 Well, I think we would all agree that Genoma is the most popular desktop environment plasma comes in a very close second What I want to do today is actually talk about five reasons why you should try plasma out now I'm making this video because recently plasma 6 came out and I can't be a Linux youtuber and not make something about plasma 6 So this is my initial video on plasma 6 and a long-term review will come later So let's just get that out of the way So today five reasons why you should use plasma no matter what version it is. So let's go ahead and jump in So let's actually take you first to my plasma desktop and this is plasma 6 I'm not gonna talk about the features of plasma 6 or any of that I'm gonna talk more in general of why you'd want to use plasma. So the first one and the most obvious one is Customizability, so if we open up the settings application here, you'll actually see that there are a ton of settings And this isn't really plasma specific any KDE slash QT application is Going to have a ton of options for you to tinker with basically if you want to make your apps look or Function in a certain way you probably can now there are probably some limitations if you're looking for something that is a little more esoteric, but the mainstream options are all here including theming and Changing the UI and all of this sort of stuff, right? And this is Simultaneously a good and a bad thing for a lot of people because one thing that is for sure true Is that there are a ton of settings here and because there are a ton of settings here it's both very customizable and Quite confusing so if you're going to mess around with customizing your plasma Take advantage of that search box up there at the top because I tell you now you'll be using it a lot It'll make your life so much easier to find the things that you're wanting to look for so customizability is the first one on a list And I think that it had to be the first one on list because it's the absolutely the most obvious the second one on the list is actually kind of connected and I Decided to separate it out because it is so important at least for me And that is theming and I think that out of all the desktop environments I don't think that it can be argued that KDE does steaming the absolute best On anything GTK based like GNOME or Xfce or cinnamon any theming that they do is kind of a hack Especially on GNOME where they really don't want you to theme at all and on Xfce and cinnamon and mate and all the other GTK desktops they all use a hack to get their themes to work for the most part or they have very minimal theming through Right so the theming on other desktop environments isn't very good on Plasma theming is built-in and fully supported. You can go to this page here and get new and I'll actually show you hundreds maybe thousands of themes made by the community and put on I basically a Theme store that you can download and apply a lot of them even have pre-configured desktop layouts that you can use So you can actually fully emulate the desktop you see in the screenshot, so it is very nice And it even goes beyond pre-configured themes if you want to create your own theme You can do so very easily by just editing the colors. You can create your own color scheme You can upload them from a file so you can back them up very easily if you want to transfer them from one machine to another You can edit pre-existing themes and make them completely your own However, you want to do it the amount of theming capability you have on plasma is unmatched It's just the premier feature of plasma if you are a tinker who likes to theme their applications So it's very very good. The next one on the list is a little bit less about features and more about the community So KDE and I truly believe this has the best desktop environment community out there The GNOME guys are very isolated the developers themselves don't interact as much with the community as you'd like The other desktop environments are all very small teams So they're not they're not leading a project that is very big So the community is usually pretty small on plasma not only is the community very, you know large But the developers themselves are out and about you can very easily contact a KDE developer They all either have YouTube channels or blogs like Nate does and you can easily talk to them Like you can go have a chat if you want to also. It's very easy to report bugs. It's very easy to get support on the forums It's very easy to request features if you want to actually have to you know Ask somebody for a feature to add into plasma You can do all of these things very very easily and a lot of that is because the developers are so Here they're they're very present right and it's very nice It's it's not an experience you get with other desktop environments very often and it happens all the time with KDE But even more than that more than just the interaction you will get between the community and yourself is their Openness to how they're developing the desktop environment. So they're always every week coming out with a blog post that looks like this one here that basically says all the new features that they've added that week all the UI improvements all the bugs that they've fixed and everything it's very very transparent and the best part of that means That if you are a diehard KDE plasma fan or you become one, you know, what's coming up You know what bugs have been fixed and when to update all that stuff happens very much in the open again Not something that you can really say about gum even though you can if you want to you can go dig into what you know I'm doing, but they don't publish a lot of that stuff in easily digestible fashion. So openness and transparency and Very good community is one of the best things about plasma the fourth one on the list is Something that is not going to be for everyone, but I think that it's truly important so if you are just coming to Linux or you're a Windows XPAT even if you've been here for a while One of the best things about plasma is that it does have a fairly windows like UI now It used to be much more windows like let's just put it out there before plasma 6 came out the Bar didn't float. Okay, so in Windows the bar doesn't float and obviously my UI here is not exactly the default UI But it's very close. There is a floating bar along the bottom. There's a menu here along the side basically what like you'd get in windows and Basically what this means is that anyone who is coming from windows can Come and use KDE plasma without having to have too much upheaval in their look and feel and this translates over to the Applications as well. So if you open up an application, it looks kind of like windows You know, you have the buttons up here at the top you have text and stuff along the side in menus That's basically the the windows UI now for a lot of people. This is a bad thing I know in plasma 6 one of the things that they wanted to do was kind of distance themselves from the Windows like UI claim they did that a little bit. They made the the panel floating They created much more in terms of how you edit it to make it more unique So if you enter edit mode here, you get something like this I'm not sure hopefully you're actually still seeing this but you get something like this So in in plasma 6 some things have Deviated from the windows like UI thing, but there's still enough familiarity here in terms of default UI That you can come here and be very comfortable if you're coming from windows now This isn't unique to plasma cinnamon does this Xfce does this in some ways depending on what distribution you're using You know, so it's not unique to to plasma, but I think that in terms of default layout Plasma has the best one because if you go look for the default layout of say Xfce It doesn't look very windows like that's one thing. It's also very very old-looking now the default layout of Cinnamon is much more windows like so there's a lot of comparisons to be made there But I think in terms of default layout KD does have the best one And because it does have so much customizability once you get familiar with using Linux once you get familiar with using this layout You can very easily go into you know colors and themes and theme stuff You can very easily move the panel up top or create a dock or whatever you want to do any number of things Okay, you are possible when you have that level of customizability But the defaults are always very important because as much as it boggles my mind the vast majority of people who use a Desktop environment like this stick with the defaults and that's okay If that's the way they want to do it But having good defaults is a very good thing the last one on the list is going to be a little controversial and It's going to maybe not be 100% true for everyone because I find that Wayland compatibility is Not universal for everyone. I'm a prime example of this That Wayland doesn't work for everyone all the time But I found after using plasma for a while that their Wayland Implementation is by far the best I had so many problems on GNOME. I've had problems with Wayland compositors on KDE at least after the update to Plasma 6 It has been been fan Tastic and on top of that if you have a multi monitor setup I find that plasma has the best Control over that situation, especially if your multi monitor setup has Monitors that aren't the same so if you have like a 1080p and a really weird resolution like I have with an LG Doolop that has kind of like a two monitor and one setup and it has a different resolution and it has a different refresh rate You can go into the display configuration of KDE Plasma and do a ton of stuff Including fractional scaling changing the refresh rate changing the over scan and with Plasma 6 You can now also use an ICC color profile if you have one So all of this stuff means that you can do a ton of customization on your monitor setup something that is not as Easy to do in other desktop environments XFCE doesn't support it at all because it's still X to work Anything in a lot of the other desktop environments are just very Very early in their Wayland stages in terms of GNOME GNOME doesn't do fractional scaling at all. You can choose between 100 and 200. That's it Now they do have some experimental supports for fractional scaling in between those numbers, but it's still very experimental It doesn't work very well also from in my experience and GNOME a lot of the UI elements of GNOME Don't scale at all like for whatever reason maybe I was doing something wrong who knows but I found in Plasma The Wayland compatibility for this situation in terms of multiple monitors is very very good So those are the top five reasons why I think you should use Plasma There are probably many more and I'd like to hear those from you guys in the comment section below Because I'm sure there are people out there who use Plasma who have better reasons than just these five So leave those in the comment section below. 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