Transcription
With the end of Windows 10 support being a few months away, most people will unfortunately move on to Microsoft's next walled garden. But for those of you brave enough to try and use Linux, there's a lot of choices to make about what software you're going to use. All of the web browsers on Windows are fortunately cross-compatible. So even if you're a Chrome or Edge user, the experience on Linux will be the same. But your user interface or desktop environment, as it's called, is one of those choices that you're going to make, which will probably be the most crucial one to how good your experience on Linux is.
Now, with Windows, you basically get what you get. And I guess you can sort of customize the layout a little bit. Like, you can move the taskbar to the side, and you can change the color of it, but you can't swap out your whole layout for something else like you can on Linux, where there's several desktop environments to choose from and boundless customizations that you can make to any one of them. KDE is just one of these desktop environments that you can choose from. And they're also one of the sponsors of the End of 10 project, which is helping people switch from Windows 10 to Linux, especially if they have a computer that isn't compatible with Windows 11, which would mean going out and purchasing a new computer and likely turning the old one, which is perfectly usable, into e-waste just to let Microsoft further abuse you.
So today, we're going to be looking at Kubuntu, which is basically Ubuntu with the KDE desktop pre-installed instead of Gnome, which tends to have more of a Mac OS feel. So looking at the default Kubuntu desktop layout, it definitely gives off a Windowsy vibe with the taskbar or panel being down here at the bottom. The calendar, along with different widgets and notifications for your network, brightness, and sound, and clipboard being over here on the right-hand side. You've got some pinned applications over here on the left, along with an application launcher on the left. And if we go into the system settings, this is also eerily Windowsy. The various settings pages are on the left-hand side, just like in Windows. Granted, KDE is a little bit more verbose with this display than Windows 11 is, which actually makes it a little bit easier to navigate, in my opinion.
Uh, so it throws you into the quick settings first. And here you can make high-level theme changes, like switching between a light and a dark mode. And you can also go into the global theme, and then that's going to bring you down here under appearance and style to switch between different themes like Oxygen or Kubuntu, uh, whichever one that you prefer to use. And you can also get more of these from the Kubuntu store. And I'm sure that you could find more online as well. Of course, make sure that you vet things that you find online and make sure that they're not going to install any malware onto your system. Uh, but you can do much more granular customization on here than you could in Windows.
Uh, and this is actually a new feature that they added, which is the time of day wallpaper. So this is another feature that's in probably most modern OSs. Windows, I think Mac OS has it. I know Android has it, where, uh, your theme and your wallpaper changes based on the time of day. So you sort of have, uh, like a lighter one during the daytime, and then you have a darker one, uh, after sunset. So that is a new feature that was just added in. I think this is Plasma 6.4. Let me just check. Yeah, so this is KDE Plasma 6.4, which you have to install from the beta branch if you're on, uh, Kubuntu, because it's really new and, um, potentially a little bit buggier than I think 6.3, which is stable right now.
Yeah, KDE gives you a lot of options for, uh, customizing every single part, like your buttons and your different applications, your window decorations, your icons, and you can do all of this through a graphical settings menu. You don't have to dive into manually editing CSS files or source code or anything like that that might be sort of intimidating to a new user.
Now, because of all this eye candy and customizations, KDE is actually kind of bloated, at least as far as Linux desktop environments go. If I open up an H-top window here to show you my system stats, you can see that the KDE desktop is using 1.74 gigs of RAM when it's idling. Uh, but the Windows 11 VM, on the other hand, is using almost twice as much. Okay, it's using three gigs of RAM out of the eight that I assigned to it in this VM. So, if we go back over to Kubuntu, I could probably open up a couple of Firefox tabs to get to that level of, uh, RAM usage. Maybe even three. Yeah. So, kind of a big deal, especially if you have a system with less RAM, to get more out of it if you're using Linux versus Windows.
Also, seemingly has a much more efficient application launcher because when you spam-click this a bunch of times, your CPU usage does go up a little bit across all of the cores. But if you do the same thing in Windows 11, you get a much more dramatic result with it, almost instantly going up to close to 100% just from spam-clicking the application launcher. And apparently, part of this is because this thing is built with an entire React Native app, and it's only like one of the sections of it that's the React Native app. But anyway, moving on from the performance and the layout of KDE, uh, we've got the utilities that actually ship with KDE, like the Dolphin file manager.
And something really cool that I learned about Dolphin recently is that this file manager, along with most of the other KDE apps actually, you can install them on Windows. So, if you're planning to make the switch to Linux, you could start KDE-ifying Windows by installing Dolphin, Kate the text editor, Kdenlive the video editor, which is actually one of the better video editors on Linux, and so on, and use those instead of the default Windows apps that aren't available on Linux. That way, when you make the switch over, you're actually using a lot of the same applications.
And there's some other quality-of-life applications that ship with KDE, like the KDE Connect app. So this allows you to sync your phone with your desktop, and it also lets you use your phone as a remote control to move the mouse and input keys from the keyboard. I think there's also a shared clipboard here. Uh, so, yeah, basically lets you interact with your phone in a really convenient way.
Now, one thing I do have to address, which is probably going to confuse some of the newer people to Linux here, uh, is the fact that KDE and Kubuntu are now shipping with Wayland instead of X11. And since Wayland is a newer display protocol that's fundamentally different from X11, there can be a lot more bugs and difficulties with getting certain software to work on it. Granted, a lot of mainstream applications that have active maintenance do have pretty good Wayland support at this point. Um, and the latest KDE Plasma actually started to introduce support for session restore in Wayland. So that's where you can save the applications that you had open. Um, and ideally also save the positions that they're in and the submenus that they're in. Like, if I was in the downloads directory here, uh, within the Dolphin file manager, I don't think all those finer details are saved yet, but, um, you can at least save the programs that you had open whenever you log out and then log back in to a Wayland session.
Uh, and personally, I am still using XServer on my host machine that's running these virtual machines, but I am going to be doing some more testing with Wayland and with X11 Libre, which is a new fork of X11, because X11 just isn't really getting support anymore. So, it's going to be one of those two moving forward for me. And I think it would be interesting to do some benchmarks between an Arch or a Gentoo system that's built pretty much the same, just with those different display servers.
And it honestly won't be long until you have to use one of those DIY distros to avoid Wayland if you don't want to use it for whatever reason, because Wayland is kind of like the new systemd, at least in terms of adoption. I think it's already built into most of the mainstream, just works Linux distros, and over time, the mainstream desktop environments like KDE and XFCE are going to be built for Wayland by default, and they might even end up dropping support for X11 altogether. Uh, in fact, the infamous Gnome desktop is already doing that. They're already going to be disabling X11 session support by default, starting with the release of Gnome 49 later on this year. KDE, on the other hand, has stated that they will still support X11 sessions for a while. So it is still possible to build KDE against X11, but they firmly believe KDE firmly believes that Wayland is the future of desktop Linux, and I won't be surprised if they end up doing the same thing as Gnome later on.
But to summarize, if you've really come to enjoy all of the eye candy that has been added to Windows over time, you can get that fix, and you can even elevate it to a new level with KDE on Linux with a distro like Kubuntu. Try it out today. And if you enjoyed this video, please like and share it to hack the algorithm. And check out my online store, bass.win, where you can buy my awesome merch or accessories for your phone or laptop. 10% storewide discount when you pay with Monero XMR at checkout. Have a great rest of your day.