Even with a bare-bones installation, Plasma lets you customize your desktop a lot. If you want more, there is always Plasma’s vast ecosystem of widgets. Widgets add features and utilities to the Plasma desktop and today you can find out all the stuff you can do and what’s new for widgets in Plasma 5.26.
Widgets are not the only thing to look forward to in Plasma 5.26: check out all the new stuff landing on the desktop designed to make using Plasma easier, more accessible and enjoyable, as well as the two new utilities for Plasma Big Screen, KDE’s interface for smart TVs.
KDE is amazing these days, and a joy to use, but they really have an application problem. They still don’t have an e-mail client that doesn’t feel straight out of 2006 (Kmail is a disaster), there’s no modern amenities like Twitter clients, and browsers like Firefox and Chromium clearly feel more at home in a GTK environments than in a Qt environment. Using KDE inevitably means ending up using GTK applications too, at which point I feel like I might as well switch over completely.
I wish there was more activity on this front, but I also realise that for the vast majority of KDE users, this isn’t a problem at all.
I hate the direction GNOME is taking GTK enough that I cringe at seeing the blur-shadows that an upgrade brought to my Inkscape context menus because I know I won’t be able to find a Qt-based replacement for it so that’s a very alien thought process to me.
…sort of an “I can’t have 100% of what I want. Might as well shoot myself in the head.”
But browsers always feel “out of place”. On KDE, GNOME, Windows, they never use the system theme.
Well, unless you use a browser that’s specifically designed to prioritize that, like Falkon for KDE or GNOME Web for GNOME.
I’m typing this on Firefox on KDE right now, feels just fine to me.
It’s a shame apps are so locked to toolkits.
Looking at what I use daily, they are nearly all GTK apps. Betterbird, FF, LibreOffice….
The most used app that is actually Plasma is Spectacle (screen shots) and Dolphin (file manager). Bit sad really.
I did look at using plasma/qt apps however too many compromises.
I ran MATE for a number of months but missed the KDE workflow I’ve grown used to for 18 years now..
LibreOffice is no more GTK than it is KDE, it has its own framework and integrates with both.