Xfce user, here to represent!

I love it and haven’t had any trouble. Try it out!

I think Linux nerds are clowns who don’t understand that not everyone wants to learn what -xvf means just to extract a goddammed file.

Kde is solid and requires zero fuckery in my experience to work well. This is in fedora, suse, arch (endeavour), void.

I have been using KDE on Arch across several machines for about 3 years now, then Manjaro for a year before that. At no point have I experienced instability or issues like that. Especially that last one; I’m the sort of person who regularly has 10+ tabs open on laptops with a fraction the amount of RAM that you have.

I would say that is definitely not normal. If that happened to me, I might search online or check journalctl -b -p 3 to see if it yields any clues.

You say KDE hangs, but what component hangs actually? It it plasmashell (other apps work but panel is dead?)? Kwin (windows move/respond to input?)? KDE apps?

I would suggest you to install a distro with kde (fedora KDE edition or open SUSE, not neon) if you’re not confident with administration. Use something like Kinoite for accidental breakage protection, or if you want to keep /home as is, install fedora 42 inplace (the new installer).

Not only my experience but also that of many KDE devs say that fedora KDE is probably the best mainline KDE experience (ignoring niche distros or customized KDE).

Also, don’t use xorg session. Always log in to default wayland session unless you have incompatible usecase (in that case you know what you’re doing).

Sounds familiar. I have tried it with many distros and it just isn’t usable. Gave up and ended up liking cinnamon more anyway.

KDE Manjaro running on 4 or 5 of my machines, pure stability. It sounds like a hardware issue.

Here are my suggestions to diagnose this.

Option 1. Setup an ssh server, connect from a second computer (or phone via Termux), execute $journalctl -fe, and observe the journal from your second device when the crash occurs. That should help pinpoint the issue.

Option 2. If you don’t have a second device, use a non-gui tty, access via Ctrl+Alt+F1. (Usually terminals are available F1 thru F6). Once again execute $journalctl -fe and observe it during the crash.

Tbh option 2 may just be easier especially if you have minimal knowledge of ssh. Good luck, ping me back if you find this helpful and would like more perspective, and apologies if this doesn’t help you.

If the entire computer crashes, boot into a terminal and browse journalctl history of previous boots, sorry I don’t have these commands off the top of my head but if you need them and ask I will get them for you.

Kde works great for me, I don’t have any special hardware. I have used it with fedora and bazzite.

I’ve never had issues like that on Kubuntu, Debian, or EndeavourOS. KDE is great and I love it.

had a couple of crashes when 6 was released, but they were fixed pretty quickly and has been rock solid ever since. Those crashes probably had more to do with my nvidia card than kde itself, tbh

openSUSE has the best integration of KDE, but I wouldn’t expect to see issues like yours on any distro, really…

I use KDE with Chimera Linux which is only in beta. Rock solid.

I’ve been using KDE for over 4 years on over a dozen different machines and 5+ distros and I’ve never had major problems with crashing.

I do experience small bugs fairly often. Maybe once every month or two, little glitches or odd window behavior. Nothing huge, but they do happen. To be fair, I like to modify and customize KDE quite a bit, so that is probably causing some of my issues.

In my experience, Cinnamon is the most stable DE I’ve used by far. Least amount of random bugs, simple but stable. I don’t think I’ve ever had Cinnamon crash on me actually.

For what it’s worth, I experience none of that. My laptop is absolutely rock solid with KDE, it’s like a MacBook you pull it out of your backpack and it’s ready to go before I’m even done opening the screen.

My desktop is currently just over 5 days of continuous uptime (no sleep). I’ve crashed more often because of ZFS than KDE.

Both are ArchLinux. I also have a friend on Bazzite that doesn’t have issues with KDE either, and it runs great in my VM.

Those all sound like possible graphics driver issues.

Is KDE actually good or it is overrated?

That’s like a trick question 😀
If I say it’s good, and that contradicts your own experience with it, you can say “see it’s overrated, people say it’s good, but in fact I know it sucks.”

I use it on Arch but I’ve seen people using it on Fedora and it looked good and stable.

Did you try to look into it, see what’s causing the problems?
In my experience having used Linux and KDE Plasma for about a decade now, if you wanna have a good time you’re going to have to figure stuff out, check the logs, troubleshoot, look it up online, etc.
If you expect to go through different distros to find one that “just works” you’ll be disappointed, and you’ll be wasting your time. Issues can be hardware-specific, maybe you just need to pass a parameter to the kernel, or change a config somewhere or something like that…

There is a bug that is open right now which sounds like it might be one you were experiencing or possibly explains part of the issues.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501073

Like the web browsing might have been from middle clicking, which causes a lengthy hang and resuming from suspend and powerdevil are a prime suspect for it.

The login wait might be an issue I vaguely recall about the splash screen and that disabling it removed the startup hang.

I’ve been exclusively using Manjaro KDE since September of 2021 and the linked issue I started getting a couple months ago and it’s gotten bad enough to make me want to start hopping again.