musicmatzes blog

Some of you might know that I am using KDE Plasma for some time now and that I am really in love with it. Lately, I've been even more in love with it.

Here's why.

A new device

As I recently switched my job, I had the opportunity to get my hands on a new device (thank you, employer)! I opted for a Tuxedo Pulse 15 Gen 1 which is a wonderful device. I might be writing about that in another article.

Naturally, I installed my favourite linux distribution on it (which is NixOS) and KDE Plasma. After updating the device and all my other installations to the latest release of NixOS (which is 21.11), I was greeted by the brand new KDE Plasma 5.23 welcome screen.

KDE Plasma has been running absolutely smooth on my old device (which I still use), which was a Tuxedo InfinityBook 14 Pro v4. Still, I was even more amazed that on the new device, it ran even smoother. There are no glitches, no screen flickering even while plugging in an external display, not the slightest stuttering while moving around. Don't get me wrong, there hasn't been any of these things with my old Tuxedo, too! Still, it felt so new and refreshing on the new installation that I absolutely had to write about it.

Initial setup

The initial setup of my KDE experience involves some work. The default configuration of the KDE desktop experience is really nice, but I need some custom shortcuts to be as productive as I want to be. For example, I want to use the HJKL keys for some tiling stuff. KWin, the KDE window manager, is not a tiling window manager. Still, you can get some basic layouting to work with it (top-right-corner, right, lower-right-corner and so on). Also I need key bindings for fullscreen, switching virtual desktops and bringing up Krunner, KDEs app launcher/search tool/... whatever you call that awesome piece of software!

Krunner

Krunner is awesome. It is much more than just an app launcher. With the (firefox) browser integration, you can search bookmarks, history, open tabs (and switch right to them), you can search windows, passwords (password-store anyone?) and of course you can launch applications from it. It just integrates so nicely with KDE, it is amazing.

Plasma-browser integration and kdeconnect

Plasma browser integration (for firefox) is god-sent. Combined with kdeconnect, which is another god-sent tool, it makes the experience perfect. Notifications from my mobile phone can be synced to the desktop and the other way round (although I disabled this specific setting because I tend to get a lot of notifications on my mobile phone that just annoy me on my desktop, especially when in a call with co-workers). Whenever someone calls, my music or netflix stream (this is made possible via the plasma browser integration) is automatically paused and (of course) resumed as soon as I hang up. I can send websites from my browser to my phone when I want to continue to read while in the bathroom (we all do that, don't laugh!) and of course also the other way round. And so on and so forth...

All the details

The details of course matter. For example: I just found the setting to disable the touchpad while typing. I toggled it and it just works like a charm. I added a script that executes ssh-add on my ssh keys to the autostart scripts and it justs works, asking me for the password of my ssh key to add it to ssh-agent after login. Enabling the integrated redshift for KDE was literally one click in the settings, now I get a redish (is that a word?) screen in the evening, which is more eye-friendly.

Conclusion

My conclusion is clear and obvious: Love! I don't know why I would ever switch away from KDE again. It is the same as with my NixOS experience, that started in 2014. I just don't see why I would switch away from something that is so good.

Maybe this article was a bit annoying to you now, me fanboying about KDE. I don't know. It's just something that I wanted to share.