I haven’t tried Linux in a while and only really played around with XFCE and Cinnamon and reviving my old laptops, but I’ve just tried KDE Plasma and GNOME for a bit and DAMN they look good. Modern looking and not the weird Mica effect that Windows has. Very clean!

They both look great and I wouldn’t say one looks better than the other, just preference probably, just that GNOME looks more bubbly + rounded + bit like MacOS in a good way and Plasma looks more blocky + similar to Win10 taskbar

The touchscreen buts still appear to need a bit of work, on both Plasma and GNOME I made it freeze. For Plasma I opened the launcher button and tried to use the onscreen keyboard, and it kept on opening and closing very quickly, for GNOME I did the three finger swipe up gesture and everything became unresponsive. Also, Bluetooth weirdly doesn’t work on KDE but does on GNOME. Huh. Maybe just my device?

I really want to switch soon, maybe during the holidays I’ll get round to it :D

edit: I think it’s pretty crazy that a relatively small team (compared to the likes of Microsoft) can offer such a good UI and overall user experience! That’s insane! The people who help make the distros are doing very good work and I wish them the best of luck! Hopefully the weird quirks and compatibility issues will iron out and Linux becomes mainsteam :D

  • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    Bluetooth probably needs to be installed and activated on KDE.

    KDE and Gnome are both great - I would say pick KDE if you like customizing things, and Gnome if you trust the defaults

    • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Ahh that’s why. Okay gotcha that makes sense. If I do switch, I’ll probably test both a bit more to see which I like using the best. I just booted the live usb and played around for a bit, testing things like touchscreen support and auto-rotate

      • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        Auto-rotate probably won’t work because it seems like the acceleramoter isn’t supported by the kernel, but if you really wanted to debug it, run monitor-sensor and rotate your laptop around. If you see the numbers change, it means your hardware is supported and you might just need a package (although it’'s also possible that Gnome and KDE don’t support it).

        • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          I think it might not be supported. My device is an Asus Zenbook 14 Flip so might not be supported compared to something like a lenovo yoga or the tuxedo flip.

  • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    also one annoying thing is that normally on windows, since my laptop is one of those flexy 2-in-1s, it auto-rotates depending on how you put it (like “tent mode” or “book mode”). On both KDE Plasma and GNOME, it doesn’t work. I guess my specific device isn’t supported? I can live with that though, I can rotate the screen manually and don’t realistically rotate the screen all too often.

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      Hmm, which distro did you try it with? I believe, KDE should support auto-rotating the screen in the newer versions¹. If you tried it with Kubuntu LTS, for example, that would’ve still been an older version, which does not use Wayland by default.

      ¹) More precisely: it should support it when it’s being run under Wayland, which is the default since KDE Plasma 6.

      • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Fedora. I thunk my device might not be supported, or maybe there’s some software I need to install to make it work. Not a huge deal though.

        • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          Hmm, Fedora should have the newest version of KDE. Yeah, hard to say why it’s not working then…

  • sbird@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    11·
    3 months ago

    Cinnamon with Mint is still great UI, it just feels slightly less modern in my opinion. Still much better than Windows with their pre-2000 UI once you go deep enough