I’ve used by far. Least amount of random bugs, simple but stable. I don’t think I’ve ever had Cinnamon crash on me actually.

I’ve never had issues like that on Kubuntu, Debian, or EndeavourOS. KDE is great and I love it.

I have been using KDE on Arch across several machines for about 3 years now, then Manjaro for a year before that. At no point have I experienced instability or issues like that. Especially that last one; I’m the sort of person who regularly has 10+ tabs open on laptops with a fraction the amount of RAM that you have.

I would say that is definitely not normal. If that happened to me, I might search online or check journalctl -b -p 3 to see if it yields any clues.

KDE just works on my machine, which is lower specs than yours. I’ve never had it crash. I use Endeavor OS, so it came with it by default (which was part of the reason I chose it).

Edit: I don’t do much tweaking of the KDE settings other than the main color scheme. I also have never had an issue with waking from sleep on Endeavor (but I recall in years past that was an issue with most distros I tried and unrelated to KDE since I was less a fan of its style back then and didn’t use KDE). My set up is a normal desktop PC that I use daily for everything, including gaming.

openSUSE has the best integration of KDE, but I wouldn’t expect to see issues like yours on any distro, really…

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.