It’s easy to remove: backup your qubes, reinstall Qubes OS, restore your qubes.
Typically not a KDE fan myself but, with respect to Qubes; I couldn’t agree more.
The singular negative for me is the lack of GTK+ dock icons which, is easy to get over considering how well all the rest improves the UX for me.
Good one.
It’s as easy to uninstall as it is to install - kde-settings-qubes will
bring in/remove packages.
But since it’s trivial to switch between Xfce and KDE at log in screen,
if you have any doubts, you can just leave it.
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Indeed. I went back to xfce once about a week ago out of curiosity, and less than two minutes later logged out to switch back.
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How come? How the DE that is incapable of remembering the window positions of daily-used applications and with no ability to fix these positions can be good for anything?
How the DE with such a lack of basic settings and options, with no proper search in settings manager (nor in start menu, nor anywhere else) can be useful for Qubes OS?
Not taking into account the ugly look that is not relevant for me but scares away a lot of new potential users of Qubes OS.
I am sure switching from KDE to XFCE was a mistake. I hope it will be fixed someday and I am happy @unman promotes usage of KDE for Qubes OS.
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Also, I am using suspend, which remembers much more than that. Works flawlessly.
I never needed a “proper” search in settings. There are not so many settings and I do not do so much customization anyway. What are you customizing?
Try Alt+F3. Using it many times a day and can’t imagine anything more convenient (not even the new Qubes menu).
Where?
Depends on your own perception of beauty I guess 
Do you have examples? Default KDE would make Qubes ISO too large, which is already not small and lacks other, more important things.
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Coming from a Windows environment, where you have the choice of just using what crap Microsoft provides, I find the desktop discussions as something of second or third priority. With both KDE and XFCE, you can accomplish what you need to do, so for me, that is just a matter of taste.
I personally prefer XFCE with the Whiskers menu, because it is smaller and faster, and with Qubes R4.2, going to a newer version of Fedora, even the menu structure will become editable there. So I am looking much more forward to new functionality and would really appreciate it if we had incremental backups.
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I fully agree with you, but since we do have such choice, it might be helpful for the users to read this discussion and decide if they want to try KDE.
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Absolutely. Let’s not get involved in a DE war.
Xfce may be able to offer some features in the future that KDE has
right now, but as far as I can see, KDE will still be a better fit
for Qubes workflow.
I advocate KDE because I think it’s better. Give it a try, use some of
the more advanced features, like Activities, window placement and
control, and see how they enhance working in Qubes. For any one who
favours the keyboard, it is far better.
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Edit: Never mind. Thanks.
Well I think this topic’s subject is wrong. Most probably it would be just:
Changing the way you use Qubes
because sooner or later you won’t be able to access dom0 at all.
So, I wouldn’t waste my energy on this DE discussions…
This discussion has almost nothing to do with dom0: You will always have sys-gui with a DE.
Also, as a user of your own computer, you will always have full access to dom0, even if it will run something else.
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No, I know about the devilspie2 and it’s not a part of the DE. It’s a third-party semi-abandoned tool, that is not working out of the box and has no user-friendly configuration (requires writing lua-scripts, common). So, my statement states: xfce lacks completely basic things like default placement of windows.
But It does not mean other users do not need it too.
Why would they add the search after all if users do not need it?
I want to enter settings and type sens to get to the mouse sensitivity page. I want to type dpi or scale and get results accordingly. And in xfce in any of these and many other cases I will get nothing. The search is almost useless to me.
Well, speaking of - it also opens window in different places. At the beginning - in the center, after I changed it size - in other places, like in the corner of the display. Another example how inconsistent and crude xfce is.
Examples of what? Users? I have no friends who uses Qubes OS, so no, I have no examples. But if I show screenshots of Qubes OS - everybody thinks that it became uglier comparing to old ones (with KDE). That’s a fact, maybe KDE has better designers, I don’t know.
Also DPI-awareness of xfce is worse (but it’s a problem of whole Qubes OS, because currently qubes have own DPI settings).
That I agree on. I am just judging on others opinions on that topic. Like I am sure xscreensaver in Qubes OS should also use different image (Qubes OS logo?) because currently users are frustrated about it appearance. We can call it perception question but too many call it simply ugly…
Currently 4.1.1 distribution ISO has size of 5.4 GiB. And if we replace xfce with KDE what will happen? It will be 6.5 GiB and will not fit super-popular 5.5 GiB flash-drives or what?
About software - I would hope there will be KDE in dom0 and KDE in default template. Dolphin is way superior compared to Nautilus, Gwenview to Gnome’s image viewer, Okular to Gnome’s pdf viewer and etc. So, yes, I agree, ideally the default template should have KDE and fit the dom0 in this case. 
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And what will manage our windows (like placing them and aligning)?
It still be some DE. In dom0, sys-gui or other qube, it does not matter. So you still will be able to waste the energy if you’d like
It is clear it won’t be in dom0. Anything else is distro, and there there’s no issues, just a matter of preferences, easy to install, remove, etc…
A script / salt configuration to apply a consistent theme (templates follow dom0, both qt and gtk2/3) would be useful for those wishing to use KDE in Dom0, especially in dark mode. @Sven has linked some helpful instructions but those theme QT as GTK, what if you want the other way around?
For various reasons, I’m not qualified to do anything like this, but if
someone can point me to a configuration that would be generally
acceptable I can try to implement it.
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Is KDE being considered as an optional desktop environment for v4.2?
It works quite well, a bit more modern, and being able to split risk level screens via Activities is a nice feature.
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I gave this a try because the screenshots look appealing and immediately met a host of problems some of which I cannot resolve from the get go. I certainly cannot be the only person that met them so hopefully there are solutions somewhere?
- UI is sllow and laggy from the get go - this seems to be helped by switching to xrender renderer (my computer is not really slow, i9-12700K), this problem does not exist in xfce
- Keyboard layouts only switch in dom0. If I type the right
setxkbmapcommand into a terminal - that VM starts working ok until the next restart. This is obviously not scalable at all though. This problems does not exist in xfce. - The activities work great, but you cannot actually change them with hotkeys? Like Meta-Q to show the list and Meta-TAB to cycle through them work, but assigning a hotkey (like meta-1 or Ctrl-1 or Meta/Ctrl-F1, or anything really) does not work
- When you get a confirmation dialog for cross-qube activity (say when using split-SSH), the dialog does not have focus. You then select the dialog and it waits for some timeout before activating the “OK” button. This makes it totally unusable. I know focus stealing is a thing and that’s why the OK availability is timed, but having both makes no sense.
- When you log out, on login all the windows from all activities are bunched into the first default activity that happens to open which defeats the purpose of saved sessions I guess?
- If you logout and login without rebooting - the qubes you had running don’t stop on logout, but instead enter some strange “readonly” mode making them unhappy and you have to restart them manually to get them working again.
- Window title in taskbar at the bottom display
qube-guidinstead of the window name. - cursors in many applications are huge (tends to happen to text cursor the most, very noticeable with e.g. Terminal, but also in Firefox in text fields)
Perhaps some more information about your system will enable troubleshooting. It is still a concern though for considering KDE as an install option.
My older i7-4710HQ laptop works well with KDE and Qubes. Hence the suggestion.