 On paper at least, KD Plasma is the best desktop environment out there. It has the most flexibility when it comes to look, feel, and functionality. It has a ton of options and most people would probably argue that it has too many options, but it really does allow a lot of flexibility when it comes to how it looks. But if you look across the distro landscape, what you're going to find is that most distributions don't use Plasma as their primary desktop environment. Now sure, most of them do offer an option with Plasma, but most of them have GNOME as their primary desktop environment. So the question I have to ask today is why is in Plasma, when it is so theoretically superior to everything else, not used more often when it comes to primary default use on distros? Before we jump in, if you'd leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it. It really does help the channel. So why is Plasma not used more often? Well, that question can be answered and that's what we're going to talk about today. So this right here is my Plasma desktop. I've been using Plasma off and on now ever since I started using OpenSUSE almost a month ago. And I keep coming back to it because I want Plasma to be good. So I've talked about Plasma and my experiences with it several times on the channel before. But most of my experiences, I've kind of boiled down to me just having bad luck when it comes to Plasma. There are certain things that just always happen on Plasma for me. Usually it has to do with monitors not going to sleep. And I've talked about that ad nauseam on YouTube and on Macedon and even on Twitter back when it was still a thing. So usually my poor reaction to Plasma can be boiled down to the fact that I have bad luck with Plasma. I don't ever think that Plasma itself is actually bad. So to answer the question, why isn't it more popular? We have to dig a little bit deeper, a little bit beyond my experiences with it. So let's first talk about why I think it should be more popular. And that all lies in this little baby right here. This is the Plasma system settings panel. Now inside of this gem, you're going to find a ton of flexibility over basically every corner of your desktop environment. You can change how it looks, how it feels, how it functions. Basically anything you can dream up, you can find inside of this Plasma settings panel and you can change it and tweak it. And even if you can't find it inside of this application, there's a good chance you can go to something like get new global themes and find yourself a new theme or find yourself a new K-Win script or whatever. You know, there are a ton of these extraneous panels littered throughout the settings panel where you can add things to your system from the KD store. And there are hundreds upon hundreds of options that you can add to it and that is even beyond the hundreds and hundreds of options that are already built in. So the reason why I think Plasma should be more popular is because it offers distro maintainers a ton of flexibility. If you want to change your theme, it's much easier to do it in Plasma than it is to do so in GNOME. In GNOME you have to literally hack the system in order to theme it. It's not meant to be themed at all. Plasma is on the other end of the spectrum. It's way easier to theme. You can theme everything here, whether you want to do a overall global theme or you want to change your Plasma style or just individual colors or you want to change the window decorations or the fonts or the icons or the cursors or whatever. You can change everything down to the most minute detail. So when I say Plasma should be more popular, the reason why I say so is because it gives distro maintainers a ton of options when it comes to setting it up their default look and feel. We know that distros want this power. We know that they do. All you have to do is look at Ubuntu. Ubuntu does not use the standard GNOME layout. They have done a lot of work in order to make GNOME look and feel like Ubuntu. And it would be much easier to get that look and feel on KDE Plasma than it is on GNOME. Because on GNOME, you have to install a ton of extensions. You have to build in the ability to theme in some fashion, whether that's using GNOME tweaks or some other hack in order to actually get your theme to work. You have to do all of these things, whereas all of that functionality is built into Plasma. So that functionality is something that distro maintainers definitely want. So why don't they use it? Well, the answer to that question and the answer to the question of the day is that there are actually many reasons why KDE Plasma isn't more popular, but there are two or three main ones. So the first one, and this is one I've talked about before, is that KDE is definitely not the most stable of desktop environments. It's sad to say, but it's not as stable as GNOME. It just is not. Because of all the features and stuff that they have built in, that has brought in more bugs than what you see on GNOME. It doesn't mean that GNOME is perfect. Okay, we're not going to toot their own horn too much, but it is more stable than Plasma. Right out the gate. That's one of the reasons why. But I don't think that it's the biggest reason why, because distros could maintain a older version of Plasma. They just could use the LTS version or whatever, and that'd be very stable. And honestly, to tell you the truth, I have been using Plasma on this machine since I started using OpenSUSA off and on. I've been using Kinoi over on my standing desk for months. Ever since George Castro pointed me towards the Ublue stuff, I've been using Kinoi over there. It's a rebased version of Silverblue. And that KDE over there has been phenomenally stable. It's been so stable. It's been the best KDE experience I have ever had. It's been so good. So stability, while is a reason why, it's not the reason why. The thing about desktop environments and distros in general is that when you have a distro, you want it to be as approachable as possible. You want a brand new Linux user to be able to come in and use your desktop environment slash distro and not have a ton of support questions. You don't wanna have them look at something and think, oh my goodness, I'm so lost. How am I supposed to do this, this, this and this? Everyone wants to be able to turn their computer on for the first time, even if you're just learning a new operating system and you wanna be able to use it. You wanna be able to, in general, know exactly how to do everything you need to do. Now, obviously, I don't think that this is the right way of going about things. I think that if you're going to learn to use Linux, you should learn to use Linux and you should expect to learn new things. But most new users, when they want to switch to Linux, they want to have a very simple experience. It doesn't mean that they don't wanna learn new things. It's just that they don't wanna be overwhelmed with a ton of options. Now, that is the biggest problem when it comes to KDE. They have too many options. Now, for the KDE lovers out there, all the options make KDE, KDE, it makes it the lovable desktop environment that we wanna use. But for new users who take a look at this and they open up the settings panel and all they wanna do is change the font, this is going to be very overwhelming for them. All of these functions and features and little doodads and stuff that you can change just adds on to their confusion and their inability to see past the idea that this is a desktop environment just like everything else. It just offers you all the power. For most people who are just coming into Linux, they don't want to have to go spelunking into a settings panel to make one little change. They don't wanna have to scroll all the way down to change their display resolution when it should probably be towards the top. Now, I understand as someone who loves to tweak and theme and all that stuff, the appearance is awesome to be at the top, but I don't think it's the most important setting that they should have, right? It's not the most important setting. It's just not, okay? The most important settings are going to be for your network. It's going to be for your input devices and your display. Those three things are the things that most people are going to wanna see when they first open up a settings panel, but they're at the bottom. For whatever reason, they've decided to put those three most important settings down here at the bottom. Now, it doesn't mean that if you, I mean really all you have to do is scroll down, of course, so it's not that hard and they've properly labeled them and you can search if you wanted to search, so you can find them. It's not that hard, but it still feels like they've buried the lead. When you come to this page here, they do a fairly good job of having stuff on the quick settings page here, so they do have display configuration, but network configuration is not there. Also, the display configuration is just one little button. Again, they've prioritized the look and feel over things that you probably want to actually see if you're coming here. Most people, I know it sounds weird if you're someone like me who likes to theme. You can tell I like to theme my desktop environment. This is Grovebox. I've spent quite some time making it look really nice, but most people aren't like me, you're right. Most people aren't interested in how their desktop environment really looks. Now, sure, they wanna choose between light and dark, fine making that top and center, but they don't care about anything else right away. Eventually they'll get there maybe, but really when they open up a settings panel, they wanna see the display options. They wanna see input or they wanna see the network connectivity settings. They don't need all the other frivolous stuff until they've decided that they need them. So the biggest hurdle KDE Plasma has when it comes to adoption is the amount of features that they actually have. The thing that makes KDE Plasma special is also the thing that holds it back the most. Distramaintainers don't wanna have to support this many features. And while I know what you're saying, Matt, they don't have to support them. They can always point people towards the upstream support. They can go to the KDE forums or whatever. But when you have a problem with Ubuntu, you don't go to the GNOME guys for support. You go to Ubuntu, okay? You go to the Ask Ubuntu or the Ubuntu discourse or whatever it's called these days. You go there and you ask for help and you probably will get it. But when you have a system here that has so many potential failure points, so many potential confusion points, you're going to discover that your users end up needing support more often. The more support they need, the more supports you have to give or at least the more support that is expected that you have to give. And district maintainers don't want to have to take on that burden because it would be a burden. It would cause them to spend time and effort on explaining how things are supposed to work. Now, I don't think that it would be as bad as this argument often makes it seem. So this argument has been around for a very long time. And it's one of the reasons why KDE has basically never been a primary desktop environment for many distros. Back in the day, like I'm talking about back in the early 2000s, it used to be pretty normal to get a distribution that had both GNOME and KDE installed on it out of the box. That's the way SUSE was back in 2003 when I first tried it. It had both GNOME and KDE on it for you to try. These days, you don't see that anymore because first of all, having both of them installed side by side, not that creative an idea. You're going to have a lot of duplicates and stuff like that. But beyond that fact, most distros have chosen to go with a simpler option simply because it means less work for them in terms of support and maintenance and all of this stuff, it just, KDE has become too featureful. And it sounds horrible to say because features are the reason why KDE has become KDE over the years. It's one of the reasons why people like KDE so much. It's one of the reasons why I like KDE so much. It gives you all of the options that you want and you can basically change anything. It's what makes it so good. But it also prevents it from being user-friendly and user-friendliness is one of the things that distro maintainers really look for when it comes to a default desktop environment. It's just the plain facts. Now, if we're going to look at all of this cynically, there is another reason why Plasma hasn't become more popular when it comes to being the default on distributions. Now, I say cynically because GNOME is more locked down than Plasma is. I don't think that anybody can argue that. GNOME is not as customizable. It has one, basically one way of using it without extending it to high heaven. And it's just either you like it or you don't, right? Now, Ubuntu has done a lot of work to make it as customizable as possible, but even their version of GNOME still is locked down. You can't go install your own theme without doing some extra work. You can't change the icons without doing some extra work. And when I say extra work, basically what I mean is hacking it because the options to change those things are hacks and not meant to be officially supported even by a distro maintainer. So if we're looking at it cynically, the lack of options and the lack of customizability when it comes to GNOME is a benefit for distro maintainers because it allows them to have more control over the look and feel. And it means that users can't make changes which they would then expect the distro maintainer to support. So if you, for example, decided to go into Ubuntu, you're using the GNOME version, which is the main version and you decided to install GNOME tweaks and you install a theme from some random GitHub repository and it breaks your system, chances are you're not gonna go to that random GitHub repository for support, you're probably going to hike it on over to the Ubuntu forums and ask for support there. By having it as locked down as possible, it means that those tweaks probably aren't something that most people, especially new users are going to actually go out and do. And that means that that support is not going to be something that they have to focus on very much on their forums, which is going to save them time and effort. So if we're gonna look at it cynically, the more closed nature of GNOME is a benefit for many distro maintainers simply because it allows them to have the control instead of the user. When the user has all the control like they do in plasma, it causes more confusion, I would say, also more support opportunities, I would say. So you can look at it cynically like that as well, as the reason why KD Plasma hasn't become more popular when it comes to Linux distros. So overall, the argument here is that when distro maintainers are choosing their desktop environments, they're probably choosing it for the most user-friendly, most widely user-friendly opportunities as they can. So they want something that most new users are going to be comfortable with. And for whatever reason, they've chosen GNOME. Now, see, I am an anti-GNOME guy. I don't like GNOME at all, despite what other people might say about me. I'm not a GNOME guy. Now, I understand GNOME much more than I used to. I understand the workflow a little bit better because I have actually used it for a little while and I can understand the workflow, but I don't care for the workflow. And because I'm an anti-GNOME guy, I would argue that GNOME is actually less user-friendly than KD Plasma is out of the box. Now, Ubuntu is actually an example against this argument simply because they've made changes to GNOME to make it more user-friendly. But if you go use the Fedora version of GNOME, which is basically stock vanilla GNOME, I don't think that that's very user-friendly at all. Where are the icons? How are you supposed to know how to get to the icons? Where's the app launcher? How are you supposed to do any of this stuff? Because it doesn't, I mean, yes, there's a tour, but it's the worst tour you've ever seen. It's really bad. Now, you'd have to know you're supposed to go up there and click the activities button, or you're supposed to hit the meta key. You're actually supposed to know what the meta key is. So I don't think, I don't particularly think that vanilla GNOME is actually all that user-friendly, but that's just my opinion. And I will freely admit that I'm highly biased against GNOME because I don't like it. So just take that opinion with a grain of salt. So that's it for this video. If you have thoughts on Katie Plasma and why it's not the most popular, you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. If you haven't already, hit that thumbs up button. It really does help the channel. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube because they're all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. You guys are awesome. Thank you so very, very, very, very, very, very, very, all the varies very much. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.