Goodbye KDE!

I switched to KDE when GNOME 3 was released. Over time, version 4 generally got better and less buggy. I was satisfied and even happy with it. Now Plasma 5 seems to have thrown away a lot of that progress. There are far more bugs and less features. It's not as bad as the GNOME 3 change, but Plasma 5 is bad enough that I don't want to use it.

It's tragic how these free software desktop environments get to be good and then revert to a state which should be called an alpha release. Of course GNOME 2 and KDE 4 had some limitations and disadvantages. A big bold change can help there, but I think the only way to truly improve is to slowly evolve into something better. Even Microsoft can't successfully make sudden big changes.

GNOME 3 has improved in the meantime. I still think the window switching, application launcher and top bar are inefficient and limiting, and it wastes screen space. So, I definitely won't be choosing GNOME 3. MATE reminded me that things have improved since GNOME 2, and I don't want that either.

Cinnamon seems good now. It seems to be a combination of the best of GNOME 2 and GNOME 3. Its web page may be unimpressive, but the software works well and has enough features. It seems significantly faster than KDE, and I'm forced to install a lot less stuff. Losing KDE 4 was annoying at first, but now it seems I'm switching to something even better.