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Plasma is KDE's flagship product, offering the most customizable desktop environment available. The KDE community has the driving goal of making it simple by default, and powerful when needed.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Highly customizable
There are many customization options and possibilities to tweak the desktop, including widgets.
Pro Looks beautiful
The design of the three built-in desktop themes; Air, Breeze, and Oxygen, are very beautiful to some.
Pro Fast and efficient
Looks great! Dolphin file manager is without a doubt the best fully functional and easy to use and multitask with.
Pro Keyboard friendly
Nearly all actions can be driven with keyboard commands. Window management, including effects such as desktop overviews, can be triggered with a keyboard control (or mouse gesture) and some even support filtering results (such as windows shown) by typing. The KRunner tool (default keybinding: Alt+F2 or Alt+Space) provides searching local files, online sources, unit conversions, math and more all from a keyboard driven interface.
Pro KDE is an evolution on the classic desktop model
KDE is a great evolution on the classic Win95/XFCE approach. It's moving in innovative directions while respecting the classic metaphors.
Pro Has a file manager that provides a good balance between power and simplicity
The included file manager provides several icon, list and detail views to choose from along with features such as tabs, bookmarks, tagging, previews and metadata, network file access, bluetooth file transfers to/from devices, excellent removable storage integration, and an optional terminal panel while remaining fast and easy to use.
Pro Adheres to standards
Standards adherence allows for interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops, with similar Wayland support being worked on. Applications not written with Plasma in mind work very well in Plasma as a result. The development team has also been instrumental in standard creation and adoption such as NETWM, X11 clipboard, icon themes, mimetype handling, application menu standardization, system tray protocols and notifications and more.
Pro Integration with mobile devices
KDE Connect allows integration of the computer and mobile devices on the same Wi-Fi network.
Pro Many coherent applications
What make plasma so nice is the galaxy of apps, sharing same look and feel, configuration and behaviour. This helps with making for a uniform looking desktop.
Pro Very customizable
One of the best aspects of KDE is that it gives you Lego-like tools called widgets. You can combine the widgets in the way that better fits you and get a Mac OS desktop layout, a Gnome 3 desktop layout, a mobile device desktop layout or a completely new desktop layout that works for you.
Pro Comes with a suite of powerful applications
Plasma Desktop generally comes packaged with a full set of applications to get users started, including a file manager (Dolphin), advanced file manager and browser (Konqueror), image and document viewers (Gwenview, Okular), the Calligra office suite, CD and DVD authoring (K3b), and dozens more. The desktop can be installed and used without these applications, but they add significant value for many people.
Pro Great for developers
Provides its own IDE for C++, Qt, HTML and through workspaces allows better organisation of work.
Pro Simple by default, powerful when needed
For the new Linux users (coming from Windows), they'll find everything easy and simple to use. But for old and experienced Linux users, they can customize the interface as they want.
Pro Low system resources consumption
Not as lightweight as XFCE, but pretty close (like +100MB in real use).
Pro Multi-device "Convergence"
Plasma Desktop provides seamless "zero config" integration of your Android device with your laptop and desktop machines via KDE Connect. Phone calls, SMS messages, cross-device copy and paste, media remote control, cursor control and more are supported.
The technology that Plasma Desktop is built on, simply called "Plasma", also provides interfaces for phones, tablets, netbooks, and media centers in addition to the desktop. These additional interfaces use the same underlying frameworks and therefore work well together and have a unified feel to them. They also support a common set of applications across them which adapt to the input methods and screen sizes.
Pro Integrated advanced search
Plasma Desktop comes with an integration search system that makes it easy to find local files, emails, contacts, events and more. The file manager supports tagging and rating files as well as full-content searching and the KRunner command window and the Milou desktop widget makes searching for files, emails, applications and other content by name, subject, category, tag, fulltext, etc. very simple. It does this with essentially no noticeable interference with day-to-day usage of the computer, thanks to the scheduling built into the backend system (Baloo).
Pro Easy-to-use software center
Apt, snap, and packagekit all show up in the built in software center. Updates show as an icon in the system tray from all sources.
Pro Activities (evolution of multiple desktops)
You can really separate your work environment from personal environment. Applications can be 'pinned' to a single Activity (spreadsheet for work, game for personal) or shown on all Activities (web browser, for instance).
Pro Innovative
Has a lot of good features preinstalled (Android integration with KDEConnect, etc.), and comes with lots of improvements and new features with new releases.
Pro Touchscreen support
Works well with touch devices and allows customization of gestures for them.
Pro Powerful window management with configurable rules
Hiding a particular window's decorations, automatically or with a keyboard shortcut, showing a window on selected or all desktops, and lots of other rule-based features are easily configurable directly from the window manager's UI without scripting.
Cons
Con Lost its way
On KDE3 you could fully customize every KDE application eg: you could move toolbars to all corners, add toolbar entries and all applications followed one interface guidline by having menubars, toolbars, statusbars etc. However since KDE4 some applications like Dolphin miss those features and it goes even further with the newer QML based applications.
Con Drains your battery
There is a lot of stuff on KDE the will drain your battery more quickly than on other desktops. For example, it uses many SVGs which have to be rendered before display, kwin also needs a working compositor.
Con Shell-style ≠ widget-style
The Plasma-shell is unable the use the current Qt style for its interface thus making it hard to get a consistent user interface.
Con Hard to customize
For example to create a Qt theme you need to learn Qt and C++. To create a plasma theme you have to use SVGs that follow a strict standard. For creating login themes you need to know QML. Icon themes for KDE are big and complex around 1000 different icons in ~8 sizes.
Con Too complex
Shows too many options at once often time, making it more complex than simplistic.
Con Difficult to turn off some transparency
Some of the transparency settings for Plasma can only be removed by changing away from the standard theme altogether. A bit disappointing as so many other things are configurable to the deepest detail and transparency in the wrong place can make reading menu entries for example difficult at times.
Con Perceived clunkyness and slowness
Emphasis on perceived. It's a myth from the days when SSDs, gigabytes of ram and cpus above 1GHz and more than one core were a fantasy. On anything semi modern (i5 2500k, 8 gb memory and 256 gb ssd is total overkill and that's a 5 year old system) it's as fast as anything.
Con Weird behaviour of PowerOff/Restart/LogOff buttons
No matter what button you press you get the same screen where you actually have to choose what you want to do
Con Too buggy
It has still a lot of bugs, like losing the function for the meta key, which can be a pain to set-up again in the first place.
Con Swollen look out of the box
In default theme elements are extremely large, which makes screen feel smaller than it really is. Some of the things are not easy to fix - even compact main menu still has awful huge paddings and header font size in calendar is ugly.
Con No native package manager frontend
KDE discontinued all of its native package manager frontends like: Kynaptic, Muon or Kpackage and fully relies on PackageKit, however, PackageKit was mainly made with the RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) in mind and does not support all the features of more advanced package managers like dpkg or emerge/portage.
Con Bloated on some distributions
Although the Plasma desktop itself is by no means bloated, some distributions delivers KDE versions with a ridiculous amount of bloat.
![[deleted]](https://avatars.slant.co/identicons/50/eb641207-4f56-47e7-903e-e7b5d8f48db4)
Con Sound output problem
You need to go in sound settings to switch between speakers and HDMI display sound. You can't switch easily just from sound widget located in task bar.
Con Only one theme
Sue you can install a few other Qt themes but the all will have issues with some parts of KDE like QML based interfaces since they are all optimized for the breeze theme. So in the end you have to love or hate the only fully working one UI theme(breeze , that you can adjust with color themes and a few settings).
Con Held back by dedication to emulating Windows
One of KDE's pros is that it works similarly to 90's-era desktop environments such as Windows. However this holds it back from being able to present something that works intuitively for people who aren't familiar with how computers back in the 90's worked.
Con Difficult to use on virtual machines on version 5
KWin compositing is restricted to xrender on virtual machines which makes the default booting process difficult as 3D graphics needs to be turned off from the VM itself.
Con Poor support of 4K screens
Even scaling doesn't help. Many places keep small font or icons.
Con Limited in themes, especially the most modern ones
Most of the themes are created for the GTK world, it means GNOME. KDE Plasma is very limited when compared to the whole quantity of GTK2 and GTK3 themes available.
Con Not for production
May be extremely buggy and there are unnecesary configurations which takes away time to do actual work.
Con Kirigami is buggy
The newer QML based interface is too much tied to the breeze style. So if you use another style(like Qt's default Fusion) you will have a mixed desktop interface of fusion and breeze. It also fails at certain points to set the correct color in a widget so if you use a dark theme you will often face dark text on dark background issues.
Recommendations
Comments
Flagged Pros + Cons
Pro Great Desktop integration with KDE apps
KDE offers a lot of apps, they integrate very nicely with the DE as a whole.
Con Issues with printing
Qt5 apps are unable to access all advanced printing options, which is a huge drawback because you will have to install GTK apps to get full printing functions.
Con High RAM usage
But if you're using KDE > 5.12, RAM usage is one of the best across Linux desktop environments.
Con Not resource efficient
There are many bloatware along the basic installation, thus uses lot of system resources for eye candidness.
Con Breeze theme is ugly
Breeze theme gives some wow effect at first with all it's transparencies etc. But when you get used, you start to notice lackluster icons and oversimplified look of ui elements - there is just nothing to look at and it looks lazy
Con Removal of advanced customisation of desktop themes
After plasma 5.6 they removed advanced customisation for desktop I think. With this option you could make hybrid themes; use bar from this theme and use icons from this theme.. like this. That was the thing that made me choose KDE over other ones. So I don't know which desktop environment to use now... Old gnome and Xfce looks like each other and I hated their sharp look. KDE was really different out there and now It's becoming like a phone desktop environment flat and uncustomizable. Yes KDE was really unstable because of variety of customisations at KDE 3 and 4 but with plasma 5 It became really stable so I really can't understand why they choose to remove "Advanced customisation" at desktop. It is a really big downgrade for me and a lot of old KDE users think that way but that new themes and the new look made this new plasma popular among gnome users more so I think they wont be going back to good old plasma before 5.6..
Con Font rendering may be (sometimes significantly) better
For example poor spacing between the glyphs.
Con Not so good defaults
For example, font rendering being overrided by KDE, however it will be fixed in KDE 5.16.
Out of Date Pros + Cons
Con No easy way to backup & restore all settings
Most crashes cause loss of settings - panels vanish, all favorites and launchers missing, icons lost, wallpaper back to default, theme changes, activities present but not active, etc.
The configuration is held in a multitude of places, the changes are applied automatically even after a crash, all without a tool or clear way to recover.
Con Interfaces are inconsistent in 4.x
While parts of KDE in 4.x can be very good looking, a common opinion is that the style is too hobbled together with inconsistent icons and styles clashing with each other.
Con Stability problems
Under certain conditions, most of KDE's components can be highly sensitive to race conditions, which leads to KDE applications frequently crashing, and, on rare occasion, kdeinit itself locking up.
Con HiDPI support is spotty
The log in screen as well as some other components of the OS do not scale properly under HIDPI. Some things in the log in screen will be displayed too small, such as the mouse pointer. It can also be difficult to get full scaling to work properly in the DE itself with things such as icons, text and window borders.
Con Compiz integration destroyed
The KDE developers seem to pride themselves on destroying previously working features with each release. Plasma 5 is terrible because Activities and Virtual Desktops are completely separate now. VD's in Plasma 5 can't even have separate wallpapers let alone widgets. Activities don't integrate with Compiz and KDE well at all (no cube, different keyboard commands). Using Activities and Virtual Desktops together gets confusing real fast. Combined with the fact the developers have no interest in fixing this at all KDE users are just running away to new desktops that are borrowing old perfectly good KDE code.
