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.
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”