KDE Plasma likes, dislikes, and would be nice to haves

By Iain Cuthbertson

With each new release of Ubuntu, I’ve stuck with the default desktop environment. These have worked well for me over the years, but thought I should see what else there is.

The only way for me to do it justice is to run KDE Plasma as my only desktop environment for a minimum of 2 weeks. So both my work station and my personal laptop are use KDE Plasma installed alongside Gnome 3 Shell on Ubuntu 19.10.

If I’m unhappy after the 2 weeks, I can always go back to Gnome. Or maybe try something else, like lxde or xfce.

I started on Sunday evening, and it’s now Wednesday afternoon. The following are my findings.

This is likely to be updated as I find new things or ways to fix niggles.

Likes

  • When an application shows in the “Task Manager” bar, one can click it to minimise the active window.
  • All icons showing in the “Task Manager” bar (Autokey is a GTK application, but can’t show its icon in Gnome 3, but manages to in KDE Plasma?).
  • Simple music controls on lock screen.

Dislikes

  • Even at max mouse sensitivity, it feels slower than on Gnome 3 - not good for a 3 monitor set-up - this may be subjective and not be an issue in time.
  • No option to locate the mouse cursor by pressing [ctrl].
  • Some windows don’t respond to a mouse wheel scroll until the window is clicked - this may be an issue only with GTK applications running on KDE Plasma.
  • Being asked for my SSH key in the terminal for every action - is there a key manager like in Gnome that I need to enable? Manually resolved by running ssh-add against each key required. Gnome does handle this a lot better 😐
  • Scrolling in an application window does not respond while a OSN is displayed - example: Spotify changing tracks

Things I’d like to see ported from Gnome 3 Shell

  • The option to only switch the central monitor when changing between virtual desktops.
  • Change between virtual desktops using [ctrl]+[alt]+arrow keys.

Things I’d like to see in all desktop environments

  • Option to have the cursor colour to invert as it passes over other colours - Windows does this.

  • Automatic window scaling based upon the native resolution of the monitor in use. If a window is moved from one monitor to another, and the resolution changes, the scale should adapt to keep it readable - Windows does this.