So, Konsole shipped by default with KDE Plasma, my current Desktop Environment. While I don’t have a problem with it, I am interested in what other people are using, because there very likely is something better out there.
Specifically I’ve seen talk of Kitty and Alacritty, although I’ve also read that the dev of Kitty is allegedly kind of a jerk, so I am specifically interested in how Konsole matches up to Alacritty in your experience, but other suggestions and general terminal emulator discussion are also welcome!
I’ll impart my wisdom of more than 25 years of using linux on you. You’re welcome.
TL;DR: If you’re using a desktop environment, just stick with what it ships. The shell running inside of any terminal emulator gives you much more leverage for improving your performance than any terminal emulator can. You want to use zsh.
Coining terminal emulators as GPU accelerated is misleading. Almost all GUI terminal emulators use GPU acceleration, simply because they are based on toolkits which rely on GPU acceleration (GTK, QT, …). Things like alacritty are performance optimized. In my experience the use cases where this optimization is even noticeable are rather fringe. And the difference in performance comes at a price: standard compliance, feature completeness, bugs, usability/user friendliness. Don’t get me wrong, I encourage you to try different terminal emulators, if only for the fun of tinkering with them. But, I predict that you’ll always eventually come back to Konsole (as did I). Konsole is the most feature complete terminal emulator I’ve ever encountered. It is stable, easy to use, the performance is quite good, it has tabs, some tiling support, image support, wide character support, …
At the end of the day the best fit for you depends on your desktop environment and workflow. I used to make extensive use of Yakuake; having a terminal one keypress away for some quick commands and instantly dropping back into whatever I was doing before was quite useful. With integrated terminals, that have the added benefit of context (working directory, PATH, …), having become the norm in IDEs and editors, that use case has completely vanished for me. I get the allure of tiling terminals for people who use tiling window managers. But if you’re already using a tiling WM, tiling support by the terminal emulator is kind of moot (imho). While I regularly have/need multiple terminals open side by side, a static tiling configuration is completely useless for me. How many terminals I need in what arrangement highly depends on what I’m doing. Having tabs in Konsole and multiple Konsole windows with the tiling and snapping by Kwin is much more useful than any tiling support I have seen in terminal emulators.
I’ve always loved Krunner, over the years it has become central to my workflow. It can do so much more than just launch applications. Important here and to me: it can navigate to open windows and individual tabs inside of windows (if supported by the app). Having one tool for all desktop navigation is much more useful to me than any individual solution (i.e. tiling within a terminal emulator).
Most terminal emulators would work fine for me. What makes a huge difference though, is what runs inside of a terminal emulator. I went from bash to fish (before it was cool) to bash to zsh. I’ve settled on zsh with fzf for history search and a ton of evolved custom configuration for a decade now. No terminal emulator switch can have even remotely the impact of a shell switch.
So, long story short, my advice to you, and everyone for that matter: spent more time on what’s inside the terminal emulator. If you run KDE/Plasma, just stick with Konsole. Dip your toes into other terminal emulators for the fun of it, but do not expect any substantial/meaningful improvement to your personal performance because of it.
I hope you can take something useful from this wall of text.