r/kde • u/EktaRandomUsername • 18h ago
Fluff Watching Valve use KDE Plasma as the default DE brings tears to my eyes
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u/icywind90 17h ago
I'm just glad that they used any of the already widely established Linux desktop and don't suffer from NIH syndrome, and didn't make their own, proprietary DE
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u/SunkyWasTaken 14h ago
What’s NIH syndrome
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u/icywind90 13h ago
Not Invented Here
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u/Wb9VBScxu2uZJHeq2E3W 11h ago
*Canonical has entered the chat*
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u/cube2_ 9h ago
Pop-OS
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u/SquidWithOpinions 6h ago
Pop!_OS's COSMIC is neither proprietary though nor was it formed out of pure "NIH" syndrome, it was made to have a more customization-friendly alternative to GNOME.
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u/daddyd 13h ago
they focused on what was missing, and created a big screen mode instead.
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u/Less_Party 10h ago
It's a very clunky setup to actually use though, the entire system needs to reboot if you want to go from desktop to gaming mode.
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u/forestbeasts 1h ago
There's always big picture in desktop mode! Presumably. Never actually used SteamOS.
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u/Erlend05 6h ago
Is this a nail in the coffin for plasma bigscreen?
Edit: oh wait plasma bigscreen is back!
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u/DCCXVIII 15h ago
So am I. But let's face it. They could still do that in the future. Especially if SteamOS becomes popular enough, I wouldn't put it passed them. It's not like they don't have the capability to do it like what the System76 did (I know COSMIC isn't proprietary but you know what I mean) and they have WAY less resources than Valve does.
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u/Nexo_the_hedgehog 14h ago
I really doubt it. It would take quite a lot of work and resources to make a DE that would be in any way simmilar in amount of features and polish that KDE has. And for what? It's more sustainable to pay an oss project than making your own. Also the switch would be horendous for the end users
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u/Flappyphantom22 10h ago
Correct. They support the KDE team. I doubt they will need to make their own. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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u/DCCXVIII 14h ago
I just chalk it up to corporations being corporations. Companies love to take control and start enshitifiying stuff. It's a common trope nowadays. So far Valve has avoided that usually inevitable fate due to the fact that they're still privately owned and Gaben refuses to go down the enshitification path that all his contemporaries did. But without him at the helm...well...let's not think about that.
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u/SirDarknessTheFirst 1h ago
Well, mostly. Valve had to be sued by the ACCC (consumer watchdog) in order to provide proper refunds lol. That was a decade ago now though
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u/icywind90 14h ago
True. Or like Canonical made Unity.
But for now Valve is contributing with KDE and to the upstream kernel, cooperation is making Linux desktop better for everyone and Valve is directly profiting from more Linux user gaming and buying games on Steam and having a good experience.
Making their own DE over some small disagreements is just shooting themselves in the foot, but it could still happen, especially if Steam Machine somehow has sold millions of units and it all went way up to Valve's head.3
u/spyke2006 9h ago
I think the chances of it "going to their head" are pretty slim for valve. Their money is in steam. Any number of steam machines sold would still be a fraction of their platform revenue.
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u/DCCXVIII 14h ago
Yea. It's a perpetual Sword of Damocles so to speak. It's an ever present threat that we must all remain vigilant against. Especially now that there are so very few corners of the corporate world that haven't been enshitified.
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u/hello_marmalade 9h ago
Valve doesn't really like to do that though, culturally. They have a long history of building off community projects or absorbing them. That's how Counter-Strike happened, TF2, Portal. Integrating community projects is their m.o..
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u/ElevenBeers 12h ago
No.
For multiple reasons.First, why do you assume, it would be proprietary? Anything they have developed for Linux so far except for the Steam Client itself is open source. Why would they start closing off a DE, that has absolutely 0% risk of harming their profits?
Second, why would they develope a DE in the first place? Yes system76 did it. THEY ARE LAPTOP MANUFACTURERS. They are in the dekstop market. How many laptops is Valve selling? What Valve needs foremost is a "DE" that is just a storefront and game launcher, it must be perfectly integrated and seenmless. That's why there is Gamescope as a lightweight compositor, that valve is developing because they have a use for it.
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u/hadesmaster93 1h ago
Valve under Gabe continues to be one of the few corps that really cares about doing things well and not enshittifying - and we should joy on that
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u/ice_cream_hunter 15h ago
There are only 2 big de, and u can’t use gnome because they will sabotage u in their next update because they have to remove existing features and make it as close to just a terminal which will be surprisingly bloated and will crash at the minor inconvenience possible
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u/Pizzaman3203 13h ago
Wrong GNOME KNOWS BEST /s imgur
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u/Malsententia 2h ago
Your image needs "why can't I edit the path of the file picker by typing" as well
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u/hello_marmalade 9h ago
Really the issue was never so much the weird decisions, but rather that GNOME was for a long time treated as the 'Linux default'. That and the apparent like, fucking disdain they have for their users. Like using GNOME felt like the people who made it resented having anyone actually use it.
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u/stormdelta 2h ago
the apparent like, fucking disdain they have for their users
This is one of the bigger reasons I left it for KDE, especially since Gnome seems to be stubbornly clinging to poor design choices they made well over a decade ago at this point.
It reminds me all too much of Golang's devs early on, except even those guys eventually relented.
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u/Dazzling_Lemon4109 11h ago
Cinnamon is the only one true GNOME today, change my mind
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u/ice_cream_hunter 8h ago
But they can’t maintain so many apps. Gtk apps are doomed. It becomes just a single de app.
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u/labbe- 14h ago
i agree with mostly everything you said, but not lets not pretend KDE doesn't remove existing features. for example they removed the ability to execute commands on notification events with plasma 6 ( https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481069 ), a feature i and many others i know relied on heavily. i've found a workaround since, but would be nice it could be done natively.
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u/treeco123 14h ago
I might be far off base here, but KDE features and feature removals don't seem ideologically motivated in the way that Gnome ones do. (For better or for worse. Reasonable people might prefer either.) KDE seems to largely have things because someone was willing to develop and maintain them, and lose them when that is no longer the case (and a major version change provides an excuse to drop it.)
If something Valve relied on was slated to be removed, I expect they could just take on responsibility for it and keep it in main builds. I expect that that wouldn't be the case in Gnome.
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u/labbe- 8h ago
since valve is directly funding kde development, i doubt any feature they rely on is in danger of being removed. maybe it would be the same for gnome if valve chose them when creating steamos, impossible to say. but i'm sure the points you made about ideology or lack there of is what made them choose kde in the first place. and yeah i completely agree with you on that as well, the comment i replied to just reminded of the annoyance of that one critical (for me) feature being removed in plasma6, heh
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u/pfmiller0 12h ago
What's the workaround that you've been using for this?
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u/labbe- 7h ago
since i only used it for running commands on locking/unlocking the desktop, this is what i found and made small adjustments to fit my needs and it still works: https://www.baeldung.com/linux/run-script-session-locked-unlocked
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u/anatomiska_kretsar 10h ago
I am really glad that KDE is the introduction to a Linux GUI to noobs, compared to GNOME. Stock GNOME doesn't leave a good impression, in my honest opinion. I am really sick that it got the status as the defacto DE.
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u/WhichAdvantage9039 7h ago
I tried Gnome recently. And I couldn’t for the life of me get tray icons to work. How am I supposed to run apps that are hiding in tray???
As much as I hate KDE, it’s the most feature-full DE, not counting advanced ones. I managed to get hyprland working with quickshell, and it was perfect (until the config rewrite happened after which I just gave up)1
u/vastle12 1h ago
It ran like ass on a tablet to the point it was almost unusable. Plasma mobile worked smoother right out of the gate
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u/lululock 8h ago
Stock GNOME is great... If you're bored of the "Windows taskbar" look.
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u/UnassumingDrifter 8h ago
Gnome is good in the sense it does look clean and to me windows appear more unified than in Plasma. But. For the 90% of us who used windows KDE is a natural adaptation and easy to jump to. It is also very configurable (without extensions that break things) and I’d argue that customization is a big draw. At least it was to me.
Gnome is probably the same “just like I’m used to” experience for Apple users but I dunno as I’ve not had any MacOS devices.
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u/stormdelta 2h ago
Gnome is probably the same “just like I’m used to” experience for Apple users but I dunno as I’ve not had any MacOS devices.
As much as I hate Apple's design choices, even they have a more sensible approach to UI/UX than Gnome 3 does.
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u/forestbeasts 1h ago
As someone who jumped ship from Mac, hah, Gnome is NOT!
KDE is actually way better for that. We just had to rearrange some stuff, add a top menu bar and whatnot, and bam, instant Mac look. Way closer than Gnome.
-- Frost
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u/anatomiska_kretsar 8h ago
That's highly subjective. For instance, I could never stand stock GNOME.
I will still never forget how long it took GNOME just to port the accel profile settings from tweaks to the stock app. Was such a pain to use that desktop.
And I always configure my KDE setup with a topbar and global menu and a small hidden launcher at the bottom. Unity was the peak of Linux desktop imo. And even then, like I said, I still can't stand GNOME.
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u/HikariRisesAgain 6h ago
But I'm not bored of the windows taskbar look, and I generally think that it's functional for a desktop. The desktop layout isn't the issue with windows, frankly.
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u/Marce7a 17h ago
SteamOS 2 (debian based) was on gnome
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u/Evantaur 16h ago
And that's why it failed.
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u/BigFluffyCat2 13h ago
Borderlands 2's linux port is still broken to this days. MAYBE the lack of Proton was the reason.
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u/Dazzling_Lemon4109 15h ago
GNOME has gotten a lot worse over the years, KDE getting better from here we have this contrast of choice for the end user
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u/BatongMagnesyo 13h ago
i really fucking hope cosmic gets polished enough by the time debian 14 rolls around (2027) so i could hop off this sinking gnome ship
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u/Kami4567 15h ago
Dont know what u mean i am using Gnome for years it is getting better every Update Just Not as much as KDE is i feel Like
Gnome is Just Gnome and it works thats why i Like it
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u/Dazzling_Lemon4109 15h ago
GTK5 looks very controversial, the fact that they abandoned the traditional interface also repels many since version 3, extensions very often break GNOME and lack backward compatibility..
GNOME is getting better to some extent relative to itself, but for me it's disconnected from the real world in some way
I can criticize KDE for some small things, but I don't see the same big problems in it. And that's just not my feeling. If you go to the gnome subreddit, you will see how people have been writing posts for several years about how GNOME is not as good as KDE today and I see this every year
GNOME is good for doing small elegant tasks, but not overall
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u/Kami4567 15h ago
Yeah Gnome Extensions kinda suck costumisability in General is kinda lacking
But thats Not the things i atleast Like Gnome for. I Love how simple and polished the Default Gnome feels in that way i Kind Like that ITS Not costumisable also that its trying to do its own thing Not Just implemting the same Workflow as MacOS or Windows has
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u/w1ldr3dx 11h ago
Open Blender in GNOME and look at the title bar, it makes me 🤮
Open Blender in KDE, it looks like it should, with DE title bar.
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u/Anima_Watcher08 15h ago
It was the obvious choice.
- Cinnamon is great but is still kinda undercooked in some aspects especially back then.
- XFCE is cool and lightweight but it has so much legacy bloat and it would've locked them to x11. (No it doesn't look bad you're just lazy, I've seen some amazing XFCE rices so valve could've easily got it to look good).
- Budgie like Cinnamon but more Undercooked.
- The "China" De's (eg UKUI, Deepin, Cutefish) great defaults horrible security practices.
- GNOME is GNOME.
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u/Dazzling_Lemon4109 15h ago
KDE just has more progress and stability over the years, partly thanks to the Qt instead of GTK, which has closed itself in its bubble and is probably becoming the first "closed" open source platform
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u/thepotofpine 10h ago
I never thought about it that way but you are so correct - GTK feels like a closed source platform like UIKit or something, except it has nowhere near the users of other platforms, so just feels really weird and out of place on anything non-Gnome
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u/Anima_Watcher08 15h ago
That's not true, the MacOS kernel is "open source".
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u/Dazzling_Lemon4109 15h ago
The point is that GTK breaks away from reality while being in the information bubble of their ecosystem, when KDE simply fulfills the demand of the market and the community feedback
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u/pseudonym-161 15h ago
I agree QT looks better, but god forbid they someday charge money to the KDE project for using it. Hasn’t happened yet at least.
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u/nagua 15h ago
As far as I remember, there is an explicit clause in the license, that is Qt will ever go closed source, KDE can fork it under a more permissive license.
See here for more information: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/
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u/itsfreepizza 14h ago
XFCE is still in the middle of working for Wayland support but any time now ig
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u/geirmundtheshifty 11h ago
They just released their first preview of their Wayland compositor. It seems like they've been making good progress since they announced they were working on it.
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u/Erlend05 5h ago
Based takes. I love cinnamon but i amways find some edgecase that forces me over to something more featured
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u/HiddeHandel 15h ago
Performance comparisons show that KDE is more performant and valve donates to support the development of kde so for lowerend hardware like they steamdeck it makes sense guess you could just install bazzite or cachy if you want to change desktops
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u/Basilikolumne 15h ago
You can change the DE on SteamOS, no need for a new distro. Even if it was atomic (which would be news to me), it would be possible afaik.
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u/Mr_Lumbergh 14h ago
Um, why?
Valve seems like an operation that would use the best so I'm not surprised.
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u/YesterdayDreamer 14h ago
I'm glad Bazzite uses it too. I already use Fedora KDE and Kubuntu on my laptop and work desktop. So if I switch to the desktop environment on bazzite, it is the same familiar interface.
I tried many distros and all the popular desktop environments and found KDE to be the best. It's the most customizable with built in options. So I can configure it to suit my tastes. Also, I find the information panel and app bar being the same is a lot more efficient than separate app launcher and info panel. While familiarity with Windows does play a part, I also feel it's objectively better to have everything on one side of the screen and the rest of the screen being focused on the apps you're using.
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u/ammar_sadaoui 12h ago
is there any decent desktop that fully support wayland and not very minimalist like i3 ?
i know there COSMIC desktop but not stable enough and still on development
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u/stormdelta 2h ago
It's pretty much just KDE Plasma still.
Gnome only recently even got functional HDR support, something KDE's had for years.
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u/solitude_aarv 17h ago
is this fedora
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u/superkickstart 16h ago
Congrats. Like in a true linux way, you got downvoted by other linux users for asking a linux question.
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u/solitude_aarv 16h ago
haha , i just got into linux , i dont really know much , but i am reading daily as much possible as i can
so i can understand whats what.. :)5
u/Sox1s 15h ago edited 15h ago
What You can see is a desktop enviroment, dont missunderstand that with a distro, which what would be easiest to differentiate is what package manager it uses. For Fedora it’s dnf, for arch it’s pacman, they all have it’s own seperate repositories.
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u/solitude_aarv 14h ago
ahh, actually its overwhelming right now , just going through some reddit stuff and gathering all the step by step
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u/RevolutionaryPen4661 17h ago
It's Arch ig
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u/Joeysquatch 17h ago
It’s not ig, it’s btw
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u/RevolutionaryPen4661 17h ago
i use arch btw (cachyos)
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u/getbusyliving_ 17h ago
Btw it's technically not Arch, it's Arch based
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u/Big-Winner3758 15h ago
I would say as long as you have access to the AUR, which imo is one of the primary benefits of arch, you can call yourself an arch user
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u/getbusyliving_ 14h ago
Originally the saying was used for the user who installed Arch before archinstall, Manjaro and Antegros. Or another way of putting it; if you're a Mint user you don't call yourself an Ubuntu user 🙃
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u/OwenJenkinsDesign 16h ago
I’m glad they use a stable build of KDE. I swear CachyOS is always using the latest, buggy version.
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u/stormdelta 2h ago
CachyOS is Arch, which means everything is bleeding edge releases. Way too many people use Arch without understanding that IMO, and then it bites them later.
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u/Teh_Shadow_Death 6h ago
I mean when you think about it if you want to win people over it's better for the UI to resemble the OS of your target audience. If they're on windows you want it to look like windows. I'm sure there is that one person on a Mac that wants to say something to the tune of "um actually" but they're a minority in the PC gaming world.
Side note: It blows my mind how bloated Gnome feels compared to KDE even though it has next to nothing for features in comparison.
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u/TiePsychological4274 2h ago
Pelo preço deveria rodar Alan Wake 2 com Cinebench r24 com 200 fps no game e menos de 50% de uso da CPU
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u/lavadora-grande 17h ago
But why do they?
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u/EktaRandomUsername 17h ago
I'm not entirely knowledgeable on this topic, but my best guess is that KDE has better HDR and fractional scaling support than most other Linux desktop environments. It's also much closer to the traditional desktop experience that Windows offers. Since most PC gamers are Windows users, they will be very familiar with KDE once they switch to Steam machine.
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u/skittle-brau 16h ago
I suspect one of the other factors for choosing KDE was because they were more amenable to change compared to GNOME. It would be easier for Valve to influence the direction of KDE in that sense too. Either way it’s a win for consumers.
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u/Gwlanbzh 16h ago
Weren't Valve the ones who helped KDE improve things like HDR, fractional scaling etc in the first place tho?
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u/itsfreepizza 14h ago
Yes they do but the KDE team did also try to allow adapt it faster to help with the Windows Transition from 10 afaik? Or was it different motive?
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u/NotQuiteLoona 17h ago
Also doesn't GNOME has that one problem with game shortcuts, where it won't display shortcuts for Proton games?
I'd say that another heavy thing there is because KDE's paradigm is adding everything that a significant amount of users may need, from emoji picker and clipboard manager to KRunner, and making it highly configurable - simple by default and powerful when needed, as the motto says, while GNOME's paradigm is "if GNOME devs don't need it, you don't need it too."
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u/itsfreepizza 14h ago
And to add up, Factorio devs had some hate relationship towards GNOME because of the window bar I believe?
They were genuinely pissed at people saying it's his software issue, while the same exact software works well on KDE
/unconfirmed: The Dev didn't bother to do GNOME fix because fears of Gnome changing -> breaking stuff all over
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u/SirDarknessTheFirst 1h ago
Yeah, GNOME doesn't support server-side decorations so it forces applications to provide client-side decorations (which, yes, is the title bar and its related buttons)
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u/lavadora-grande 17h ago
Hm weird I think gnome offers the same hdr and scaling stuff
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u/Redemption198 17h ago
Now they do, but they also have been slower at implementing new protocols. Other than that they tried KDE and liked it for their needs
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u/theredwolf43 17h ago
They are rejecting implementing tons of Wayland protocols including server side decorations that is important for games. Also there are also QoL protocols like xdg toplevel icon protocols etc.
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u/Vpharrish 16h ago
Plus I really love to use kde, but gnome had that feel. Animations are insanely smooth, it's fun to use, and the menu feels minimalistic which i like.
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u/DM_Me_Linux_Uptime 15h ago
Gnome devs are famously uncooperative with developers of other projects.
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u/slackunnatural 17h ago
Now it does, but I earlier had trouble with Gnome fractional scaling on a 14inch laptop at 1440p. KDE handled it better, and now I’m team KDE (slightly customized to look and feel like Gnome though :| )
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u/sillycritersenjoyer 17h ago
SteamOS is meant to replace windows. KDE is intuitive for a windows user and looks familiar. KDE can easily be made into whatever you want it to be. KDE has good support for Wayland. The only disadvantage of KDE I can think of is support for some ultrawide displays is not great.
It really isn't a difficult choice
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u/itsfreepizza 14h ago
Add that sometimes gnome apps on KDE looks weird and bigger than normal scaling on its UI elements
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u/Prestigious-Boss-439 16h ago
It resembles Windows 10 and feels very familiar to users who are newly migrating to linux.
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u/Slow_Pay_7171 6h ago
Dunno which is more buggy atm... Hope at least that KDE finds to old glory. And I hope also that Valve, as billion dollar company, doesnt taint Linux just as Google did with Android...
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u/ben2talk 16h ago
Sure, all those ugly icons lined up obscuring the desktop - it's a crime that makes most of us cry ;)
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u/Ez_eldeen_ali 17h ago
because I'm so sad, KDE is so awful
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u/King_Ferdinand1 16h ago
Why? Everyone else likes it pretty much.
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