When comparing Ubuntu Touch vs KDE Plasma, the Slant community recommends KDE Plasma for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like desktop environments for convertible laptops?” KDE Plasma is ranked 3rd while Ubuntu Touch is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose KDE Plasma is:
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 and excellent removable storage integration while remaining fast and easy to use.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Very privacy oriented, non-Google OS
No aggregating of your data or habits on any servers which you haven't requested (via apps, etc.).
Pro Many updates even for old phones
Getting updates every several weeks even in 2023, even if Android updates ended many years ago.
Pro Gesture based UI
Ubuntu Touch doesn't use any physical buttons, except for power and volume buttons. To navigate you swipe from edges of the screen. Swipe buttom-to-top gives a contextual menu, swipe right-to-left switches open applications, swipe left-to-right gives quick-access to apps, swipe top-to-bottom accesses notification center.
Pro Desktop/dock mode
Docking feature that allows to establish a PC-like desktop behavior from the mobile device was announced by Mark Shuttleworth.
Pro Quick-access settings
When swiping top-to-bottom to access notifications, you can (without lifting your finger) swipe to left or right to access different categories of settings.
Pro Screens hold information grouped together by topics
Ubuntu uses "scopes", functionality and information presented based on topics. Topics such as music, photos, video etc. Swiping left and right switches between these scopes. This information is pulled from various services used. So, for example, the music scope could consists of Spotify, Grooveshark and Soundcloud. The scopes can be customized.
Pro Converged desktop/tablet/smartphone
Shuttleworth estimates that desktop/tablet/smartphone convergence to be reached with Ubuntu 15.04 release.
Pro Has a file manager that provides a good balance between power and simplicity
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 and excellent removable storage integration while remaining fast and easy to use.
Pro Highly flexible
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 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 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 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 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 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 Great HiDPI support
Scales well with laptop and big home theater screen simultaneously.
Pro Bunch of coherent applications
What make plasma so nice is the galaxy of apps, sharing same look and feel, configuration and behaviour.
Pro KDE is an evolution on the classic desktop model
KDE 4 is a great evolution on the classic Win95/Gnome/XFCE approach. It's moving in innovative directions while respecting the classic metaphors.
Cons
Con Few mobile apps
Con Discontinued
Ubuntu Touch is discontinued and now not available due to lack of market share.
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 Perceived clunkyness and slowness
Compared to other options, KDE is still perceived slow. Especially, the desktop takes a few seconds to login.
Mouse pointer can feel sluggish, or laggy, on older systems.
Con HiDPI support is great
One can even synchronize the login screen to scale with the rest of the DE