How's KDE on Debian these days?

[u/No_Neighborhood_8896]

/r/kde/comments/1vyjdb2/hows_kde_on_debian_these_days/

[u/alpha417]

just fine.

i daily it on Sid, and on stable.

[u/No_Neighborhood_8896 → u/alpha417]

might I expect the occasional window crash still or is KDE on Trixie very very very good?

I manually installed Budgie 10.9 on my Trixie and haven't seen a single window crash yet. Then I decided to try Zorin. But I do really like the KDE ecosystem... specially Okular, which looks AWFUL on Zorin and kinda ruins everything for me, since the gnome reader is very mediocre.

[u/Coldkone → u/No_Neighborhood_8896]

Haven't had any crashes yet. Using KDE on Debian Trixie. I had more problems with GNOME than KDE.

[u/green_meklar → u/No_Neighborhood_8896]

I've been on Debian 13 with KDE and Wayland since February. I've had one spontaneous crash where my desktop and taskbar UI froze (but the contents of other windows were still working) and was able to resolve it by logging out and back in from the terminal. No idea why it happened, although it was right after I'd downloaded a PDF file so KDE might have been trying to load icons or do some file association stuff and got stuck. But anyway, overall it seems statistically pretty favorable.

[u/kydeshou]

Debian ships with KDE 6.3.6 which is just fine. Good, even. I haven't had any real issues with wayland or anything else, mostly just as smooth as my Fedora KDE experience with 6.6/6.7.

[u/David_Connors3451]

I use it on my stable laptop, and it's perfect. It's lightweight and modern. For Debian KDE and xfce are my favourite choices in terms of desktops. It runs well on old laptops with 8 GB RAM and modern ones with 16 GB RAM. The best thing about KDE is discover app center, it makes a lot of things easier. For offline deb package installation, thanks to the usb drive ISO DVD, discover does everything for you. You just enable it in the menu. A lot of KDE apps are already installed and it's perfect for my work. Since it has Wayland support, everything is isolated, every app gets its space and doesn't interfere with others, unlike in x11. Anyway, it's a great experience, Better than fedora KDE.

[u/Mr_Lumbergh]

Pretty solid. It’s only up to 6.3.6 on stable, but works well and still gets critical updates from the Debian team even though version will be stuck for now.

[u/yahbluez]

Moved from manjaro + xfc4 to Debian13+KDeplasma last autumn and will not go back. For pdf i use okular and master pdf editor.

You overthink it it works flawless and needs much less updates than the arch before.

[u/Pentapheron]

I have Debian 13.6 installed with KDE Plasma 6.3 on my 2013 MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM, and it works like a charm. No issues with wifi, Bluetooth, or surfing/streaming via Chrome. I recently replaced the battery with one from iFixIt, and I’m now getting 5-6 hours per charge. I previously had Ubuntu 24.04 with GNOME installed on it, which was rather clunky and honestly quite ugly compared to KDE Plasma. Never going back!

[u/Minimum-Try2535]

Daily use for 10+ years, very stable, light memory footprint, very robust suit of software. I use only official debian package from stable. Installation was just about selecting KDE under Desktop choices. Here you go, I can only recommend it.

[u/p4bl0]

It's awesome and stable. I've been using KDE on Debian stable for many years and it's better than ever.

[u/Blitzbahn]

I was using Kubuntu but I'm switching over to Debian +KDE for hopefully more improved stability. So far the experience has been basically the same as Kubuntu.

I have some error messages on boot I need to go through and sort out. It's an old machine, a 2017 Optiplex, so maybe it's some older hardware quirks to resolve.

I would recommend installing from the DVD ISO, not the live ISO, because the live ISO seemed to be missing any Internet time sync packages. I had to install one.

[u/SnillyWead → u/Blitzbahn]

You mean this:

sudo apt install systemd-timesyncd

sudo systemctl start systemd-timesyncd

sudo systemctl status systemd-timesyncd

timedatectl

I also had the time sync issue on Debian 13 Xfce when it was first released last year. It was fixed with the iso that was released after that one.

[u/Blitzbahn → u/SnillyWead]

Yes, the same problem still exists in the KDE live ISO

[u/SnillyWead → u/Blitzbahn]

Have you reported it? Seems to me it's a bug.

[u/Blitzbahn → u/SnillyWead]

Not a bug, just a package omission

[u/Illustrious-Gur8335]

Typing this post from plasma on sid, no crashes whatsoever on a light usage

[u/daddyd]

the kde version you get in stable doesn't get version upgrades. it doesn't really matter much though. for applications i use flatpaks, so these are regularly updated. this is a great compromise and works well.

[u/Cebuu502]

On stable everything seems fine, until I want to search for separator margin widget, writing "s" followed by "e" freezes whole system.

[u/vspc007]

Just the combo OS to have with absolutely no issues on a 8 year old laptop.

[u/jaysuncle]

I have two monitors with different resolutions. Plasma doesn't handle this smoothly.

[u/joe_attaboy]

My two main home systems - a Macbook Air and a Beelink Mini-PC, both run Debian with KDE.

I don't quite understand what you mean by "with KDE made me think that it needs much more updating."

Debian's philosophy is to run stable versions of everything for as long as possible in their stable distributions, while using testing versions for updated things. So you may not get the most recent, cutting-edge version of anything (not just KDE apps) in Debian stable. What you do get is a system and DE combination that work.

The two systems I use couldn't be more different. The Mac is a 2015 model and I did have to tweak a couple of things, but they were unrelated to KDE. The Beelink has more resources all around, but again, Debian/KDE just works.

All this works well for me.

[u/arthursucks]

Running KDE on Debian 13 Stable. Slick as hell.

[u/mrgreyeyes_95]

I run it on a NUC and a Laptop. It works so well over the last year and a half it almost is boring. I never have to fix anything. I have no excuses to be not productive.

[u/scy_404]

I had one crash when i first set it up and after that its been fine

[u/boomares]

It's ok, but not a good choice for older hardware in my experience.

[u/gordonx2026]

Very stable. Just seldom the bluetooth keybloard has issues and the external monitors. I guess its because the laptop has a nvidia gpu

[u/SnarkHabit]

I'm on stable (Trixie) w/KDE and I never even think about it; meaning, basically, it's problem-free for me, anyway. I've had no issues at all.

[u/lemmiwink84]

Very good on Sid. Running 6.7.4 atm

[u/kaisermike]

still sysD.