KDE has come a long way but I still find it just too buggy to be usable as a daily driver…which is unfortunate because I don’t really like Gnome either but it’s the least worst of all the real options at the moment. Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day just doing regular things but I can’t even remember the last time Gnome crashed on me. The ghost of KDE4 still haunts me.
I don't know man, i have a bunch of computers, the oldest one is a 2012 macbook, then various laptops from different brands (hp, dell, lenovo), an intel nuc from 2016 and a minisforum using a ryzen 7 that i bought just before the ram craze (phew)
all these machines run debian trixie with KDE and i think i only ever seen glitches once, or twice in only one of them. I think the macbook. Granted, all devices run from the internal GPU, intel or AMD.
The only time i saw kde "krash" a lot was when i was demoing arch in a VM, to see what the fuss is all about that distro. But i don't know if it was virtualbox, or arch.
This has not been my experience at all ... I run KDE + Fedora or Ubuntu on laptops for years as my daily driver doing professional work. Its an absolute joy to work with and stable. If there's a hickup then its because some unrelated process is consuming all memory or hogging all CPUs (Slack, Teams I'm looking at you) which would crash any desktop.
I get regular "crashes" on the newest Fedora KDE on a new Thinkpad X1 (from this year). I say "crashes" because it’s not the window manager or Wayland session crashing but some non-essential component of the Plasma desktop (don’t remember which one right now), so it doesn’t affect my work at all. From my point of view it basically just causes a crash report popup every 1-2 hours and says whatever service crashed has been restarted.
It’s normal if you use the Nvidia proprietary driver. Every notification leaks one fd, so if you get a lot of notifications it’ll segfault once or twice per day.
It is normal for KDE. KDE is mockingly called KrashDE in Linux circles for a reason. We're only 4 days into 2026 and there's already dozens of crash-related bugs filled in the bug tracker: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_...
Yes, KDE aggressively caches and indexes things by default whenever you have free RAM unless you disable this behavior in multiple places in multiple applications. For example, in Okular you can tune it to choose how much of a pdf you want to keep rendered in memory, if you have a tonne of memory, this makes it the smoothest pdf viewer I have ever used.
It has become reasonable graceful in giving it back when you you need it nowadays.
The Linux kernel does this too, yet it does not crash like KDE. At any given moment, most of your free RAM is used to cache stuff by the kernel, unless you've recently rebooted.
No, what the Linux kernel does instead is randomly kill user processes :)
It's kinda infamous for that, and had held up Linux adoption for a decade or so.
But you sort of missed the point, I think. The comment chain was about speculating why KDE could possibly crash if there was faulty RAM while other software would be fine. And the kernel absolutely crashes when there's faulty ram.
I'm guessing this doesn't capture manual restarts? I have the same experience as the commenter below: Plasma requires a restart a few times per day for me, as the panels disappear and one monitor's (of two) desktop goes black - usually after wake from sleep. This occurs on both machines that I run it on (only common component is Radeon graphics).
That said, it's a single command and not a big deal, and it's a great DE, so thanks for your work.
Editing text files (code), executing simple programs in the terminal (work is done on my Mac Studio, not my personal desktop), browsing the web with Firefox and playing the odd Steam game. I use the stock Opensuse Tumbleweed panel setup and don’t even tweak the animation speeds or configured effects.
So I don’t think I’m holding it wrong.
My hardware is old-ish (Ryzen 1800x and a Vega56) but I’ve had no issues in literally any other environment, use stock drivers with no customizations, no custom kernels or anything, and only with packages from the official repos, so I don’t believe I should have many major quirks. Heck, I don’t even have Bluetooth or wifi enabled.
Might be a driver issue, too. I remember Vega as a sort of short-lived in-between generation with especially many driver problems.
Actually, early Ryzen 1800X also crashed under certain workloads on Linux, especially compilation and downloading games on Steam(!) IME - another KDE guy and me were some of the first world-wide to communicate about the problem. AMD had a hardware replacement program, maybe it's still active.
There was IIRC another problem with early Ryzen, something about transitions from idle power causing instability, fixed by essentially raising idle power consumption a little with a special BIOS switch and / or playing with load line calibration. That one crashed the whole computer, not just the offending program. (Actually, crashes while downloading games on Steam might have been that one.)
And yes, do run memtest (from the boot menu) for a couple of hours or over night, too.
The bootable, free memtest86+ is excellent for memory testing (not to be confused with Passmark's memtest86).
I concur on the driver issues. To my understanding the Vega driver situation is actually better on Linux than on Windows (or at least it used to be), but it's never been well-supported hardware.
Vega GPUs should be very well supported, especially for basic desktop stuff, since Ryzen mobile CPUs shipped with Vega cores for many years after the dedicated GPU line.
As an experiment, try a fresh VM of your distro and see if it still crashes.
Rolling distros are not an exact science. They can can get stuck in weird inconsistent states because of some local modification or stagnant dotfile or configuration that is not forward compatible. That sort of thing is more likely with complex software, it's usually not a bug unless upgradeability is a seriously supported thing.
"holding it wrong" is a reference to Steve Job's conference on the iphone 4. It was a design flaw that made the phone problematic so that's more of a way of saying "I think I use it properly" rather than "I think I use it as intended"
Hmh, I'm running Tumbleweed on a Ryzen 5 7600 and an AMD Rx 7800. Like you I don't fiddle with the defaults and this is my gaming rig (I'm working on starting just into Steam). I just have default KDE Plasma to launch Steam and play my games, I do my work on a Debian Trixie laptop. I have set up TW two years ago and only DUP-ed it since then. Actually, it is more stable then the Debian machine :o
I know, this is not helping you in any way. I only encountered weird instability with Linux when my RAM was not OK. Maybe check your RAM?
Reminds me of when people praise the efficiency of their car: "It's great, $30 lasts me all month!". Tells you nothing about the car and hardly anything about the person using it.
I have crashes on a monthly basis but I'm also pushing it pretty hard with 4 Activities, 5 Workspaces, and 3 Screens. That's 60 desktops for it to manage (granted, only about 10-15 in total actually have anything on them) with my tiling window management scripts on top of that. Plasmashell and Kwin take up 20% of my CPU on average which is unfortunate but that's the cost for my setup I guess.
I used to daily drive KDE up until shortly after the 4 switch, when I moved to Mac. I've moved back to Linux starting in 2018 but went with i3. I installed KDE around Christmas to try it, and while I'm mostly impressed with the general polish (except that firefox doesn't react the same way as other windows to clicking on the frame), I have a hard time figuring out what activities are and how they're different from multiple workspaces.
Speaking of workspaces, is there no way to only have it show a small rectangle per space in the taskbar instead of a big wide one (I'm using multiple screens)? That's just a useless waste of space.
Activities function best as "context domains" (the classic split is "Personal" and "Work") while preserving your existing Workspaces.
I use workspaces to group apps/tasks/programs functionally (eg. "Active Projects", background stuff like music or a long running terminal task, no tiling).
Some things like Obsidian or Spotify are open on multiple Workspaces and multiple activities at the same time but only require a single instance.
> Some things like Obsidian or Spotify are open on multiple Workspaces and multiple activities at the same time but only require a single instance.
Oh, you can do that? My first impression was that the activities were somehow completely separate, somewhat like profiles in firefox. Since I actually have stuff that isn't exactly context-related, specifically spotify, I thought it would be a pain to have to switch back and forth to interact with them.
> Speaking of workspaces, is there no way to only have it show a small rectangle per space in the taskbar instead of a big wide one (I'm using multiple screens)? That's just a useless waste of space.
I missed this one. Yeah, I have the same problem and couldn't fix it but I use a tiling window manager so I didn't need that space for anything else. I've come to appreciate the overview actually and you can drag-and-drop windows between workspaces without having to jump around.
I think the best way to describe Activities is that they filter "what" is available whereas Workspaces filter/select "where" it goes. Spotify automatically chooses my "Background Tasks" Workspace when it opens and it is available on all my Activities. My task manager always shows up in my main workspace but not in my "Gaming" activity. It's a really powerful feature once you understand how it works (eg. notifications from other activities can be muted; separate file and folder views; email accounts hidden in Thunderbird, etc.)
Edit: You could probably get total isolation by using the other TTYs! A fully separate user and different desktop environment even. You just need to use Alt+F{1..9} to cycle between them. For a specialized workstation this could actually be a clean way to handle it.
I have one for general stuff, one for when I'm working, mainly to minimise distractions, and one to do 3D work.
Each activity has 9 virtual desktops because that's what I use in the main profile.
And yeah Firefox is a bit different, however you can select an option to get the regular KDE menu bar back! I've done this.
And I configured my workspaces in a 3x3 grid, that way it doesn't take so much space (and also it's much easier to navigate them than 9 in a row!). This grid function is really one of the big things that annoys me in macOS (it used to have grids but they killed it when mission control came out), windows and Gnome. I need a grid, especially because I switch with hardware keys.
Or they are just simply not on the happy path. For example, my laptop has been running KDE just fine for years, but my attempts to switch to Linux on my desktop today have turned into a project, as plasma, steam[1], discord, and sometimes kde_powerdevil[2] are crashing every time my monitors turn off.
Linux as an OS is so fragmented that the number of paths are basically innumerable. Many of them are "happy" but they can be hard to find and also change from year to year.
I have a machine that has run Debian 11 and 12 with no issues but 13 hung before launching the UI. Fixable from the terminal but still, super un-happy path!
KDE on SUSE vs on Debian vs on Kinoite and with various sound demons, file systems, file browsers etc will surely differ in ways that are beyond the direct control of the kDE devs too.
Literally today I dragged a file to the trash widget on a panel and it crashed the entire WM. If you don’t have at least one story about this after using KDE for a year then you’re lying
My experience is on Bazzite with a Radeon 7800 XT and 9070 XT. I've had two amdgpu hangs playing The Finals which were a Mesa bug, this crashed kwin but kwin wasn't responsible in the stack trace. It's been fixed since.
Until recently I used all three major OS almost every day for work, school, games, servers, etc. I’ve seen really bad bugs in all of them. Just spend some time looking around the Internet, Linux and KDE crash constantly. There’s also people regularly slobbering over Linux for a variety of reasons.
What’s more likely, this guy won the equivalent of the computer lottery and never experienced a single bug, or that he’s one of the many Linux fanboys infesting this site?
I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but no I don’t believe your shoes are made of gold just because you said so.
Well, I'm not quite to a full year on my main KDE box, but I don't recall it ever crashing on me. Calling me a liar doesn't make your argument more compelling.
Also, you're trying to move the goalposts. The progression has been:
> Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day
> I haven't seen a plasma crash for years.
> Literally today I dragged a file to the trash widget on a panel and it crashed the entire WM. If you don’t have at least one story about this after using KDE for a year then you’re lying
> What’s more likely, this guy won the equivalent of the computer lottery and never experienced a single bug, or that he’s one of the many Linux fanboys infesting this site?
Nobody said they hadn't experienced a single bug until you tried to make a straw man. I've seen bugs on every desktop OS I've used for any length of time. I don't see crashes on KDE.
Bugs in your WM can cause crashes and often do. You’re trying to pretend this is some ridiculous foreign concept when it isn’t. The two are closely linked.
If KDE works for you, great. It crashes often for me. I find it exceedingly hard to believe it hasn’t crashed on you at least once when that’s such a common experience among me and my peers. I put more stock in my own experiences and the experiences of people I know than random internet commenters. I don’t know what else to tell you.
Oh for me it happens automatically. And my OS doesn't have systemd so that wouldn't work for me. But in this case it's not needed to restart something manually anyway.
I experience similar windows crashes regularly on my old asus laptop. It’s likely from the asus drivers. The screen gets black for a fraction of a second and the explorer.exe restarts.
I love XFCE but I've had a hell of a time getting it to work nicely with multiple high DPI monitors. I finally gave up and went to KDE which.. just works.
Unfortunate because the minimalism of XFCE is way more my style.
Yep. Unless you have really good eyes, XFCE is unusable on a 4K screen. On the same screen, KDE at 150-175% is glorious at providing both more real estate than 1920x1080 while being crispy.
This is my experience too. Tried again just this week. Zero issues with Gnome or Cosmic (so likely not hardware issues), but an-least-daily Plasma crashes.
FWIW Plasma 6 is running stable and fast for me (via vanilla Kubuntu on a somewhat recent Intel Meteor Lake laptop), best experience I had with desktop Linux all the way back to the late 90s, and especially on a laptop (the touchpad finally doesn't suck anymore compared to Macs). It's also the first time where I think the overall experience is vastly better than running Windows on the same machine.
????
I have using KDE plasma as mainly driver for years.
I remember having big issues in the KDE 4 era.
KDE 5 ran smooth and KDE 6 + Wayland it's amazing. I don't had any issues or problems like you described.
Yeah, I've been running Plasma as a daily driver (and without a fallback OS) for around 8 years now without this kind of trouble. I routinely run for months between reboots, and when a reboot happens, it's usually because I did a dumb.
I helped someone else earlier today with an unstable Linux laptop, it turned out there was an amd/gpu/drm issue that was crashing Wayland in the background.
My first bet would be that you've got something similar going on -- a hardware or device driver problem. You've crawled through journalctl and the like, I assume?
