About Desktop Environments

Having bought myself a new computer, I was tempted to make a change not only in hardware, but also in the software environment.

My work laptop has Ubuntu on it and while I don’t like Ubuntu that much (snaps are evil), the desktop itself feels somewhat refreshing after 10-ish years of KDE usage. Debian (that I use at home) installs with GNOME by default, so I tried to give it a go.

That didn’t work at all. GNOME in Debian 12 is unusable and unconfigurable, and from what I read the more modern versions are even worse. They seem to stick to “build a system a fool could use” concept, and only a fool would want to — exactly as Shaw’s Principle dictates. After three weeks of trying, I simply couldn’t bear it any more.

I gave Sway a go, but it looks like I’m too old for building my system out of the Lego blocks, and the misleading documentation doesn’t help. I spent a week trying to make it work (I do really like the general idea), and I’m sure I would have got something workable out of it in a month or two. I’m also sure the experience would be better if I used a more recent version but I’m not ready to sacrifice the stability Debian gives me. I quite like having my system work reliably for over a year without major overhauls, thank you.

Last weekend, I gave up and installed KDE. Boy, did it feel good! I suddenly had a system that mostly worked in a way that makes sense, and the few disagreeable things (some of the KDE defaults do puzzle me) could easily be tweaked to my liking.

I’m now contemplating installing KDE on my work laptop.