One of the best things about KDE is the amount of apps they have available that are integrated into the shell. As XFCE lacks its own remote access integration you have to install x11vnc and muck around trying to get it to run as a service which I have yet to be able to complete. In KDE you have several apps available, I chose to use Krfb (RFB is the protocol that VNC uses) and it comes up as “Desktop Sharing” which is essentially the correct description of what I want to achieve.
With just a few clicks I was able to enable the desktop sharing and also enable it as unattended because I want to be able to connect to this desktop all the time without having to go to it to authorise a connection.
It will be interesting to see how Plasma develops in its latest high efficiency optimisation. It is quite possible some of my computers will be switched to KDE instead of XFCE but there is no huge rush as I just want to spend some time figuring out how everything works with KDE. Most of my PCs are fast enough to have few issues with the somewhat greater resource use in KDE and I will be keeping Debian as the base OS, no more Ubuntu for now.
The only real thing with the Debian install of KDE is the clunky default logon theme which you’ll want to change to the Breeze logon, for which you have to install additional packages. I last had a play with the Breeze logon when I had LXQt on one or two of my computers. Incidentally LXQt is now an option to install in the Buster alpha and the next release of Lubuntu will use it by default.
One of the reasons KDE looks good is because they are making steady progress towards integrating Wayland, something XFCE is falling further and further behind on. Pretty soon Wayland will replace X11 as the default display protocol and then some of the Linux desktop environments will not support it very well. Interestingly enough Ubuntu 17.10 installs Wayland by default (Xubuntu doesn’t, so I won’t have seen Wayland on anything yet). In Ubuntu 18.04 they reverted to Xorg after discovering Wayland still has some issues.
Mainpc at the moment is getting reinstalled with Debian and KDE because some sort of stupid crap bug resulted in an apt autoremove command removing a lot of core install packages including all of LibreOffice and some essential stuff, basically stuffing the system and making it unable to connect to the internet. So Debian 9.5 will be on it along with KDE and this will be only the second time I have tried KDE on one of my major computers that I use every day. This time hopefully I can make it stick (last time it was too hard to migrate from XFCE).