Will KDE 6.1 Work?
Hearing the announcement that KDE 6 would be released with Fedora 40 was exciting, but my excitement was short-lived
I tried a bunch of desktop environments, even the very early releases of the current desktop environments or the ones that popped up but couldn’t survive too long, like Unity (it is still active, by the way). During work time, I am mostly on the terminal. Still, after that, I would like to use a proper desktop environment, and choosing an appropriate desktop environment is the most problematic part of the Linux world. I also tried tiling window managers (specifically i3), but I don’t want to go in this direction after nearly all-day-long terminal screens. Believe it or not, I want a proper, eye-relaxed, functional desktop environment.
I was a big fan of GNOME in the early times because they were delivering what it needed to be there. After a while, I didn’t remember precisely which version (the year was 2011) they tried to be innovative, but it didn’t feel good. For example, you do not have desktop icons. There can be options for this, but you cannot try to force it. Ubuntu is modifying features like desktop icons, but the default or stock GNOME no longer has them. If you are editing the default or stock GNOME, you are becoming late for the latest release, and it happens all the time in Ubuntu.
KDE has always been a big contender for GNOME, but they also include weird features by default. I remember that when they enabled “single click” to open anything, I was like, “What?” Even though it was optional for Windows at that time, KDE made it the default action.
There are other significant efforts, too… Mate, XFCE, LXQT, Cinnamon, Deeping, Budgie, Pantheon, Cosmic, name it. However, most were either born from GNOME’s weird desktop interface “evolution” or tried to be more macOS-like. The only one that puts actual new features in a brand new programming language approach is Pop_OS with Cosmic Desktop.
As you can understand from my wording, I am not a big fan of GNOME anymore, but they are the only ones currently dominating the desktop environment with up-to-date Linux distributions. I don’t want to use a Linux distro or desktop environment as a decade-old feeling, and GNOME is the only safe way to do it (although they have some funding issues). I have a love-to-hate relationship with GNOME. I will give more details about my GNOME experience in a different article.
My feelings became more evident with GNOME when I purchased a 4K monitor. GNOME’s fractional scaling is just a joke, and I need to install the GNOME Tweaks tool and apply the scaling factor more custom inside because GNOME settings are either too small for 4K (100%) or too big (200%, 300%), but nothing in between. Great, I need to install an additional application to actually see what’s written on my screen!
Then I jumped to KDE lagoon because their scaling factors are reasonable, and it is a desktop I can enjoy using. I used version 5 and was waiting for version 6 with Fedora 40. I planned a clean Wayland install, but boom: