Do you prefer KDE 4 or KDE 5?

I haven't tried KDE 5. I would like newer versions of the applications than what is in KDE 4. KDE 4 has been good to me. Its my favorite KDE version that I have used.

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5 myself, but only because I kept forcing myself to use it. 4 is much more stable and feature complete, even the newest plasma 5.10.5 isn't 100% stable yet from what I've seen (I use it on Arch). I wouldn't even say KDE Plasma was beta worthy until 5.8.0, and probably not truly release worthy until 5.9.0

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I prefer 5 but as it stands I think 4 is the more finished and polished of the two.

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When the HALF of the packages, from a Linux distribution, will be related to a particular Desktop Environment, even we like it, or not, there is a very big problem: one could consider that distribution just a compilation of this particular DE. Something like Android.

I for one, I do not want to install 1.2 GB of packages, only to have a some questionable stable and usable DE. I said that also I consider it ugly like hell?
I for one, being Romanian, I am not interested by Chinese Language to be installed by default on KDE, but about stability and usability.
I for one, I am scared only thinking about hundreds of Plasma 5 packages (about to be) dumped on l series, making a nightmare avoiding them.

I for one, I want to run Slackware, not a Plasmaware compilation!

In my humble opinion, the Plasma 5 is simply too big to be included in a Linux distribution like Slackware. Who want it, to feel free to install it from a thirdly party repository, and remember my words:

In the day when Slackware will remove half of its packages and add the Plasma 5 instead, it will become Plasmaware.

And WHAT IF the next Plasma 6 will hard depends on SystemD? After all, Plasma 5 already play with that. We will adopt it too, because it is required?

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Gotta list me as a "Don't Care", as when KDE 4 originally showed up, I moved to xfce. But like most slackers (I think), I install "everything". So whatever ships next will be fine (even though I don't expect to move off of xfce, I've got to admit that I really like Shisen-Sho) - for the record I posted here, but did not vote.

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I have no preference as I never tried KDE5.

I don't like KDE at all that I never use but to make some tests, but I do like some of the KDE apps, like lokalize or kate.

So my dream is to be able to use these apps with a very minimal subset of the KDE packages, but with nothing related to strigi, akonadi or baloo (for sure this prevents to use the PIM apps, but I don't need them).

Honestly I know very few about KDE4 and nothing about KDE5. I would be interested to know if it is more modular that KDE4, or if you have to install everything or nothing.

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I think the biggest problem is that Plasma 5 was written for distributions with dependencies resolution in the package management. That's why it was split in so many packages.

And it is astonishing big. And everything related to it as libs go to l series, making hard to find and remove them, if you have storage constraints.

Myself I am very happy with an EEPC having 4GB as storage, and another netbook, having 16GB. And I am not happy hunting like Red October the actual KDE4 packages, to remove them. Already.

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I prefer KDE 4 on my main faster box. On my slower units I run XFCE. I have not tried KDE 5 so I cannot offer an opinion on it.

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I use KDE 4 but really dislike it; when I get the time I'll be going to KDE 3.5 (V2) AKA Trinity.

Because of the agro caused by early versions of KDE 4 I have no intention of trying KDE 5.

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I like KDE 5. It has the bigger version number. It's also prettier. Ymmv, eye of the beerholder, etc.

Actually, I like 4 because I can get it to work whereas with 5 something about it and my graphics card definitely did not get along. It's been a while since I've retried it, so my experience is dated by months ago. It's probably half my fault for not being motivated enough to install the nvidia drivers. That's a project for another day.

I stopped using KDE 3 because it got to heavy for the laptop I had at the time (this was back in the days when RAM was measured in KBs). I started using Fluxbox and grew to quite like it's versatility and configurability and defaulted to it for almost a decade, with occasional forays into Enlightenment.

Recently, I've come back to KDE via Mageia, which is quite KDE-oriented, and came to quite like what KDE4 has matured into, now that it's over its growing pains.

I also quite like the Plasma desktop, which I'm running on Mageia 6 (it came with the version upgrade) and on Debian Sid.

Afterthought:

I voted for v. 5 because it seems to me an organic successor to v. 4, whereas v. 4 was a significant change from v. 3.

Half? Maybe you need to check your math a bit. The number of packages for KDE roughly doubled from KDE4 to KDE5 (plasma5, whatever) from 276 to 494. Slackware-current has 1452 packages right now. If we remove all the KDE4 and add the KDE5, it brings us to 1670. If we divide 494 by that new total, it would be less than 30% of the packages. And this doesn't include any libraries that might get removed that were required for KDE4 but not for KDE5.

And Plasma 5 is only 1.14x bigger (146MB) than KDE4 if you include all the language packs. I don't know why kde devs decided to incorporate all the languages into the program files rather than keeping them separate like before, but honestly, hard drive space is cheap nowadays. I even have a 1TB NVMe drive. The old kdei files are less than 400MB. If you have a 256GB SSD, that's only 0.16% of the space if installed.

But, afaik, most programs include l10n and i18n within them and not as separate files, so maybe KDE is working to do the same.

Hundreds? You're great at exaggeration! It's only 62 packages that are considered "deps".

Too big? It's a whopping 146MB bigger on a DVD that contains 2.6GB of packages. We're talking a 5.6% increase. -current is already ~250MB bigger than 14.2, so it would be less than what -current has already grown.

Then they'll tackle that when it arises. They may choose to stop supplying KDE, or find alternative implementations to the required systemd functions. Why are you complaining about a completely non-existent version of KDE when discussing KDE5? KDE5 doesn't require systemd, so who cares if the next version requires it. We're talking about the current version of KDE. Should we also consider not supporting kernel 4.20 because it *might* require systemd? What about apache? They might choose to only support systemd in apache 3.0. Should we stop using it now? See how stupid it sounds when you question what software might require when it isn't even being written yet? Even more, should we drop the software now just because it *might* start using something we don't like in the future?

Also, QT6 is said it should be binary compatible with QT5, so KDE wouldn't require a full refresh to use it, but that's still far enough out that any speculation is pointless.

@dugan, I didn't vote since I haven't used Plasma5, but it will most likely be my new default DE once its added to Slackware (unless something is horribly amiss, then I'd go to xfce, but I really don't like xfce, so it'd have to be pretty bad for me to go to it). I've enjoyed all the KDEs from v2 and up. Each version takes a little bit to get used to, but once I do, it ends up being hard to go back to the previous version.

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Given the capacity of contemporary hard drives, I find it difficult to wrap my head around concerns about the size on disk of a desktop environment, when the size on disk of the average movie generally exceeds the size on disk of the average DE.

Two movies can exceed the size on disk of a typical Linux distribution.

It does appear to me as much ado over not much of anything.

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LOL @ faster box. KDE 4 under Slackware ran smoother than Win XP on my P2 450mhz with 384mb of ram until it died in 2014. So I never been a fan of the KDE4 is bloated or is just for fast hardware meme.

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