It has been a month since my last post. I seem to be churning out one of these a month, and that is okay with me. I normally stop doing this after a couple of days. I really like being able to keep track of the work I am doing and being able to access it remotely from a variety of devices. I don’t want to make this site something that has ways to comment or anything like that. It is personal reflective work. If someone stumbles across it, I am okay with them reading it, but I am mainly putting up unfinished ideas that I will polish over time.
That said, that is not the main point of this post. My post is about my frustrations with KDE Neon. KDE Neon is a fun implementation of KDE. It is pretty. It actually does work very well. The amount of ram usage is surprisingly low for something that has historically been quite bloated. I do like all of the options that are available to me and the default look and feel is quite pleasing. So with all the positives, why am I burning to switch back to Gnome?
Well, quite frankly, Gnome works better. There are many minor niggles in KDE that drive me CRAZY. I really enjoy the gasp Unity style of application launcher on the left side. I have an ultra-wide monitor, so having a launcher that takes up minimal space on one side is actually quite nice. It leaves the vertical space free, which is good because there isn’t as much vertical space on a 29in ultra-wide. I can, of course, position my bar on the side with KDE. This is an obvious feature that works fine. What doesn’t work, at least for me, is the ability to manually sort the icons that I pin to the navigation. Now people are going to say “there is an option in the task settings to manually sort, you dummy”. Yes, there is. Unfortunately, it does not actually work. I sort it, but things move willy nilly back and forth and don’t stick where I have told them to. I have spent, probably hours, trying to get this to work and it just does not. It worked on different KDE spins that I have tried, but not on my Neon install. (Update: Very soon, in fact within minutes of posting this, this issue has been resolved in an update. Apparently I am not the only one who noticed this bug)
Another thing that aggravates me is the lack of ability for easy customization of themes. You may think I’m crazy for saying that when KDE is known for being crazy customizable. Hear me out. KDE is very customizable, but Gnome has MANY different theme creators who make themes that work on a variety of point releases of Gnome 3. KDE plasma has gone through such radical changes that many themes just simply don’t work unless they were written for the most current version of plasma 5. Even the ones that do “work” don’t always have the same features that Breeze does. So despite the fact that I love switching things up and trying different themes, I end up using default Breeze all the time. One example of this is that the little hamburger menu on breeze, shows up as a little dot on many other versions of themes and that little dot does not actually expand out the menu like the hamburger does.
The Dot…
The Hamburger…
I know this is minor, but one adds functionality and the other is a useless mouseover button that doesn’t actually do anything.
So I find myself in this strange land of wanting to go back to gnome because it actually works even though it doesn’t have a bunch of the nice features that KDE does. Unfortunately I cannot easily switch back to gnome because I decided to run NEON. If I had gone with Kubuntu I would be one command away from converting to gnome (albeit with, undoubtedly, some hiccups from not doing a fresh install) but instead I cannot command line myself out of this one, it would seem. I also don’t want to do a fresh install because I spent a lot of time getting gpu passthrough working on my virtual machine. While I am sure I could replicate the process in a couple of hours, that is a couple of hours I really don’t want to spend doing such a thing. I am, surprisingly, almost missing dual booting for the fact that I love trashing my linux install regularly for the latest and greatest new shiny thing that comes along. I LIKE all of the new distros and spins of things. I want to try them all!
I will, however, stick with Neon for the time being. I will pray that these tiny issues will get resolved, because it is an otherwise wonderful experience minus two relatively minor things. Basically, it is stick with the defaults and be happy…but isn’t this the very opposite of why KDE rocks?