I moved to KDE for better gaming support, but I really dislike the condensed look of everything in the settings app, discover, and most of all in Dolphin.
Are there any discrete, simple, clean themes that have more padding ? I like how GNOME looks but I really dislike their slow development for gaming related stuff.
try KvLibadwaita. otherwise, you can install gnome apps on plasma and use those instead of kde apps.
In my experience, theming KDE Plasma is an absolute no-go. Not only do the themes themselves just look off, but the desktop feels so much clunkier. Themes also ruin consistency on Plasma, making certain windows look like patchwork.
On the other hand, Breeze (Plasma’s default theme) does grow on you. It’s like Plasma has some weird spell about it, once it even caused me to prefer light mode! Gah :O
Somewhat unrelated, but by the sounds of it gaming is a focus for you considering the DE jump. I’ve had the best gaming experience on a distro called Nobara, I think they started shipping Plasma by default for the same reasons you switched. Could be worth taking a look at, if you aren’t familiar with it. Obviously it’s a perfectly good day-to-day distro too, it’s based off Fedora and follows their release schedule closely.
I don’t want to switch distros. I want to change the theme to one with more padding.
You don’t have to switch distros, you should be able to have GNOME and KDE installed side by side, and pick which one on the login screen (at least in GDM & SDDM), unless you’re running an immutable distro.
Having both Gnome and KDE installed at the same time might lead to unexpected and difficult to diagnose issues. E.g. I’ve had issues with broken themes when the same user/home directory is used.
Another example: having both xdg-desktop-portal-gnome and xdg-desktop-portal-kde installed at the same time, sometimes leads to broken file chooser and screen share (at least that’s the case with other xdp, like xdp-wlr). The portal issues are more likely to be noticed while using Wayland and/or flatpak, as they make use of portals.
Yes, dont install different DEs on the same system or user account.
Maybe that was easier in the past and that may be sad.
Yeah. This has also been my experience. Theming Plasma just ruins the experience. It’s true that it’s the most customizable, but actually customizing it just breaks the experience lol
I would extend this Nobara recommendation from “for gaming” to “for anyone with Nvidia graphics”
Try touch mode
I haven’t looked but I bet there’s an Adwaita (Gnome’s default) theme for KDE.
better gaming support
Just curious what you mean by that?
VRR, HDR, etc.
What does VRR have to do with KDE? Or HDR?
DEs ship their own Wayland compositors. Kwin for KDE and Mutter for GNOME. Both have different capabilities. Kwin has support for VRR & HDR, and better color management. KDE Plasma has GUIs to visually configure them. GNOME has almost no support for this, either on the compositor and/or the GUI.
X11 had it’s own compositor, the X.Org server. Things changed.
Wayland compositors
As I understand it, functionality like VRR is provided by the DRM driver in the kernel, not the compositor. Hence my question.
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It’s not like games talk to the kernel and GPU driver directly to get graphical output
LOL that’s exactly what they do.
there’s a desktop environment they need to take into account
They do not need to take the desktop environment into account. They ask for a window and they render into it. They’ll ask for a window using either the OpenGL or Vulcan API. Both those APIs abstract the windowing system away, the desktop is entirely irrelevant. Under Wayland, the compositor requests a buffer from the kernel, provides it to the game and then manages where on the desktop that buffer is rendered. The game’s rendering is done directly (talking to the kernel and GPU driver) without going anywhere near either the compositor or the desktop environment.
The desktop environment means nothing when it comes to gaming. Except in so far as it may provide a GUI to configure aspects of the system that would otherwise be configured on the comand line or, for example by interacting with /sys.
This is why I asked what OP meant when they said KDE “supports” gaming better. Seems ridiculous. The desktop environment is not involved in game rendering. It has no impact. I’m mystified as to why people think it does.
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There is no HDR protocol for Wayland, so Wayland compositors cannot display HDR content. X11 also does not have HDR support, so window managers can’t do it either. Games don’t draw their own windows. If the compositor doesn’t support HDR, the game isn’t gonna be displayed in HDR. If the compositor doesn’t support VRR, then VRR is also not going to work. Plasma 6 implements a custom Wayland HDR protocol which is also implemented by the Steam Deck. This allows it to display HDR content. It has also had VRR support for a few years. GNOME is waiting for the official HDR protocol for Wayland to be complete before implementing support, so it doesn’t have it. It also didn’t have VRR until relatively recently.
If you don’t believe this, then can you explain why Plasma devs have been advertising HDR support as one of Plasma 6’s killer features? Can you explain the purpose of this recently merged VRR merge request for Mutter? What is the purpose of this merge request for a color management/HDR Wayland protocol which has been in the works for years? If compositors have no involvement in HDR or VRR, then why are their developers working their asses off to make it work? And most importantly, can you show me HDR on Linux working in GNOME? Or Cinnamon? Or anything that’s not Plasma or Gamescope?
you’re explanation makes sense and yet, gaming still works better on kde. it’s a known reality.
