from Hacker News

KDE for Windows 10 Exiles – Upgrade your software, not your computer

by jlpcsl on 6/3/25, 12:56 PM with 82 comments

  • by Pet_Ant on 6/3/25, 1:08 PM

    It's not relevant now, but back when I started using Linux (Red Hat 7.1 I think) what made me choose KDE was that with KDE all the apps had a conspicuous 'K' in their names whereas Gnome app did not, so it was easier to get a consistent user experience.

    After that it was Konqueror with the different protocols like "wk:" in the address bar to search Wikipedia.

    Then when I learned more, it just seemed like Qt was a much more capable foundation to build a desktop on, and I wanted to bet on the winner.

    In the end KDE did win the desktop... because they built WebKit (as KHTML) and everything is now a webapp and the desktop is otherwise irrelevant.

  • by blyry on 6/3/25, 1:30 PM

    Plasma on Ubuntu is the what windows 7 could've been. It's been my daily for a couple years now, with jetbrains tooling and vscode. The only reason I boot back into windows is if I have to work on a .net framework app with visual studio. And Ubuntu is even explicitly supported by dell and Lenovo? It's a no brainer tbh. I'm lucky that my corporate IT is cool with it: I showed them how it supports drive encryption, can join our domain and run our patching software to meet all their 'policy'

  • by jeroenhd on 6/3/25, 1:23 PM

    Something often ignored by articles like these: you can still use Windows 10 safely past the 10 year support period, if you pay for additional updates: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/extended...

    Realistically, many people will use registry hacks and other forms of piracy to get those updates for free, of course, just like people did with Windows 7. Only businesses or people afraid of viruses will pay, but that's probably enough for Microsoft.

    I find it quite confusing to seemingly target people still unaware that Windows 10 is going out of support, but also list FTP/SSH/git/SVN integration as a feature. The people who use version control probably know what alternatives are or aren't available (even if they'd rather not need to find an alternative).

  • by alyandon on 6/3/25, 1:09 PM

    This really just blows my mind that Microsoft believes people are going to throw their perfectly functional laptops/desktops into the trash. All Microsoft has to do to keep people on Windows and in the Microsoft ecosystem would be to offer a supported version of Windows 11 without the CPU and TPM 2.0 requirements.

    For me, every one of the older machines in my household (laptops and desktops) that are currently on Windows 10 that cannot run Windows 11 in a fully supported manner will be migrated to a KDE based Linux distro.

  • by nicholasbraker on 6/3/25, 1:44 PM

    My 85 years old dad uses Win10 right now, but using KDE (or similar environment) seems to be a good alternative. He only uses Firefox and mail anyway.

  • by neepi on 6/3/25, 1:34 PM

    Tried this with my mother. I had to rebuild the machine with Windows 11 LTSC afterwards. Which she hates but less than Linux which was totally unusable for her.

    YMMV but this isn't a real option for a lot of people.

  • by kalaksi on 6/3/25, 1:46 PM

    I now run KDE on Fedora after I got fed up with snaps and bugs in Ubuntu 24.04.

    For linux newbies, I'd actually suggest checking out Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop. I used to run Mint a long time ago and recently installed it for someone trying to change from Windows. it was nice to see that they still provide a good, preconfigured UX. And no snaps. It's probably simpler than KDE but not too simple.

  • by GrantMoyer on 6/3/25, 3:02 PM

    I find Plasma much more pleasant to use than Windows' shell. There's no specific big feature that makes it stand out, but it works just a little more smoothly in almost everything it does.

    Maybe it's a case of [1], but I think Plasma is ready for the average desktop user. The other parts of the system may have some ways to go.

    [1]: https://xkcd.com/2501/

  • by the__alchemist on 6/3/25, 1:16 PM

    #1: You can install Win 11 on older machines from boot media.

    #2: End-of-updates isn't the security vulnerability large software vendors make it out to be, in the context of PC use. The paragraph below the first picture is FUD.

  • by rhabarba on 6/3/25, 1:12 PM

    KDE is actually a good example of why non-Linux users say that Linux users would actually prefer to use Windows.