Plasma/KDE and Nvidia cards

Now I have been running Plasma 6 for month before switching back to Gnome. My experience is that don't use Plasma when you have a Nvidia card. It's very lacking compared to Gnome and Budgie on that area. I will stretch it so far that don't get Nvidia cards in the future if you want to run Linux fully. As I have read it, Linus and the kernel devs are rejecting more and more Nvidias restricted driver from the kernel - which is IMO bad news as most people still has Nvidia cards.
So my near future GPU card is going to be AMD.

Admittedly not running Zorin on this computer and don't have an AMD graphics card to compare with, but I've been using Manjaro with KDE Plasma 5.x for over 2 years and they pushed the upgrade to Plasma 6.x a couple of weeks ago, all while having an NVIDIA RTX3060 and I've had with basically no graphics card / driver / gaming issues. Except hardware acceleration for videos in Firefox, which I'm honestly not sure if it actually works half the time despite technically being enabled now :joy:

To me, the distinction between DE more comes down to the device and how you use it. I love Plasma on my desktop PC with a keyboard, mouse, and multiple monitors, and I love the immense customisation it offers while also looking good out-of-the-box. On laptops / tablets, mostly due to poor Wayland support, Plasma 5.x really struggles (I haven't tired 6.x on one yet) while gnome flourishes with its great gesture support and single-screen-multi-tasking focus, though I still find its rigidity and the ideology of the devs disappointing - I know some people who much prefer the design and more restricted philosophy gnome provides. At least for (mostly) vanilla gnome, like on Fedora Workstation.

Zorin's DE does a great job of improving base gnome to actually be comfortable on a multi-monitor desktop with no trackpad / touchscreen while keeping gnome's benefits for laptops and similar use-cases.

From a future-proofing standpoint, though, yeah, unless team green really pull their finger out and start playing nicely with the linux community, I certainly will be looking at AMD next time I upgrade.

My understanding is that Nvidia will start being more cooperative with open source from now on. But based on the historical disrespect they've shown towards open source in the past, and to promote the underdog in the graphics card market, I also endorse the decision of going for AMD... although I have no need for one so I won't be doing any shopping any time soon :smiley:

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Nvidia agreed to work on/open up to the NV driver which at current state is far from ideal, but they need to pull a stunt to deliver performance equals AMD open driver. And that has to be fast.

Also regarding KDE/Plasma - don't get me wrong I love the project it grew on me, but with my Nvidia card they interface interaction wasn't smooth, it was chubby and in KDE 6 the system app is still a mess as it was in KDE 5 - that needs improvement.
The best part of KDE is the integration of qt apps. My favorite VLC, Audacious, Kdenlive, k3b and OBS. Also the GTK apps doesn't look bad in KDE, where vice versa is disastrous :wink:

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For NVidia will come some better Support for NVidia Drivers on Plasma Wayland. But it is more a common Wayland Thing. There will come something called Explict Sync. That will land in Wayland and in one of the next NVidia Drivers ... I think it was NVidia 555 or 560. And in Plasma it will come with Version 6.1 if I'm not wrong.

This should give a better Support and Performance. That is the Plan. But how this will intergrate in Gnome or others I don't know.

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