EndeavourOS is moving to KDE Plasma for its live environment and offline installer from Xfce. You’ll hear no complaints from me!
Endeavour has been great with Plasma. That’s how I’ve always configured it.
I can’t wait until they push the big Wayland update with KDE; I am using Wayland with an Nvidia card and it can be a bit unpredictable.
What big update? Wayland has been pretty usable (on AMD, anyway) for a while now.
Presumably Plasma 6.0, which will fix a large number of remaining Wayland issues via Qt 6.
Will that make it more usable for nvidia users? I hope to someday try SteamOS with nvidia but I think most of the wayland issues are what’s preventing that.
EOS and KDE are basically what SteamOS is running on the back-end. They use Plasma as their DE, and they use Arch as their OS. It’s just highly tailored to their hardware since it’s all AMD-based and AMD drivers have been open source forever.
There are offshoot projects that build from the SteamOS source and then include Nvidia drivers, but I haven’t found one that was as functional as just running Endeavor and customizing it in the way that a Steam Deck would be designed for gaming.
Yeah that’s basically what I’m doing now but using xorg instead of wayland. So I cant use stuff like gamescope and the steam big picture is horribly laggy for whatever reason with nvidia cards.
Next GPU upgrade I’ll go team red but until then I’m stuck with the nvidia card.
https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia for KDE specifically, see bottom of https://arewewaylandyet.com/ for others
Will that make it more usable for nvidia users?
Don’t bet on it. For a while NVidia had hired a guy to implement EGLStreams support in KWin and other issues around supporting the Nvidia driver but since a year he’s gone: https://invent.kde.org/users/ekurzinger/activity
Since then they’ve made their driver open source.
Since then they’ve made their driver open source.
No, they didn’t. They open sourced the kernel module interfacing with the actual driver that’s in user space. The actual OpenGL, Vulkan, etc. implementations are all closed source.
Also their “open source” commit updates are one-shot for any version updates and nothing in between. Makes it pretty hard to contribute to.
It’s not great on Nvidia. KDE’s dev team have announced a big Plasma update, specifically focused on Wayland support to be released around February.
I have a 3090 and some stuff works, some stuff doesn’t. I am forced to use it because X will lock refresh rates to the rate of the lowest monitor, so my 165hz screens were not being used to their fullest until I swapped over to Wayland which supports multiple monitor refresh rates.
Often I will find system components freezing up. The task bar, for example, will often stop being useable and freeze up. I have had the digital clock widget freeze up on me, which requires a relog to fix. It also doesn’t totally work on transparent themes, rendering them without the translucency.
The task bar, for example, will often stop being useable and freeze up. I have had the digital clock widget freeze up on me, which requires a relog to fix.
Thankfully this has been tracked down, and will be fixed for Plasma 6. If you run into it, you can hit Alt+F2 and run
kwin_wayland --replacewhich will restart the shell.If you go into edit mode, and edit the task bar widget that shows your running applications, disable the option that shows window previews upon hovering over the application. Apparently that is the thing that causes the renderer to fail on non Intel GPU systems. Here’s the bug report that goes over the whole history if you’re interested.
Definitely feel you on the overall Nvidia Wayland KDE issues. I really wish I was in a position to be able to pickup an AMD GPU.
Awesome, thanks!
There’s still weird bugs with Plasma Wayland unrelated to GPUs too. For whatever reason, dragging a file from a notification (e.g. Spectacle when a screenshot is saved) to Discord will make the shell just quit and restart…
On AMD is usually great but still has bugs, klipper with xwayland is a mess and cant be disabled, for example. But on Nvidia is … Bad
I think for NVIDIA or other proprietary drivers like AMDGPUPRO, Ublue images are best. They have images that they build with the NVIDIA driver and everything preinstalled, if an update fails, they will simply not ship it, if it breaks something on your system, you simply roll back.
And in contrast to regular Fedora Atomic (Silverblue, Kinoite,…) it has all the Codecs and drivers included, so you can directly run things like Resolve or Games on it with minor installation.
EOS has generally been fine with the NVIDIA-DKMS drivers. The only funky thing that happened to me was that for about a month on my 1650 the HDMI output was not recognized, and I had to flip to Windows to use the external monitor on my laptop.
I have so many issues with X11 crashing for me on KDE. I hope Wayland will be better…
I use EndeavourOS with KDE and it’s wonderful!
Does anyone know offhand the issues Calamares has with Xfce?
“KDE Plasma offers a more native development experience for the team and therefore it is easier to maintain. This is the main and only reason for this switch”
As a user I switched from KDE to XFCE, and found it to be an improvement. But I’ve never done any development involving Xfce.
What do you like better about XFCE?
Well, they’re both pretty good.
Xfce starts off closer to the way I like things and requires less messing around with the config to get it all the way there. It changes less frequently, which I appreciate. It uses slightly less memory, seems to go wrong less often, and has fewer things I have no interest in like ‘kwallet’ or whatever. And I appreciate what seems to me its more approachably modular nature (which I’ve used only for a couple of minor things.)
for me, simplicity.
EndeavourOS is the distro that stopped my distro-hopping addiction. Installed it over a year ago and haven’t left since. Now this made me love it even more. KDE plasma has come along ways. I think Nate Graham has a lot to do with the progress Plasma made. Dude is awesome (so is every other volunteer of course).
Great news. Seems that most of the community uses KDE anyway, so this should make things faster for most installations
I plan to switch soon from Manjaro to Endeavour, and hadn’t yet decided whether I wanted to stick with Xfce. Well, with this endorsement plus reports of good overall performance I think I’ll give Plasma a shot 🙂
I tend to use XFCE on machines with lower specs. It’s a lighter DE. Plasma has always been pretty heavy in comparison, because it’s really customizable and designed to be very good looking, which can be taxing on lower-end hardware.
I think this is outdated advice. Most folks seem to say the memory usage is similar, CPU/GPU usage is a bit higher in Plasma if you leave effects turned on, and disk usage is higher in Plasma.
I primarily care about RAM and my experience with KDE on the Steam Deck is pretty good so it seems like a solid choice.
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At some point I’ll probably need something that supports Wayland, but their custom XFCE is so nice, I love it
Does it use systemd-boot by default?
Last I installed it, it had it as the default with an option to use I believe grub.
Can confirm
Awesome, thanks!
There is a default? I installed it at least 5 times in the last year and I don’t remember doing more than clicking a single button to choose KDE, but I had to choose at some point. But my memory is shit
This only applies for the offline installation
I’m using EndeavourOS with Sway
Plasma is very lightweight, so no complains here. Although they could implement some convenience-stuff, like Kwallet as default keyring + autostart via dbus. Or a keyfile, so you don’t have to enter your password twice, in case you use full-disk encryption and a swap partition. Small things, but I see little reason not to do it like that. It’s stuff that’s trivial for powerusers but scary for the less experienced.
