Figure 1: KDE Plasma 4 running on OpenSuse

KDE was arguably the first “desktop environment” available for Linux. Currently poised to release version 5 of its Plasma desktop, KDE boasts a thoroughly modern desktop experience bundled with a wide catalog of desktop applications. KDE focuses on being highly configurable and malleable, with a huge list of configuration options, downloadable themes and widgets, and a desktop shell that can be transformed in a number of drastic ways.

Critics usually claim that KDE is too complicated, slightly unstable, bloated, and something of a resource hog.

Overall, I recommend KDE if you have newer hardware, like eye-candy and desktop-tweaking, but don’t want to dig around in cryptic config files to do it.

Try KDE Plasma on: openSUSE, Kubuntu, or SolydXK.