KDE is the desktop environment that finally made me stay on Linux full-time and I seriously feel like its developers don't get enough praise. Especially over the last years I feel like they've ironed out a ton of bugs and weird quirks and made KDE truly a joy to use.
I'm surprised to see how much Kate can do, and even more so that the author deemed it good enough to use in place of neovim. Maybe I should give it a chance someday.
I second that. I almost switched from vim to Kate. I do use the undecorated/non-IDE Kate version called "KWrite" which is the only no nonsense totally usable basic GUI editor with a vim mode. I can quickly write my notes and edit them the vim way and have a regular copy paste experience in the same time. Love it.
I know it's subjective and some people will say the later is better because it's shorter, but I greatly prefer the first. It's very descriptive, I can tell exactly what it does just by reading it. The vim version... "no remap"? I know it means "Normal Recursive Map", but that's not the way it reads unless you already know what it does. Vim just has a bewildering array of such things, noremap, nnoremap, vnnoremap, znormap, xnoremap, snoremap, onoremap, tnoremap... one of those is fake and you probably can't tell which.
Basically, vim has an old-school unix culture of naming things, while emacs has a lisp culture of naming things. Considering both these editors now come with powerful completion features that make it easy to type long symbol names, I think the lisp approach is the correct one.
I tried to like vimscript. Tried for nearly 15 years. When I finally took the plunge and switched to evil mode it was like a breath of fresh air, and I was left wondering why I hadn't switched years earlier.
That's it? Just the configuration method? I thought you would go over a bunch of things that cannot be done in vim, but is possible with evil. And all I got was configuration language. And key remapping for that.
Discussions about text editors are always useless... people express their opinion as if they were completely objective, but when pressed to explain it they come up with the most ridiculous little things. We should just all recognize it's all subjective preference.
One feature I really liked when I used evil, which wasn't present in vim, was search/replace with `s/` replicated the case in the replacement string. So `s/one/two/` would replace `One` with `Two`.
Great when you want to refactor a name that's used both as a variable and a CONSTANT in one go.
That's available in vim via the vim-abolish[0] plugin... which has other capabilities, but the one I take advantage of is case-preserving S/one/two/ which does what you want.
It's odd vim doesn't have that builtin, I'm half convinced it does and I just haven't dug enough to find it.
The editor component is also used in KWrite if you want a more minimal editor. I don't really use Kate itself but really like both KWrite and KDevelop.
one thing i missed from modern kde was tiling window management. but bismuth enables that. and it's absolutely great, with a ton of key bindings you can set yourself and some good mouse support if you need.
It's not missing. Go System Settings → Workspace → Shortcuts (alternatively: run `kcmshell5 kcm_keys`) → System Services → KWin and configure the global keybindings for tiling to your taste.
I tried KDE recently on Fedora 37, and my workstation kept running out of memory (32 GB) due to its file indexer. I like KDE in general, but its quite heavy for my tastes.
I'm not aware of amy significant funding from the eu. The only funding we received was nlnet for a few small projects in neochat, okular, kaidam amd kmail regarding encryption support. And dome small funding from the german environment minister for the kde eco project. In all these cases, it's just enough to pay for part time work for a small amount of time.
I haven’t used KDE is several years, but I do use Gnome/Unity with Ubuntu and Fedora and while not entirely bug-free, I find them “adequate for full-time Linux use”.
What are the reasons to use KDE over Gnome, aside from that Android phone integration?
This is not what i.e. GNOME are going for nowadays, everyone wants to reinvent the locked down iPhone "experience".
So VERY much this. I don't want an "experience" that's curated and chosen for me. I want to decide for myself how my desktop is going to look, feel, and work. And that is why I use KDE over Gnome, etc. KDE doesn't assume I'm an idiot who needs all options hidden away, yadda, yadda.
Lol, thank you for the chuckle, that's how I feel while I use gnome. Damn, I wish KDE was the desktop choice for Ubuntu and fedora, it would solve so many problems.
KDE isn't the environment of the Steam Deck. The environment of the Steam Deck is Steam running its own Gamescope compositor. The desktop mode runs KDE but that's optional and it's not the main mode because the Steam Deck isn't a desktop, it's a handheld gaming device.
Aren't they still accessible through the Dconf editor?
Just asking, don't want to sound like it's a good thing to me: they started dumbing down the interface long time ago (between GTK2 and 3 if memory serves), and now they ruined it completely with the new design.
Sometimes, but that's a finnicky beast in its own right. You need to figure out which poorly documented variable you need to change to do whatever, usually from a Stack Overflow post from some other poor fucker, then make heads and tails of system settings vs. user settings, the dbus nonsense for communication, the weird gconfig shit for fiddling with system files, etc. Doing something as simple as e.g. changing the image used on the login screen for all users is far more complex than it should be.
I understand that GNOME has other goals than I do for my machine, but it's basically the antithesis of the reasons I choose to run Linux in the first place. I think it being the de facto "standard" Linux desktop environment is really hurting the ecosystem.
>I think it being the de facto "standard" Linux desktop environment is really hurting the ecosystem.
I completely agree. I think it's a case of moneyed interests having taken over. Someone in another HN comment a while back implied that the big reason for Gnome and its philosophy is Red Hat's big corporate and especially government customers. Why so many casual Linux users have jumped on the Gnome bandwagon I don't understand. If you want something that gives you no choice and tells you how to use your computer and is "simple", then just buy a Mac.
Please stop with the conspiracy theories. GNOME is still very much a volunteer project. And KDE also gets corporate contributions too which they're very grateful to receive.
GNOME isn't really against "choice" either, they just optimize for a different workflow.
I'm thinking maybe there are two distinct groups of people. One group choose their OS and love to fiddle and fine tune its behaviour.
Another group have their OS chosen for them by their employer. They don't care about the OS, or software in general - they just want to get through the day.
Perhaps KDE is well suited to one group and Gnome to another?
GNOME can be fiddled with, just not in the same way as KDE.
And KDE can simplified for installation on work computers, just not in the same way as GNOME.
Personally I use GNOME now because it fits my current workflow better, but in the past I had a different workflow and I used KDE more. I still have both of them installed so it's not difficult to switch.
> Another group have their OS chosen for them by their employer. They don't care about the OS, or software in general - they just want to get through the day.
People like Linus Torvalds didn't get their OS chosen for them, but still chose kept Fedora's GNOME default.
Usually of the people that just work with a giant terminal session with screen and that's it.
No, really, because having a terminal application where "Tab Next" doesn't wrap around just goes to show how worried they are about users outside that niche (and yes maybe they fixed this now, but come on)
You don't understand why some people might prefer a more precisely defined, simpler-by-default desktop? I can only speak for myself - I've been using linux full-time for ~20ish years, and gnome 3 is the one of the most solid, stable, elegant desktops I've used. I understand why some prefer KDE, but I spend most of my times in APPS, not configuring my desktop environment.
Also, what does "big corporate" customers even mean? At my corporate job, I get paid to do work (within applications), not spend time configuring settings in my DE. I'd be quite curious to hear how gnome specifically prevents you from doing your job.
Last thought, but "just buy a mac" is a rather silly argument; in fact, if gnome is being to mac, that's a pretty high compliment, IMO. If that's not your thing, that's fine, but it's also fine for others to want to use a simple, well-designed desktop.
> I understand why some prefer KDE, but I spend most of my times in APPS, not configuring my desktop environment.
When I first got into KDE, I was young and excited about all of the eye candy and downloadable widgets and stuff. I spent a TON of time tinkering with the desktop environment. But nowadays, I use KDE with something like 85% or 90% of all the options at their default settings. I think that's a really common way to use KDE: everyone has their 5% or 10% of customizations, and it's not much, but for everyone that 5% or 10% covers different options.
I feel that in that way, defaults are very important for KDE as well. They provide a center of gravity for the userbase, and their appropriateness determines how much work it is for everyone to maintain a usable setup.
Anyway, on KDE I have a handful of settings saved in my dotfiles or similar, and the rest I don't really spend time configuring anymore. So I totally understand GNOME users who take a similar approach but fall a little further on that spectrum where the settings are 98% or 99% at the defaults.
I don't know why (maybe it's my reliance on the CLI and the deep familiarity of GNU and Linux together), but for whatever reason, despite being a KDE guy, I strongly prefer GNOME to Windows or macOS. It feels thoughtfully designed, and limited, yes... but not too restrictive. I get the comparison, but macOS feels hamstrung and confining to me, including compared to a nice, current GNOME distro.
It depends on your needs and workflow. Personally I spend most of my time on my laptop in the terminal, browser, email and one or two other apps like Discord. I just want something that is simple and stays out of my way and I don't want to spend my time crafting the perfect desktop. Stock Fedora+Gnome with a couple extensions pretty much covers all my needs.
Other users have different expectations and needs and perhaps KDE suits them better, and maybe they are happy spending hours fine-tuning their desktop experience. All good and I'm happy we all get to have a choice.
Sounds similar to my needs and workflow, and yet GNOME always feels to me like it requires me to spend hours fine-tuning it, finding extensions that make simple things possible and tweaks that aren't exposed anywhere by default to make it usable - while Plasma works fine out-of-box and I'm not worried about little things I do like to tweak in my desktop because I can be reasonably certain that I'll be able to quickly reconfigure things whenever I get annoyed by them.
However, I do like to use GNOME on my phone (with phosh as a shell). It fits there quite nicely and IMO feels better than Plasma.
On the side of the desktop environments and their usage of it, the fact that I have to "dbus-launch" to change a user's settings from a shell seems pretty insane to me.
Technology-wise I'm sure other protocols are worse and all, but DBUS does not spark joy. My experience with DBUS is that it's a pain in the ass to program with, and can cause strange issues if you for example have a service that needs to be available both for early boot and late during shutdown and you're not very careful with your dependencies. Documentation is sparse, and it seems like 99% of people just use the low-level library they keep screaming you shouldn't use anyway. I used the glib one, and it put me off programming anything GNOME ever again.
I have bad news for you, every alternative is going to be the same or worse. There's no good and clean solution for early boot services. The Linux kernel expects you to handle any of those issues in userspace with a userspace daemon like dbus. If you're upset the documentation is sparse, well, welcome to open source.
Nobody is "screaming" at you to stop using libdbus. The issues with it are actually spelled out in the docs. Here's what they say:
>The low-level API documented in this manual deliberately lacks most convenience functions - those are left up to higher-level libraries based on frameworks such as GLib, Qt, Python, Mono, Java, etc. These higher-level libraries (often called "D-Bus bindings") have features such as object systems and main loops that allow a much more convenient API.
>The low-level API also contains plenty of clutter to support integration with arbitrary object systems, languages, main loops, and so forth. These features add a lot of noise to the API that you probably don't care about unless you're coding a binding.
So unless you really have your own object system, language and event loop, you shouldn't bother with using libdbus. Use literally any of the other bindings of which there are many. The glib one is only going to be good if you're already using glib's event loop and object system.
I don't have an actionable list off the top of my head, but in particular, about 6-12 months ago, I started digging into how to theme my install. Wanted to have e.g. different system theme colours than Ubuntu eggplant, a different background, different login screen, etc. There were so many different ways and places of doing things (stylesheets packed in gresource files, dconf, more oldschool config files, gnome-tweaks) that after messing around with it a bit I just gave up. Didn't seem worth the time.
It isn't any one particular option that I'm missing, rather the entire experience of modifying its behaviour is a pain in the ass. They seem to labour under the delusion that if they just make this one perfect system, everyone will be happy with it, so they don't need to prioritize customizability. This is rarely ever the case when dealing with real people with different needs.
That has nothing to do with GNOME. That's going to happen any time you try to theme 100 different programs and try to get them all to look consistent. Try to imagine writing one CSS and applying it to every website you visit and expecting it to work correctly. It's just not going to work, you'd have to manually rewrite the CSS for every site. The same is true of desktop applications. The only reason your desktop appears consistent with the default Ubuntu themes is because all the apps already did the work to target that theme. If you want another theme, you have to do all that work all over again. You can't avoid this just by adding more options, it's a large amount of extra code that needs to be written every time for every app.
they began removing stuff WAY before gtk3 was even on the table. I believe gnome 2.6 was the last version before they decided that users are precious snowflakes that must be protected from options that an idiot shouldnt have
Clearly they didn't "ruin" it because there are people in this very comment thread with a mix of opinions. Some saying they like it, some saying it's okay, some saying they don't like it.
Sure, some people think Windows XP (also roughly 20 years old) was more pleasant too. But somehow, few of them are racing to format their hard drive and replace everything with Windows XP. I bet you could name a few reasons why.
Yeah, see, disagreeing with you and trolling are different things. Trolling would be more like creating an account just to make personal attacks and defend RH. Anyways. This is a pain to get hard numbers for but https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom... seems decent enough; based on that, @redhat.com represents ~13,000 commits out of ~50,000 commits with all other groups combined not even coming close, which means that even as a technical minority overall RH has a massive amount of influence. Or as the author puts it,
> Top 15 affiliations again, but now ordered by commit counts. It's safe to say that GNOME is dependent on paid developers in a big way. Specifically, and to no one's surprise, it leans heavily on Red Hat.
So yes, it is true.
> what makes you think Red Hat wants to start paying those costs?
Well no, I'm sure they don't want to. And hey, it's Red Hat's devs, so at some level I can't blame them for serving RH's interests above the user. Just as they can't blame me for abandoning their function-poor toy desktop environment.
No, that page is misleading because it doesn't include unaffilated developers. Red Hat may be the biggest corporate contributor, but most contributors are actually not affiliated with any corporation.
I say you're trolling because even if it were entirely a corporate Red Hat project, Red Hat still wouldn't owe anyone any features. They would still be the "volunteers" in that case. Insisting anyone meet some threshold of features for a random free product they give away is leaning heavily into toxic entitlement. I suspect you know this full well. This isn't just about a disagreement and it's not that they're putting their interests above "the user." A corporate contributor puts the interests of their paying customers over anyone else. That's how they work. But then you immediately jump from there to equating "the user" with your own personal choice. Can you not see how this is a very trolly way to approach conversation about anything? Just be clearer next time and say it's not to your liking and be done with it, you don't need to turn every conversation about this into a Red Hat flame war.
And before someone makes more trollish comments accusing me of "defending Red Hat," I don't have any connection to them. It's just bad conversation to have people trying to turn every comment thread into a hate-fest directed at some corporation. Yeah I get it, capitalism is terrible. But isn't this what we want companies to be doing? Taking labor their customers paid for and giving it back for free to open source projects?
> I say you're trolling because even if it were entirely a corporate Red Hat project, Red Hat still wouldn't owe anyone any features. They would still be the "volunteers" in that case. Insisting anyone meet some threshold of features for a random free product they give away is leaning heavily into toxic entitlement.
Negative feedback when removing existing features is not "trolling", nor "toxic entitlement".
In fact, it's expected, when you remove a much used, much loved feature, that you're going to get criticism for doing so, even more so when there is strong indication that there will be no replacement for that feature now or in the future.
Gnome has been steadily dropping features and then attacking anyone who complains (much like you are doing so).
> Browser-mode file browsers hide the lack of thought
and organisation in the filesystem structure; spatial ones do not.
> And now, when the time to ressurect the spatial ideas has finally come, people accustomed to the
bad interface design try to defend it only because for the past years
they have been using it!
TBH, if I had time, I could compile a substantial list of similar insults from the Gnome devs themselves, when closing issues as "wontfix".
You can criticize all you want, but I notice you neglected to share any of that actual criticism in your comment. Closing a bug as wontfix isn't an insult, please stop taking that personally. All open source projects reject bugs sometimes. Every project gets to determine their own threshold for what features they remove and what bugs they close as wontfix. All projects reject bugs. There's a comment from down thread about KDE developers doing exactly the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34395682
But you also have to make sure your criticism is good. Just complaining that a feature was removed "because I was using it" is not a useful criticism. I learn nothing from reading that. You have to actually explain why you needed the feature, how you were using it, and why the newer options don't work for you.
>Mostly the gnome supporters imply that the complainers are just plain stupid
I don't see the author claiming anyone's stupid in that article. This is what the author says:
>it is just bad file organisation coupled with a bunch of old bad habits
And maybe on that note, you could consider that designers know a lot more about the habits of users than a random drive-by commenter, considering they study it for a living?
That's a strawman. I said "they attack people who provide feedback".
And whether you like it or not, feedback of the form "Hey, don't take that away, I'm still using it" is legitimate feedback. You wanna see their typical response?
> I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately.
And that's one of their *good* responses. From my other link, you saw that their responses basically said that, even if users were using something, that way of doing things is only done by the ignorant.
> You have to actually explain why you needed the feature, how you were using it, and why the newer options don't work for you.
The posters in the link above explained all of that, and the response was still "No".
> I don't see the author claiming anyone's stupid in that article. This is what the author says:
>>it is just bad file organisation coupled with a bunch of old bad habits
The gnome dev literally said that any way other than their way had was because the users weren't thinking!
> Browser-mode file browsers hide the lack of thought and organisation in the filesystem structure; spatial ones do not.
I mean, they literally said that the users are not thinking if they prefer the old way.
There's a reason why gnome has fewer users than you'd expect given that is the default everywhere - even though it is the default, many user's still find it easier to simply switch.
> And maybe on that note, you could consider that designers know a lot more about the habits of users than a random drive-by commenter, considering they study it for a living?
If these designers knew that, they'd have more marketshare on Linux at least.
Ok, sorry. I misquoted you. I should have said "isn't an attack" instead of "isn't an insult."
Still, the rest of my comment is still relevant even with that change. There's no "attacks" anywhere in anything you've quoted. That response about Ubuntu and XFCE is a factual statement. GNOME, Ubuntu and XFCE are all different platforms and they have different APIs. You can't expect GNOME to implement every XFCE feature just like you can't expect XFCE to implement every GNOME feature. And if you decide to do port to another OS like Windows or Mac, then you have to decide if you're going to use Linux APIs or Windows APIs, and so on. This is all very basic concepts. As an app developer you have to decide which of these APIs you're going to use. It's not "attacking" anyone to point out that truth. It's also not an "attack" for them to respond with a firm "no" response. If you want to get along with others you need to learn to accept that sometimes you'll receive "no" for an answer.
And no, "Hey, don't take that away, I'm still using it" isn't legitimate feedback. You need to actually explain why you need to use it that way and why another way isn't going to work for you. And even after that, you still need to be able to accept that your explanations could be bad or wrong and could get thrown out by the developers. You're not the one paying the cost to maintain that code so you don't get the final say on what gets thrown out and what doesn't. That's the entire point of open source. If you don't like this, then you start sharing some of the costs by maintaining the code, and then you can be the one who makes that decision. But it simply isn't an "attack" on you when someone else decides your feature is too expensive for them to work on anymore. You need to not take that so personally.
>The gnome dev literally said that any way other than their way had was because the users weren't thinking!
>I mean, they literally said that the users are not thinking if they prefer the old way.
No, it doesn't say anything like that anywhere in the article. That article isn't written by a GNOME developer either. If you're referring to something else, please show the direct quote where they said that.
>If these designers knew that, they'd have more marketshare on Linux at least.
There's no "marketshare" and no "market." This is an open source project being given away for free. I think what you meant is "mindshare." None of these projects are concerned with trying to dominate the mindshare, they all work together.
It still seems pretty strange to me that you’re so fervently denying anyone the right to criticize the design and UX choices made in GNOME just because it’s available for free (unless you’re a RedHat customer I guess..).
I assume most people who do that genuinely want GNOME to be improved than due to malice or anything else. What’s wrong about that? If I was working on GNOME I’d definitely prefer users who share their views and opinions to those who just silently quit without saying anything.
I never denied anyone that. Go criticize all you want. Just please stop with the conspiracy theories, it's bad discussion. You don't have to be a Red Hat customer, you could pay any other Linux consultancy.
No, 50k commits is from the higher up graph that includes unaffiliated commits.
> I say you're trolling because even if it were entirely a corporate Red Hat project, Red Hat still wouldn't owe anyone any features.
And I say that's not what that word means, unless you truly believe that no reasonable person could actually disagree with you (in which case you'd be factually wrong, but using the word correctly). You're allowed to claim that GNOME/RH giving software away for free makes it illegitimate to critize them, and I'm allowed to say that's nonsense and the software still sucks. Trolling, if you'll forgive my quoting urban dictionary, is
> making random unsolicited and/or controversial comments on various internet forums with the intent to provoke an emotional knee jerk reaction from unsuspecting readers to engage in a fight or argument
This isn't random (as an ex-user, I have very real, very strong opinions about GNOME), I don't care about your emotions, and I didn't intend this to be a fight. So no, not trolling.
The comment on the higher up graph still says "I've excluded personal accounts" so a lot of data is just missing there.
I'm not saying it's illegitimate to criticize anything. Please don't put words in my mouth. This is the entire original comment I was responding to:
>What volunteers? GNOME is a Red Hat project.
There's no legitimate criticism in this comment. If you do have real opinions, you never communicated them. The only thing here is the usual substanceless FUD and complaining about Red Hat that pops in every Linux thread. It's bad discussion. You did add some more information afterwards, but your original comment didn't have that. This is why it's trolling. Do you see it now? Next time, lead with the information. Please don't just make snarky comments. I really don't get this vehement denial when it's right there. It was a snarky comment, judging by the language you're still using I think you know that it was snarky. You can just own it and we can move on.
EDIT: And about being an ex-user. People and projects change over time. It just happens. That's life. It's fine to have strong opinions and be passionate but you're letting that passion take you in a bad, angry direction. For yourself, please don't do that. It's like getting upset about a divorce, you have to find some way to deal with it that doesn't involve stewing over the person who left. And that analogy is stretching it because unless you make an effort to get involved and get to know people personally, then open source developers are not your friends. They're just random people giving away free stuff on the internet in a parasocial relationship not unlike anyone else you might encounter on social media. It's not worth it to bother having strong opinions if that's the case. I can tell you, the endless Linux flame wars complaining that software XYZ sucks aren't a place where good productive discussion happens.
No, there wasn't a point. Making these accusations is the personal attack and it's a non-falsifiable claim anyway. Once you go that route you're on a complete descent into nonsense conspiracy theories.
To be fair, my impression is that KDE has more bugs, which is what you'd expect in the "features are a burden" model. I'm not conceived that that's the reason (because other environments are even more configurable without that reputation), but it's a plausibly consistent claim.
KDE doesn't assume I'm an idiot who needs all options hidden away, yadda, yadda.
Have you read KDE's new Human Interface Guidelines? Because that is exactly what they are doing, now.
Make it easy to focus on what matters --- Remove or minimize elements not crucial to the primary or main task. Use spacing to keep things organized. Use color to draw attention. Reveal additional information or optional functions only when needed.
I know how to do that! --- Make things easier to learn by reusing design patterns from other applications. Other applications that use good design are a precedent to follow.
Do the heavy lifting for me --- Make complex tasks simple. Make novices feel like experts. Create ways in which your users can naturally feel empowered by your software.
It looks like they are moving more and more toward a iphone/android like, dumbed-down experience. https://develop.kde.org/hig/
>It looks like they are moving more and more toward a iphone/android like, dumbed-down experience.
Have you actually used KDE? The amount of settings in the "system settings" application is almost overwhelming; it is definitely not a "dumbed-down" experience. The thing you're quoting is just asking devs to keep things a little more focused, not to remove options altogether ("Reveal additional information or optional functions only when needed.")
I can't find it now, but Dolphin used to have a rather demoralizing web page that listed user stereotypes (something like "Joe is a corporate developer", "Bob is an artist...", "Fred is an enthusiast..." and basically amounted to if you've been a linux enthusiast since you were a teenager, we don't want to hear your feedback. I can't find it now, I hope they deleted it. I know creating such stereotypes is or was common practice in corporate software design, but it's vile.
There's nothing vile about that, it's normal development practice. If you decide to make a code editor you're not making an app for artists, you're making an app for developers. That's a conscious choice you make when you sat down and said "I'm going to make a code editor today." Unless you think it's stereotyping to consider that people have different skills and professions?
Just think a little bit more about this in the context of your example. A user who isn't a Linux enthusiast or sysadmin isn't going to know anything about what /usr/share or /var/lib, etc is supposed to be. And a user who knows everything about that isn't going to need a fancy file manager to perform sysadmin tasks on those folders! They know how to do everything from the command line already.
This is a very weird dichotomy that doesn't actually work that way IRL. A power user is not necessarily a command line wizard, and even if they are, plenty of tasks are still easier and quicker to do in the GUI - provided, that is, that the GUI can actually be optimized for the needs of said power user. We used to be able to accommodate all kinds of users with customization; now it's increasingly the lowest common denominator (and often an imaginary one at that) with no escape hatch.
Creating, testing, and updating documentation for command line tools takes a tiny fraction of the time and effort required to do the same for GUI tools. At the same time, the command line across Linux distros is subject to way less variation than all the GUIs across the same. Moreover, the fundamentals of the shell and the syntax of the CLI tools are way more stable over time than a given GUI configurator's layout, so CLI documentation will remain correct and useful longer than GUI documentation. Add to that that for many Google-able tasks, the same task may be relevant to headless servers, and you have another, independent cause for CLI documentation to be created without a GUI counterpart and for it to show up highly in search results.
This means that most documentation for advanced tasks in a volunteer-maintained system where everything actually has configurability via the CLI will tend to cover and emphasize CLI methods.
It is arguably possible to have knowledgeable 'power users' who do not know how to use an operating system's CLI. Longtime Windows users probably fit the bill. But on Linux, nobody who has spent enough time actually reading documentation or following tutorials (and made a reasonable effort to understand them) to become a power user is actually unable to use the CLI. The CLI-averse power user just doesn't exist on Linux due to a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue.
PS: The only system directory tree users should ever 'administer' on Linux by directly manipulating files in it is /etc. The grasp of the CLI needed for this is extremely basic, and there are even nice CUA text editors for the terminal these days. There's no wizardry required to do anything that isn't as destructive or risky as confusing the operating system itself (namely the package manager) about the state of the filesystem.
I actually think the reason for that is economic and it does work IRL. What you think of as "power users" actually requires a lot of training, it's expensive to produce them. Their skill set still isn't enough to offload real development tasks on them, so whatever they do is still completely dependent on having a team of engineers to support them. If you're going to be paying the engineers anyway, it's cheaper to just make something that requires less training for the users up front.
To me that means thinking about contextual information rather than "dumbing down". I don't remember anything significant being removed in the last 5 years, Dolphin is an almost perfect "power user" file manager, and they have not been messing around with it. In fact the whole Plasma desktop environment is getting into a nice stable state.
I can see it being overwhelming for someone used to an iPhone (or Gnome :p), but the KDE approach seems to be to hide advanced options/GUI by default if needed, but make enabling them a simple check box that doesn't suddenly disappear one day.
> I don't remember anything significant being removed in the last 5 years, Dolphin is an almost perfect "power user" file manager
When Dolphin first came out, it was arguably a 'dumbed down' version of Konqueror, which has even more features and also supported web browsing.
But over time, it became clear that Dolphin did a great job of organizing and simplifying Conqueror's file management functionality without losing power in any way that mattered.
I hope that kind of change is what the new KDE HIG is going for. If so, I think KDE is going to be better than ever.
It's not dumbed-down to make apps that are focused around performing a specific task and making them easy to use. That's literally the entire purpose of designing apps. There's nothing else to it. iPhone and Android didn't invent that either, I think most people would agree that not every app needs to be Emacs.
Stupidity is contagious. Some five years ago i had to use Gmail for work and someone from Google had the great idea to use a big "Gmail" icon which did nothing but used around 1/5 of the screen.
Or you go to a website to fill a form (name, address, etc) and there are exactly 3 text inputs on the screen, the rest being unused space.
You don't have to. The OP is entirely misinterpreting the KDE HIG. If you want to see how actual KDE devs interpret it (rather than some random non-KDE user on a message forum), just go use the latest KDE. It isn't turning into Gnome.
I do use the latest KDE. I'm just saying that if they start making changes that go in the "let's dumb this down and start removing options" path, then I'll probably start looking at other options.
I don't see any evidence they're going to do that, including in the HIG quote the OP posted before. It said nothing about removing options, so any suggestion they are seems like scare-mongering to me.
IME they very much do care, they're simply not aware that a constantly changing user interface is not just something you have to deal with, like death or taxes. Every time I play tech support for friends and family it's the same story about how everything looks different yet again and how they can't find that thing that was right here just recently.
(For myself I have cobbled together something that looks roughly like Windows 95 did decades ago, but doing that for others comes with its own problems, so not forcing that on anyone.)
People go through your entire post history and criticize you for breaking the rules by posting your homophobic transphobic bullshit here, and you should expect it. Hacker News is not the place to spread your insults and hate speech, like Truth Social. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequences, and when you post that kind of bullshit, one of the consequences is that people know you're an asshole. If you're embarrassed about people reading what you wrote, realizing what kind of a person you really are, and telling you what they think about it, then don't ask for it by trolling like Fred Flintstone and Archie Bunker. Grow up, and take responsibility for your own actions.
Obviously you can't counter or address any of my points, so now you concede and want to cut off the conversation that YOU started by inappropriately posting insulting homophobic and transphobic hate speech, because you can't even prove or justify your lies.
So you stop making homophobic and transphobic posts and insults and lies, and then I will stop replying to your hate speech and insulting lies, reminding you that what you're doing is against the rules.
Just why do you post idiotic close minded bullshit, then suddenly not want to talk about what YOU brought up, anyway? Is it because you can't justify it when questioned? Because your own words embarrass you and make you look like an asshole and a bully? Then stop posting that bullshit, if you are so afraid of answering my questions that you just want me to shut up because you know you will lose the argument!
You posted the following bullshit, in your own words, that you can't defend:
>"Because a few years ago they used that on gay marriage and they said no you will never have men dressed as women in libraries you're being silly." -isthisthingon99
Exactly who said "you will never have men dressed as women in libraries"? Can you provide a direct quote or citation, or are you just making that up and lying? If you can't prove that somebody actually said that, then retract it and apologize for lying, and don't post hate speech and lies you can't defend in the future.
And explain what exactly is wrong with men dressing as women in libraries, or anywhere else?
Do you also believe kids shouldn't watch Bugs Bunny or Mrs Doubtfire or The Nutty Professor either?
Explain why are you so afraid of and hateful about trans and gay people (or cartoon rabbits, for that matter) that it drives you to lie and bully and humiliate yourself in public by posting indefensible hate speech and childish insults, like you do? How do they threaten or affect your life in any way at all? Or is it all about your own internalized homophobia, self loathing, and hatred of your own repressed feelings? Because real straight and cis people aren't terrified of and irrationally threatened by gay and trans people, like you obviously are.
If you could justify your own bigoted beliefs, you would. So tell me to shut up again, if you have no better response, can't counter my points, and I'm correct about you lying and taking your own repressed self loathing out on other people who terrify you.
That is what attracted me to KDE. However, in recent years there design philosophy has become more aligned with Windows and mobile. It seems more difficult to create skeuomorphic themes, now. The trend seems to be for dizzying, translucent, psychedelic themes, where figuring out what I can and cannot interact with is like a point and click adventure game, only without the joy. But this seems to be in line with KDE's new stated design goals:
Make it easy to focus on what matters --- Remove or minimize elements not crucial to the primary or main task. Use spacing to keep things organized. Use color to draw attention. Reveal additional information or optional functions only when needed.
Make complex tasks simple. Make novices feel like experts. Create ways in which your users can naturally feel empowered by your software. [0]
To me, this feels like dumbing down, and this is disappointing for a powerful desktop. A desktop PC is such a vast and powerful utility that it's interface should be reasonably complex, like the cockpit of an airliner. I'm working with 14 to 30 inch screens, I don't need the same UI as a 5" phone. Instead, we are following Musk's lead and hiding everything behind an Android-like system, with burger menus, disappearing UI elements, brightly coloured icons, and bouncy window animations. And even though KDE is still infinitely customizable, the vast majority of themes out there follow this trend. If anyone knows of a good skeuomorphic theme that still works, I'd love to see it.
Holy transparency, batman! I'm guessing KDE 3 introduced the transparency API or something? But that wasn't a default theme was it? I've used trinity, or TDE, which is a KDE 3 fork, but it's built in themes are way more conservative and practical.
True transparency had only just become possible around then thanks to Compiz, so default themes generally wouldn't have it. However, even outside of transparency, look at e.g. how much crystal glare and reflections all the icons have.
I find this quite strange. I was a kid (and heavy computer user) when Windows 9x was current. I'd been a user of MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x, and Windows XP before I got into Linux and KDE, back in the KDE 3.4 days.
I love KDE, but I have no positive feelings about Windows 9x, and I don't really think KDE reminds me of it at all. In fact, some of the developments and workflows that excited me back in the day were divergences away from Windows 9x, like the replacement of the old Kicker menu with Lancelot.
The KDE application that eventually won my heart as a teenager was Amarok, which simply had no equivalent in any other ecosystem. To me, what is great about KDE is best described with reference to KDE itself, not some other desktop experience.
That's fair, there's no code lineage, and it's hard to see Amarok's XMMS/Winamp descent from 1.4. But the design lineage is maybe more credible if you look at historic screenshots like https://amarok.sourceforge.net/amarok_20040203.png . (Note the "PL EQ" buttons, straight off the Winamp main widget.)
Those are cool to see! I got into Amarok in the 1.3 days, so I never saw the Winamp-like interfaces. For the same reason, I also never used it before it had collection support, so I always used it to manage my collection and didn't browse the filesystem with it.
FWIW, my favorite Amarok design is the 2.x one. The initial rewrite sucked in all the ways that KDE 4 did, but it had better defaults and it was more flexible. Once the plugin ecosystem mostly recovered, it was awesome again!
I remember feeling disappointed and frustrated with the 2.0 layout as well. I think it was around 2.3 that the player got some UI tweaks which let you make use of screen space in similar proportions to 1.4.x.
It's been super long since I really used a local player, but IIRC later versions of Amarok 2.x let you rearrange the panes that make up the single window interface, including IIRC stacking them into tabs which is similar to the vertical, collapsible tabs on the left side of 1.4.x.
What was exciting for me about the 1.4.x player and earlier was the contextual information provided for songs— especially lyrics fetching and Wikipedia embedding. I used the lyrics fetching to learn and sing along to hundreds of songs when I was a teenager. It took decades for streaming services to catch up on lyrics display and trivia.
I also heavily utilized the collection management features and patterns, which were so excellent. Amarok was my primary tool for organizing a collection of MP3, Vorbis, and eventually Opus files that grew into the hundreds of gigabytes, on spinning rust. The metadata fetching and editing and file renaming functions were vital for me, although later I did do a lot of maintenance with Musicbrainz Picard.
The dynamic playlists in 2.x were great for parties, and I liked moodbars for showing people specific sections of songs and the cool visuals.
Anyway, to me Clementine feels like a very cluttered hodgepodge of features and menus, in a way that Amarok never did.
Gnome assumes developers don’t have an insane amount of time to spend on their open source desktop apps. And that users deserve high quality apps that work well together.
So Gnome devs, seeing the vast majority of bug reports that developers of first and third party apps received were a result of the large number of configurations and extensions and customizations have decided to rein it back.
Doing so means Gnome developers can start with a smaller footprint which they will now expand to add customizations back in a supported manner.
It’s a different approach. The good thing is that with Linux different groups can try different approaches and users can switch relatively painlessly between them.
So far, having gotten a lot more responsibilities with growing older, I’ve found that letting Gnome pick sensible defaults, etc, and not requiring me to spend a lot of time and mental energy configuring stuff has meant that Gnome has been the most productive general use Desktop in my personal life (i3 for work life…).
The issue is that everyone needs at least one or two customisations that they can't live without, even though they don't need all of them. And so they end up installing gnome tweaks which is a buggy mess which will never be fixed, as with most third party extensions.
In comparison, even though there are a lot of bugs in KDE, they will eventually be fixed, given that most customisations are first party.
I, unfortunately, have a limited amount of time and prefer not waiting for those bugs to eventually be resolved. So I prefer using Gnome, where the limited flexibility is not a problem for me, and the far more consistent and stable Gnome environment is extremely valuable!
So I use Gnome.
That's the great part about Linux.
And I can somehow manage to do that without suggesting that KDE developers need to stop treating their users like a bunch of kids with no jobs living in their mother's basements.
Many in the Linux community seem incapable of doing that second thing, which is the crappy part about Linux.
> KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era.
I find this sad. It is a sign of lack of innovation in desktop environments.
As a teen I loved fiddling with linux because it had compiz/beryl, etc. You could make windows explode in fire when closed, see the desktop as a 3d cube, etc.
It was all trashy eyecandy, and of little use, but the point is that there was experimentation.
Nowadays I don't think there's a lot to see, the options are:
- 90's-like UX
- terminal focused setups (tiling windows managers, etc)
- dumbed down tablet-like experience.
I think desktop design in the 90s reached a point similar to car design did in the mid 1910s; the lack of innovation is a sign of maturity. Almost every car since the Cadillac Type 53 has had more or less the same controls; a steering wheel, foot pedals for the accelerator/brake/clutch with accelerator on the right, brake to the left of that, and clutch to the left of the brake. Some deviation from this scheme is tolerable, new automatic systems sometimes replace manual controls like the clutch pedal, but for the most part every new car either conforms to this general scheme or sets itself apart as a weird outlier. Rarely there is a car with a yoke or joystick instead of a steering wheel, but it never catches on.
Even if you managed to discover something marginally better but radically different, it probably wouldn't catch on because the status quo gets the job done and everybody already understands it. Re-learning how to drive because your car came with a joystick instead of a steering wheel isn't appealing to most people who view their car as a means to an end.
(Also, I don't think there's an intrinsic connection between tiling window managers and terminal-focused setups. The apparent correlation between the two is a coincidence; the sort of people who choose one also often choose the other. GUI file managers and the like work fine under tiling window managers.)
I switched back to KDE a few days ago, after having used GNOME for about a decade. One thing that made me really happy is that wobbly windows are an option again! (There's a plugin for GNOME 3 to enable them but it has unusable graphical issues on all computers I've tested it on.) It's nice to be able to reenable some of those effects that got me to try Linux out in the first place.
> Most of the modern OS developments focus on making things easy and safe. That usually boils down on removing features and locking down things.
Fair enough, but innovation should not necessarily be more complex. See pinch-to-zoom in the first iPhone as an example of a groundbreaking addition that makes things simpler.
Pinch to zoom is nice, but relies on a sort of peripheral that most desktop computers don't have. To make a mainstream desktop system, you can't assume the user has more than a keyboard and mouse. And so the usual ctrl + / ctrl - shortcuts for scaling/zooming remain, even though they're usually superfluous to laptop users with touchpads.
All kinds of things like that have been added to desktop environments. Things like hot corners to "Exposé" the windows or show all your virtual desktops, gestures for minimizing all your windows or flipping through them. Dragging windows such that they snap into certain geometries for an assisted manual sort of tiling. Despite all these additions, things which Windows 95 didn't have, the typical desktop environment would still seem reasonably familiar to a time-traveling Windows 95 user because the primary input devices are still keyboard and mouse and therefore desktop environments all work the same way, broadly speaking.
My point was not that those effects from 20 years ago are unavailable, it's that I have not seen current similarly experimental projects that expand what we think of as a desktop.
There is nothing (that I know of) that feels as groundbreaking for 2022 as compiz was for 2006
You see this a lot though. It’s because it becomes harder and harder to do something new and different when it’s all sort of been done before. Innovating something that’s been done to death is a lot harder than innovating when things are still less well defined.
I think video games are in this same space. Rarely does a game actually innovate or come up with something truly novel anymore. Ultima Online was the most amazing thing I ever saw at the time, but now that I’ve seen a million different MMOs the entire genre feels stale. Have fighting games really advanced much from either a Street Fighter type, Mortal Kombat, Marvel Vs Capcom or Smash Brothers style? What about action adventure - is God of War Ragnarok innovating anything? It doesn’t feel that different than playing any number of other games, just maybe more polished. Uncharted is just another take on Tomb Raider at the end of the day. Same thing with movies or television. There just isn’t that much new ground to break.
Exactly my feelings, altough it would be with Windows 2000 and XP since I wasn't born before. The file explorer, dolphin, is a good example of that, and a pleasure to use.
What distro do you use? Would you recommend it to newcomers?
I've friends and family who always ask me this. My partner tried Fedora KDE, but their input methods are completely broken, and writing in Chinese (her native language) was simply not feasible.
I tried live media of a few random distros, but basic things were always broken (e.g.: touchpad scrolling didn't work, things like that).
The best distro for newcomers is the one their mentor in the local LUG is using. Any other way is just a recipe for misery.
> Fedora KDE, but their input methods are completely broken
That sucks. I can say with confidence that this is not the case on openSUSE with KDE. I have fcitx5, fcitx5-chinese-addons and a few other relevant packages installed and it works fine.
I tried OpenSUSE and it had scaling issues. Basically, everything was tiny (to a point where it was unreadable).
OpenSUSE used X11 by default (rather than Wayland), and configuring scaling on X11 has never fully worked for me, so I didn't want to sink time into that. It didn't seem that Wayland was an option.
I admit I didn't have a huge amount of patience or put a lot of time into OpenSUSE; after wasting a lot of time into trying to make input work on Fedora [and failing], we basically went through multiple distros in a weekend and quickly moved on whenever one had obvious issues rather than try and figure out if it was possible to tinker around it.
Do you know if X11 is still the default or Wayland if is well supported? Or any other advise for this scenario?
When was the last time you tried OpenSUSE? Both distributions of OpenSUSE with GNOME now use Wayland by default. As for KDE unfortunately it still needs a bit of time for Wayland sessions to be more stable. They are perfectly usable now, but face potentially more headaches comapred to GNOME Wayland sessions.
As for Chinese input, fcitx + google pinyin worked just fine on Manjaro KDE for me. Word prediction isn't very good but it's generally usable. For more details see here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/fcitx
If using Wayland is a hard requirement then I would recommend choosing GNOME over KDE for the desktop environment. I've been using KDE on X11 just fine for now.
it's personally why I don't like KDE. I have no nostalgia for the old school windows desktop and it feels like something designed by a Soviet Design bureau combined with an airplane cockpit. There's always three different menus to change the same thing and buttons everywhere.
GNOME goes a little bit overboard sometimes with the simplification but it just feels so much cleaner out of the box.
Yes and no. I would use KDE if either they went full Windows 98 in their style, or modern slick like GNOME.
Instead they have this bland Windows 10 flat look that has no personality.
The familiar Windows 98 gray had saturation, constrast and even a touch if colour (the gray tends a bit towards the red)
The modern KDE look is a diluted flat gray/desaturated cerulean blue which I really do not like. So uninspired, cold, clinical, corporate, clashing with that friendly look they want KDE to represent. It is uncanny, and while the GNOME design team loves to change stuff just for the sake of it, they have more taste and eye that whoever runs the design team at KDE.
Can we have a desktop that doesn't look like a poster that's been left in the sun for too long? Can we have contrast back and more colours than just light gray and light blue?
Part of what gives the default KDE theme that feel you describe I think is its usage of transparent grays. Generally when you do transparency in UI it needs to be transparent white or transparent black (though in some case, dark transparent gray can work), because transparent mid-grays make everything feel kinda dingy, with whatever's showing through feeling like it's being seen through a thick fog on a dark rainy day.
The out-of-box look isn't exactly great, but I'm using Breeze Twilight theme (dark shell + light apps) and Breeze Classic color scheme - and it doesn't feel that way anymore at all. Both are available by default in system settings, and you can even set a custom accent color there.
By default, Win98 used the same gray as Win95 (#C0C0C0). If I remember correctly, it was Win2K that made it warmer, and it was definitely an improvement.
I love KDE. Its file manager in particular is a thing of beauty, unique in its ability to display large directories without slowing down and uniquely flexible and powerful. The desktop in general gets out of my way, with a good window switcher, launcher, and window manager. Nothing groundbreaking here, but everything mostly works as intended (looking at you, Win+Arrow on Gnome). Some of the default apps are great, like the PDF viewer Okular with its fantastic annotation tools.
The only thing I don't really care for is the default look, which is a bit dated. A refresh would be nice. To be fair, it is relatively easy to customize the colors, which helps. Still, that steel-gray-with-neon is a bit boring.
Every now and then I see a picture of a UI circa 2000, and I mostly miss that era. Controls were organized. Everything clickable looked clickable. There were clear conventions. Controls did not obscure content.
Sure, it wasn’t pretty the way modern UIs are pretty, but users don’t need pretty.
Windowing should be a window manager concern. There is no reason for Dolphin to embed a terminal instead of your window manager to just keep a borderless Konsole next to it, like you might see on any tiled WM. It's pure bloat caused by inflexible software.
Personally I would love to see tabs, panes and all that crap disappear from any application. It shouldn't be their concerns to manage windows. My dream desktop would even have Emacs windows be separate frames managed by the window manager, not by Emacs itself.
GP gave a reason: The terminal follows you around while you navigate in the file browser. I don't even know to think about where I would start to implement something like that in a tiling window manager. I'm pretty sure it would be a pretty ugly hack.
The point is not the window-conjoining, it is synchronizing the app-specific state of the file browser with the state of the CLI in the terminal, and keeping that up to date as the user navigates around.
That seems pretty specific and outside the purview of what a window manager should be doing itself.
100% agree, but I think the actual number of use cases are not that many, the implementation complexity is high, and on top of that you then need buy-in from all the apps.
Would be really cool, though.
A potentially easier idea I have ruminated on is just letting apps (or better, having the OS almost force them to) expose a "current app environment state" that any other (authorized) app could read and subscribe to (in some waves hands efficient way).
Even in this example, though, you already have security concerns: do I want other apps to be able to know that my file browser is perusing the "pr0n" directory? If no, then how do we put the user in charge of that kind of thing in a way that is simple enough not to make the entire idea more trouble than it's worth?
The goal of being able to embed apps everywhere reminds me of COM/OLE and ActiveX. No, thanks.
Again, and this time less sarcastically, if embedding is the goal, why can't I embed an email client and only the terminal is an approved extension? Seems awfully limiting.
Embedding a terminal in a file manager solves a particular problem. It synchronizes the working directory of the terminal with the directory open in the file explorer. This is a pretty common problem to have, and there certainly are other solutions to it, but embedding a terminal within the explorer is a good solution for a lot of use cases. It's convenient, and it makes sense for a program that manages your files to enable you to more directly manage files with a terminal prompt.
It doesn't really make sense for a file manager to embed an email client because email doesn't usually involve file management. Needing to send an email from a particular directory isn't a problem that anybody has.
Could you synchronize a terminal window and a file explorer window? I'm sure you could with a bit of effort. You could also set up a whole tile manager and dock those two windows together.
For people who don't want to do all that, or don't use or don't like tiling, or who just want to run chmod +x on the file they downloaded, putting a terminal in the file manager is a perfectly valid solution to a relatively minor inconvenience. It even has a hotkey to close it when you don't want your window spoiled by a horrible subframe.
Shift -> right click a directory and you get a context menu item to open powershell. You can registry hack to make it cmd instead. Been part of my normal work flow since windows 7 I think?
It reminds me of OpenDoc, which, for the extremely limited set of tech demos that worked (e.g. putting the BBEdit text editor into any app that edited text) was awesome and flabbergasting when I saw it.
Just because it failed and nobody has so far ever succeeded in delivering on that concept in a usable form doesn’t me we should just give up and go back to living in caves.
It also doesn’t mean that developers who deliver on that only in limited-but-useful ways should be dismissed because they also failed to deliver the comprehensive universal successful implementation of it.
But it makes sense to embed terminal, since you often/sometimes want to run some command in that directory/folder. I never had a need to run mail in specific folder.
Yes, but Emacs tends to use windows (what one would call panes elsewhere) for everything, not frames, so it replicates badly something your desktop is already doing.
> Its file manager in particular is a thing of beauty, unique in its ability to display large directories without slowing down and uniquely flexible and powerful.
I've found PCManFM to be just as performant as Dolphin with very large (100k+ file) directories. I stopped using Dolphin because Dolphin can't sort a directory of symlinks correctly (it uses the dates of the target files, rather than the dates of the symlinks, with no apparent way to configure this.)
During my dissertation, I routinely worked with directories containing hundreds of thousands of files. For not entirely unrelated reasons, I also had to reinstall the OS kind of a lot, and experimented with a few.
Most file managers slow down terribly/crash when asked to display such a directory. Windows can't do it. Gnome can't do it. Dolphin doesn't even break a sweat. It's impressive.
I bet it's technically because Dolphin is using the Qt List View, which lazy-loads its contents instead of being pre-filled with the entire list. At least that's what it feels like.
All of those are so ugly and stripped down compared to Dolphin, though. (Maybe Thunar is more modern these days, at least?) Something like PCManFM is truly reminiscent of Win 9x.
In my experience, Thunar and Dolphin are comparable, with some features (e.g. bulk renaming, custom actions) much easier to use in Thunar. It's probably the thing I miss most about Xfce after switching to KDE.
The others are indeed minimalist. My point was mainly about speed. A lightweight file manager is always a key consideration when I try a new desktop environment.
I prefer Dolphin to other file managers, but I feel it has a lot of issues when it comes to remote directories. Maybe someone has some good
workarounds..
It will hang and become unresponsive over slow connections. If you try to access a phone filesystem (through KDEConnect) the whole thing will lockup for a minute or two - to the point where you need to force-kill Dolphin to close it (and no visual feedback on what's going on)
I've also had issues with its SSH remote-directory access. Generally the whole thing often goes into these unresponsive lock states as the a lot of operations aren't seemingly handled asynchronously (KDE on Jammy)
I've been on KDE since coming back home to Linux a few years ago. A few thoughts:
* KDE feels like we just kept on iterating on the same UI since the early 90s. The functionality is very deep, but also intuitive. A lot of the depth comes from things like KIO, kparts and dbus, where we see a lot of functionality being reused from one app to the next. This means if you learn how Konsole works, when you fire up a terminal in other KDE apps, it works the same way.
* Customization is really a good thing. Everyone isn't learning to use a computer for the first time. Computers have been personal for almost 50 years now.
* Would really love kmail and the whole korganizer get a refresh. It's really good when it works, but needs some crashy-ness and jank removed. (BTW Akregator, the KDE-PIM RSS feed reader is still EXCELLENT)
I was a very happy KDE user during the 3.3 to 3.5 days. I tried sticking with the desktop after the 4.0 release (there were SO MANY changes and grand new ideas under the hood!), but lost patience soon after the 4.2 release - it just wasn't ready for day-to-day use; all the rough edges made me bleed every day. So I made the plunge to Xfce, and didn't look back for more than a decade.
Until some three months ago, when I had to set up a new, additional machine at home, and I decided to try the new (really: current :)) Plasma Desktop on Arch Linux for funsies. By now, all may Xfce machines, except the one at work, have been migrated to KDE. Now even my wife uses it on her personal desktop - she's especially fond of Okular, KDE Connect, and digiKam.
KDE did everything they could to tell people that it wasn't ready for general until 4.3, but never figured out how to get people to listen. Distros insisted on installing it by default.
There was good reason for them to release 4.0 when they did but nobody has figured out how to communicate releases only to those the release is for (this last isn't about KDE, humans in general have the issue)
They should have called it 3.999 instead of 4.0, or "4.0 BETA", or "4.0 (for developers only!)" or anything like that. Anything other than giving it a new major version number without a disclaimer that it wasn't ready for prime-time. When you give something a new major version number, distro packagers will either update to it or they'll be subjected to endless questions from users asking them why the package is outdated.
> There was good reason for them to release 4.0
What were those reasons? To me, it really seems like they rushed it out because the release of Windows Vista and iOS made them feel like they had to release something to seem current and up to date.
The reason is that KDE is mostly developed by volunteers. Many of whom had branches that have been developed and ready for several years but not released. They were losing interest. KDE had to move the train to keep those volunteers around.
If you don't ship it and some point it's gonna die.
So use the beta version to integrate everything and make sure it all works before shipping it to users. That's the point of having a beta. But shipping what should have been a beta release to end users as though it were finished has ramifications in how your project is viewed and whether people keep using it.
Nothing, it was a mistake that some are attempting to explain away as everyone elses fault for misunderstanding.
I did the same thing as the other poster, went to 4.x with KDE then promptly left as I fundamentally disagreed with so many of the things they were doing. I ended up at i3 and haven't looked back. KDE is a lot better than it was back in those days, but i3 is so perfect for me I'll never be a full time KDE user again. Not because I hate them, but because they're not i3.
Back then there was just a single "KDE" release, instead of separate frameworks, desktop and applications that we have now. KDE 4.0 being released meant that the frameworks used to build applications were now stable and that initial ports of desktop and applications on top of those frameworks were now available. They made it clear that end users should wait with switching until the whole DE stabilizes.
That's just how their versioning scheme worked. The exact same thing happened with KDE 2.0 and KDE 3.0, but there was a different audience back then and 4.x took much longer to stabilize (as Qt3 -> Qt4 migration was much heaver that others, including Qt4 -> Qt5), so it became a bigger problem there.
It didn't happen with KDE 5.0 because there was no KDE 5.0 - now you have separate releases with separate versioning schemes of KDE Frameworks, Plasma Desktop and KDE Applications (and many apps were still based on KDELibs4 on initial release anyway and only gradually ported to KF5 afterwards).
The distros did a shitty job there; they should have seen that 4.0 wasn't ready (esp. when the KDE devs were even saying so), and continued to fully support KDE 3.x until 4.x was really ready for prime-time. Instead, the stupid distro maintainers completely dropped support for 3.x, forcing people to either use KDE4.x or to stick with an older distro version.
The whole point of a distro is to make intelligent choices about the software to include in the distribution and package it up into a coherent system for users to use. Even moreso for distros that claim to focus on stability, where sticking with older versions of packages is the norm.
Can you define "bloated"? RAM consumption? Disk space? All are a cheap commodity these days. I've been using KDE for the past 8 years on and off, and uninterruptedly in the last two years. It's fast, powerful and rich.
Sure, they are cheap, but if you ever try using Xfce (or similarly small DE) for a bit you will quickly realise just how slow other desktop environments (and Windows/OSX) are. Unnecessary animations is another one.
I've seen a similar argument defending "bloated" websites but then whenever a minimal website (e.g., a text-only site) is posted, people are astonished at how snappy it is.
That being said, I last used KDE over 10 years ago and computers have definitely become faster since then.
https://itvision.altervista.org/linux-desktop-environments-s... According to this test it uses approximately as much RAM as GNOME and 1GB more than XFCE. I guess on older hardware with 8GB RAM XFCE would make more sense, perhaps even for mobile devices where battery life is a scarce resource.
A NUC-sized mini PC with Q1'21 Intel Celeron ran all three DEs with no noticeable difference in speed. Perhaps there's a difference for hardcore usage but it simply isn't applicable to the vast majority of use cases. So yes computers have definitely become much faster since 10 years ago that a lot of these "bloat" really aren't noticeable anymore.
I assert that one exception to this is compositing.
Even if you're on a gaming rig with a really beefy GPU, you might not notice that DE compositing is on, but you will notice the difference once you turn it off.
To test this, try dragging a window around on a high refresh rate monitor on LXDE (since that DE has no composition by default, iirc) and then on GNOME, KDE, et al.
The overhead of composition extends to games as well, which is why I like KDE for being the only full-featured DE that lets you turn composition off.
I also found it to be slow on my (now 7 year old) laptop. Not everyone has the luxury of frequent upgrades. And I tend to prefer speed over bells and/or whistles.
KDE hasn't gotten more resource intensive on my laptop (turns 7 soon) since it was when I installed it in mid 2016. It probably uses a 200-300 more MB of ram compared to XFCE, but the number of tabs open in my web-browser dominates any other memory usage on my system.
The only thing that slowed my system down was the file indexer (Baloo); some people have said better now, but I never re-enabled it.
That. I disabled Baloo because it's cache was growing uncontrollably. And Firefox with many opened tabs uses most RAM anyway, in that sense I don't see how much it's the problem of KDE.
It wasn't chasing the design. The major change was upgrade to Qt4 and they rewrote almost the entire thing from scratch. Long term I think it was for the best.
May I ask what the biggest changes/ deal breakers were?
It is difficult to understand the whys without knowing about the usage-pattern was broken.
I'm genuinely curious.
KDE4 was pre-pre-pre-pre-release quality. It crashed all the time, it greatly increased hardware requirements, and they were trying to push the whole "semantic desktop" thing that was a complete failure and was basically nepomuk running at 100% to "index files" (that would never be found).
They fucked up desktop icons. It'd be akin to purchasing a new walkman and the volume buttons don't immediately change volume up and down, instead they're more generalized buttons so you CAN change the volume up and down with them, just not by pushing them and nothing more.
Someone somewhere had an idea and an intent and I didn't give a shit and it represented a fundamental problem in their mental model of what they should be doing, so I left.
It's great that it eventually got salvaged but it should never have happened in the first place.
> May I ask what the biggest changes/ deal breakers were? It is difficult to understand the whys without knowing about the usage-pattern was broken. I'm genuinely curious.
KDE 4.0 was famously broken at release. It's not even missing features that was the issue, it was highly unstable and not ready for release.
IIRC KDE4 wasn't as much breaking existing usage patterns but pushing intrusive things like desktop widgets and generally trying to lock me into tightly integrated system. I remember it was really easy to create a desktop note by accident and somehow really difficult to delete one. KDE3.5, or Xfce for that matter, felt more like something that is good for launching apps, managing desktop and some generic utilities. The clumsy UI design didn't also help.
I was in this group and the major thing that annoyed me was the reinvention of the Amarok music player, destroying my favorite music player ever overnight.
Now that you remind me, the Amarok update was terrible. For some time I used to run a self-built version of 1.4 and I see there is now a fork called Clementine and a few clone projects. For me streaming services have mostly replaced local music files.
KDE has a well articulated vision about how open source personal computing should look like. E.g., I like their growing collection of android apps [0] (KDE Connect in particular). Hopefully they can attract more resources to speed up executing on that vision.
KDE Connect is indeed amazing, definitely a "killer feature" (albeit one not exclusive to the KDE desktop -- I run GNOME and still integrate with my phone via KDE Connect).
It makes so much sense, I don't know why Google or anyone else hasn't attempted anything like it too.
KDE Connect also runs on iOS (I find it the easiest way to send large files to my iPhone then open with VLC for example). Also, Windows! A bit ironic that a KDE Connect user probably exists that uses it on their iPhone and Windows computer together.
Looking back I'm not sure the Oxygen theme has aged particularly well
Well, I am currently using the Oxygen theme (with a GTK 3 version called Oxygen SCSS) and I like it a lot better than the default Breeze theme. Buttons that look like buttons, a nice glow effect when highlighting things, and some of the icons* I find absolutely gorgeous (the Log Out, Restart, and Shut Down icons, for instance, have this nice glassy look).
Who cares about fashion? If something looks good, it looks good, even if it's not fashionable. It's like saying the style of a nice Gothic cathedral has fallen out of fashion, it still looks better than a concrete and glass box.
Correct about fashion, but wrong about the icons. Glassy icons are like concrete boxes, not cathedrals. They never looked good and were just the fashion for a while, like shag carpets or powdered wigs.
As much as I want to like KDE and agree with some of its principles (such as its all-too-uncommon lack of fear of proper menubars) I have a hard time using it long term because even after years of effort going into polishing it, it still has that distinct “designed by programmers” feel to it with awkward UI layout and whitespace distribution and quirky idiosyncrasies smattered throughout. I get why it has ardent fans but I don’t think it’s for everybody.
Just about anything GTK-based. GNOME takes minimalism too far but is undeniably polished, but Cinnamon and XFCE get much closer to a balance between good UI/UX and configurability.
KDE was buggy, unreliable and annoying when I tried it--admittedly some time ago. And the fetish for naming everything with an initial letter K: kindergarten stuff.
Too much effort on making every last thing customisable and not enough on making it work?
I know it is a very unpopular opinion on HN but I don't get KDE. Sure, all applications are super feature-packed, which is mostly a good thing (Konsole, Dolphin, Okular are chef's kiss) but also has its downsides: e.g. that, last time I checked, you cannot have a simple dedicated calendar app like gnome-calendar (or macOS Calendar) but must open the outlook-heavy KOrganizer which comes with mail, contacts, etc. Not really what I want when I just quickly want to check my calendar. But this is just a small annoyance.
What really bothered me though was the UI. All these lines! Everything has an outline. Every UI element has a heavily highlighted outline. It feels super dated and cluttered. But the last time I daily-drove it, I thought "Hey I embrace the KDE life style. I am finally on the right side of the Linux Desktop according to HN and Reddit. Whenever people sh*t on Gnome, one of the big arguments is that you cannot customize it. So I just customize it, make it mine, lets go!"
Well surprisingly the other themes were almost all equally bad or caused inconsistencies. So I went further down the rabbit hole and installed Kvantum. I found a theme that I liked and happily used it for some time. Until I noticed that the theme altered the functionality of KMail. Namely, when tabbing away from KMail, it would select another Email. Super annoying when you want to keep an Email open in the background as a reference while e.g. doing something in your browser. I raised the issue with the Kvantum dev who redirected me to an issue with KDE. I don't remember all the details but it is an issue in KDE and for them it is a wontfix.
So, for me I basically had a similar experience to others here with Gnome. I try to make it work for me until I hit a wall where the maintainers tell me that my use case is not supported by the desktop. So I went back to Gnome.
And you know what. I like Gnome. It works for me. It looks nice and is functional. However I don't want or need to convert other happy KDE'ers which is also not the point of my little comment. I don't want to dunk on KDE. It does a lot of cool things, but I just cannot stand the UI. Isn't it great to have choice?
> e.g. that, last time I checked, you cannot have a simple dedicated calendar app like gnome-calendar (or macOS Calendar) but must open the outlook-heavy KOrganizer which comes with mail, contacts, etc. Not really what I want when I just quickly want to check my calendar. But this is just a small annoyance.
I usually shit on GNOME because KDE is technologically better. Qt is undoubtedly superior UI framework which is used far more outside KDE community unlike GTK. I feel that little issues KDE has here and there are mostly the result of it being a second choice in the most popular distros such as Ubuntu or Fedora, and that's another reason I like to shit on GNOME - I think it doesn't deserve to be the face of Linux.
"Shitting on GNOME" isn't going to solve anything. The people who made it the default in their distros already disagree with you and trash talking isn't going to change their mind. Everyone who's been around has heard all the common complaints before. Just saying "it's technologically better" doesn't even mean anything either. Technologically better at what? There's this myth that you seem to be bought into about how Qt and GTK are fighting against each other or are competing against each other when that's not true. They happily work together and borrow ideas from each other when it makes sense.
That goes both ways my friend. Open source maintainers have a right to dismiss substance-free complaints without needing to prove P = NP.
Complaining about potholes is a great analogy. Repeatedly bringing up the pothole problem at the local swing dancing meetup isn't going to solve anything. You need to actually send your complaints to the transportation office. If they've heard about a particular pothole before then you don't need to bring it up again and keep sending them the same complaints. They already know about it. When they can't fix everything in time then the problem is either bad planning or lack of budget, and louder complaining definitely won't do anything about that.
> They have a right to express their opinion without needing said expression to have the goal of solving world hunger.
Just avoid calling someone to task for expressing an opinion that many others hold. They absolutely have the right to express what they don't like about Gnome.
And the person responding to them also has the right to express their opinion, that the person's opinion they're responding to is a shit opinion, whether or not it solves world hunger.
No, I'll continue calling people to task for expressing their opinions poorly or falling back on these bad justifications. Cut that out please, you're doing it now. Responding with "well I have a right to express my opinion" is just a platitude, it's not adding anything of value to the conversation or moving the discussion forward.
The guidelines of this forum say you should post "anything that good hackers would find interesting" and it's not interesting to just complain and rant. Even moreso when it's the same boring things we've all heard before like "XYZ sucks" or "I shit on XYZ" like the parent comment was doing. The guidelines also say "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work" and that's what the parent comment was doing too. Please make your comments better than that or don't post here. Make a commitment to be better every day of your life and you won't have to worry about this. No one's asking anyone to solve world hunger, you're falling back on the usual HN hyperbole and snark. So you can just avoid saying that. This is a series of very simple personal steps you can realistically take to improve yourself and improve this forum at the same time.
And maybe I wasn't fully clear the first time. Sure, you have a right to do whatever you want. But that isn't useful way to communicate in a lot of cases. Just put a little bit of thought into it please? Imagine you have a new open source project. Some person comes and makes a complex feature request that will take you years to implement. You ask "why do you need this" so you can try to get to a simpler solution and they respond with "because I have a right to express my opinion." Ok? That's not really answering the question, is it? Now imagine looking at it as an outsider and you can tell how the person refusing to give explanations is the one being stubborn and evasive and stonewalling the discussion. You can't even blame the developer for that at all. This is a public forum, you're not having a casual bullshit conversation with your friends when you comment here.
Please also consider that your opinions could just be wrong, and other people may know more about the subject than you. Maybe you're not as informed as you think. If that's the case then you're doing active harm to people around you by propagating misinformation with those opinions. If you've been helped by receiving useful information from this site then you owe it to other people to make sure your opinions are helping them, not harming them. So you shouldn't just express whatever opinion occurs to you without thought and research.
I'm not trying to be negative here though. I've also seen lots of times here when people expressed their opinions in an engaging way, giving justifications and honest reasoning and useful suggestions. You can do it too, you just have to put in a little bit of effort and listen to the person you're talking to instead of just blindly saying "I have a right to express my opinion" at any opportunity.
You were being unfair, I pointed it out and asked you to try and avoid it in the future, and your response is a multi-paragraph rant about who knows what because it would require that I take the time to read it.
No, I wasn't being unfair or ranting. This is a classic case of "accusation in a mirror." When I push back on people for "shitting" on things, someone immediately tries to flip the script and accuse me of ranting. If you change your mind and still want to talk, please be honest with yourself and admit you were being unfair by dismissing my whole comment without even reading it.
The ranting description didn't come into play until you decided to make a post that was 5-6x as large as anything else in the conversation.
your "immediately accuses me of ranting" didn't happen anywhere near immediately and I suggest you do some introspection to better understand why that was your reaction.
It's still not a rant. You didn't actually read my comment so you can stop with the characterizations and asking me to introspect, because you've already admitted nothing you say has any relation to what I actually typed.
And yes, it did happen near immediately compared to other comments on this site. Please respond to my actual words next time instead of continuing with these rude, low-effort comments. I try to make my comments more informational and have more depth each time, you're not giving me the same courtesy. If I give a short response people complain they don't understand what I'm talking about. If I give a long response people complain it's too long. If I give a medium response people complain I wasn't convincing enough. So there's just no winning with you folks. This is another case where what you call "complaining" and "expressing opinions" is actually just "trolling" and "making excuses to avoid listening to anyone else's opinion." It's another accusation in a mirror, you need to be doing some introspection and figure out why you're being so evasive.
I feel the same. The UI to me since plasma has seemed large and awkward whenever I tried it. The default theme is a bit outdated as well. Something with gnome or cinnamon just really does it for me, cinnamon especially.
I really like KDE but one thing that saddens me is the state of the office stuff - like KMail, KOrganizer, Desktop Search etc.pp - there was an ambitious project called Nepomuk for Semantic Desktop and that failed 10 years ago? And the Backend launches a full MySQL at the moment - I hope someday all of this will be streamlined get's an UI update and a fast database i.e. https://github.com/cozodb/cozo and the features will come back. Also KMail needs some usability improvements...
If this stuff would work and not crash adding calendars/todo-lists in the ui would hopefully work and the original ideas and research concepts could be implemented in a fast an good way.
> And the Backend launches a full MySQL at the moment
You are allowed to run SQLite instead, install package `akonadi-server-sqlite` and edit `~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc`. Unfortunately, `akonadiconsole` does not offer this customisation in the GUI for some reason.
thanks - I didn't know about this. I actually like and enjoy this it's just that it's missing polish but this is not the fault of the devs who do hard work for an difficult and almost impossible problem without lot's of ressources and even then it's still difficult to get right.
Unfortunately it's the last 5% of polish -- coming up with cool tech is interesting, tracking down that one weird bug in Akonadi that makes mail break randomly after 3 months of working fine is much less enticing.
KDE 3.X was the first Linux desktop I ever used. It was back in the old days, when I installed a SUSE Linux that came in a magazine that my mother bought me after me finding it unexpectedly in a groceries shop while shopping with her.
I felt pure and simple fascination. I was a teenager that only knew Windows. I spent hours playing around with it and its familiar and attractive aspect helped me a lot on making easier to dig into the GNU/Linux idiosyncrasies. Later, I moved to Ubuntu and Gnome 2.X, then Debian, then Slackware, then Arch then whatever was the trend at the time. All great experiences, and despite nowadays I use Gnome (in Fedora) exclusively (and enjoy it quite a lot) I will always have KDE in my heart.
The only shame is the fact that no mainstream distro (from the subset I prefer to use for technical reasons: RHEL based) use it as a first class citizen. I would be open to give it a try if that wasn't the case.
I use KDE on Fedora in my daily driver. I have not experienced issues that would suggest of KDE being lower than first class. In Fedora it's installed with dnf groupinstall -y "KDE Plasma Workspaces"
You wrote: "no mainstream distro". What is wrong with Debian and its variants? Assuming that you are vanilla x86-64, GNOME, KDE, and many other windowing systems are first class citizens on Debian.
I get much of the praise and dislike for KDE. What I've never understood is the success of gnome.
KDE isn't perfect but gnome is a textbook example of broken workflows and poor UI design. How it became the default for many distros never made sense to me.
GNOME takes a hard-nose approach to application and technology design, making each application they ship feel like part of a greater whole. Rather than feeling like applications made by developers each with their own ideas of how to design an application (which is very much what KDE looks and feels like), GNOME pushes every one of its components into a unified look and feel and it really makes it feel like everything was made by the same people (despite the actual development story). It permeates everything from user interface design to what libraries the applications use (eg: GNOME applications use SQLite for database needs. And that's it. You don't get some using SQLite, others using PostgreSQL, others using MySQL; that's the situation KDE found/finds itself in.)
On top of all that, IBM and Novell have put some serious development money behind making GNOME check all the accessibility boxes and the remote administration boxes. It's the only environment outside of Windows that can match the accessibility and administrative control Windows offers.
GNOME became "the default" in large part due to the licensing uncertainty that has historically clouded Qt and by extension KDE. After that, it's been inertia.
Wayland wasn't relevant until very recently, and hasn't existed even in concept for much longer than that. The Qt licensing matter I'm talking about was back in the 90s.
GNOME's been pretty damn usable with Wayland since around 2015 or so. Enough time that I can distinctly remember three Debian stable releases that run it by default.
I really don't get it. What's wrong with gnome? Where exactly are the sharp edges on gnome that you cut yourself on? Or what exactly is the missing feature that is important to your flow? Is it just the vibe?
Every criticism of gnome I've seen is just so unspecific and vague that it seems more like group virtue signalling than anything else.
There are a lot of sharp unfriendly edges to GNOME, like having to use GConf to customize keyboard shortcuts, not being able to change mouse scroll speed (note for people who have difficulty understanding English: scroll speed is not pointer speed. Scroll speed is how fast you can scroll with the scroll wheel, not how fast the pointer moves over the screen. These are not the same things), not being able to set date+time format to DayOfWeek YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm, applications not having friendly menu bars with a clear and obvious "Help" menu, frequent breakage of user extensions,... some of those may seem like small nitpicks, but they add up.
KDE is great. I've been using the Fedora KDE spin for years now. Just works.
Everything just seems to make sense, and I have not experiences the crashes or wake-up failures the author describes. Probably Fedora pre-vets which packages and version work well together.
Seconding KDE + Fedora! Great twice annual upgrade cycle, SELinux by default, popular enough for e.g. a first-party Google Chrome package, and close to bleeding edge kernel! KDE feels like Windows 10 (meant in a good way).
I've been meaning to switch to Fedora because of more up to date packages after 10+ years on Ubuntu. It does work for me though, and by now I reached a point of where everything works, so I'm afraid to change things too much.
> Whereas on KDE applets typically quickly allow me to to perform the required action without having to dive into the full settings.
Indeed, but I had to actually remove applets which I wanted to use because once I added a few (Command Output applet to be precise), CPU usage started to jump by 2-5% on every addition and fans started to run full tilt. Running shell scripts that don't do anything CPU intensive once every 5 or 10 seconds shouldn't result in that.
Completely agree with the points regarding Task Switcher - when I use Breeze, I get this huge list of icons on the left which frankly looks terrible. There should atleast be an option to switch to smaller icons in the task switcher (I don't see any "Small Icons" option, only the names of the themes).
None of these are deal-breakers though; I think KDE is the best "mainstream" DE experience on Linux.
In OpenSUSE Tumbleweed the additional task switchers are provided by the package plasma5-addons. Depending on which distro you're on it may have another name, like kdeplasma-addons in Arch. Look for a package which provides /usr/share/kwin/tabbox/small_icons/contents/ui/main.qml.
I couldn't find the package for Ubuntu (I'm using Pop!_OS which is based on Ubuntu) - trying to install kdeplasma-addons returns error "Unable to locate package kdeplasma-addons".
Anyhow, I searched for alternative switchers and found one called "MediumDefault" which works pretty well - medium size icons in the middle of the screen which is pretty much a "sane" setup.
I went with KDE from gnome shell, and it just works so nicely - would have stayed with gnome-shell, but it had some weird glitches in regards of screen freezing, while mouse moves, but with KDE life is so much smoother.
If year of the linux happens, KDE will play a big part in that.
I jumped to macOS 20-odd years ago, mostly out of frustration with the build quality of Windows laptops and the endless PITA experience of Windows itself. Figured the resale value of Apple laptops made it a minimal risk.
Bought a Lenovo laptop the other year and installed Ubuntu. Thoroughly meh experience there, really disappointed. But then I found KDE, and it’s my main dev environment now.
If Lenovo could come out with a laptop with the build quality of Mac, running a KDE environment integrated with their new Lenovo phone, I think they’d stand a very good chance of going head-to-head with Apple.
It makes sense but I think there are other factors preventing Linux going head to head with Apple, even with the same quality build. There are apps. I was a long-time Linux user also (and still use it technically), but my main computer is also Apple now.
There are the apps, and even with KDE MacOS is still more consistent-looking than Linux sadly.
I miss the KDE 3.5 days. It was a super customizable and polished DE. It's a real shame all that work was thrown away, every time I try KDE now I'm still disappointed, it doesn't take much to get the first crashes and bugs...
I’ve been running KDE 4 and 5 on a variety of different hardware since the day KDE 4 reached v4.0. Granted the first few releases of 4 were a little bumpy (as had been thoroughly discussed on the internet at the time) but it’s been super stable for me ever since.
Is it possible your issues are down to your preferred distro packing KDE badly? The few times I’ve tried Kubuntu (for example) KDE has felt laggy. On Slackware, OpenSuse and Arch it flys though. This was true in the 3.x days too.
I’d also be interest to know what WM / DE is your usual daily driver and comparison here. Does it do compositing? If not, I wonder if the issue is graphics hardware and running KDE with software rendering would work better (though if you’re going to do that then you’re probably better off with an older DE or WM).
As an aside, I’ve been running KDE since the 1.0 and I my personal opinion KDE is the best now it has ever been.
Tried different distros, same results. Last time I tried it was with KDE Neon "user edition" and the start menu didn't even align properly, the button was on the left and the menu opened somewhere in the middle of screen. How does that even make it to release?
My comparison is Windows because after KDE 3.5 was dropped from ArchLinux I was just too fed up with all the issues at the time. Around that same time they also started messing with the sound subsystem (switching to PulsAudio) and I couldn't even play mp3's without stuttering under load (this worked fine before). I just needed something that worked and it's been like that ever since, I don't have the motivation anymore to get under the hood and fix things, I just want my computer to work.
Nah, I have the same story. I spent a lot of that time distro-hopping and tried all sorts of combinations of hardware, different distributions, etc (for reasons unrelated to the KDE fiasco). KDE4 was extremely buggy on all of them, including the later KDE4 verions (and even earlier 5 IIRC). After reading comments like yours, I re-tried it several times (maybe 10 in total) and was always left disappointed. Maybe it's time to revisit once more (OTOH how many times do you touch the stove before learning not to do that anymore?)
Not GP, but I was also KDE3 user who ran away after the KDE4 (in my eyes) fiasco. I never went back because customizing and learning to use a desktop environment is an investment on my side, and if the DE doesn't respect that and doesn't understand why I use it, I will not waste my time with it. But hearing the praise in this thread, maybe I should give KDE another chance?
I went to Gnome for a while but never felt at home there, too many weird (to me) ux decisions. I finally settled on Xfce and it works great. Nothing fancy, it just does its job.
Interesting that you mentioned GNOME because it was only a couple of years later that GNOME 3 was released and that was a far more significant change to the UX than KDE 3 to 4. Around that time there seemed to be a lot of changes to the FOSS DE landscape.
I’ve not used XFCE in 10 or 15 years but I always had a good experience when I did need it. In fact I preferred that over GNOME too. Completely just my personal preference, though the leaner footprint was a big incentive.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. All this stuff basically boils down to personal preferences at the end of the day, but it’s often interesting hearing what peoples preferences are.
GNOME 3 and KDE 4 both committing usability seppuku at around the same time was really odd. Both these disasters were immediately preceded by the release of the first iPhone. I think maybe iOS broke the devs, made the KDE and GNOME devs feel inadequate so they started flailing around and hurt themselves in an attempt to reinvent things and prove to themselves that they could reinvent like Apple can.
The winds were already changing for PCs before then. Compiz and Beryl had been out for a good few years and really showed off what desktop compositing could do. Then Windows Vista was released and, putting popular opinions aside for one moment, visually it looked next generation compared to XP. So it’s only natural that the leading two FOSS desktop environments follow suit.
iOS certainly would have helped fuel the change too but you could see this trend in desktop
UX even before the first iPhone was announced.
I wasn't using Gnome before that so the changes didn't affect me much... :) Iirc I switched to xfce very quickly too.
I agree, every person has a different set of preferences and priorities. For me it just has to work reliably and not get in my way, and design is less important. But I still try to make my desktops look good.
KDE 5 is much better than KDE 4 was, but I agree that KDE still hasn't reacquired the heights they had in the 3.5 days. Things are still less configurable than they used to be. And Plasma is still buggy for me, whenever I try to use Plasma I end up having to manually restart plasma-shell several times a month because it crashes and KDE doesn't manage to start it again, leaving me with no task bar until I restart it manually...
Kwin is generally great though, and many of the KDE applications are top-tier.
Logging in the morning, opening a website, a word doc and a spreadsheet in tabs in Konqueror, editing stuff over SSH in Kate. It genuinely felt like KDE was trying something new back then, creating a more object oriented desktop. I don’t know how much of that survives but it was exciting at the time.
My experience with KDE has been great, until you start using proprietary drivers / hardware. I got an ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 (solid laptop aside from the spotty keyboard) and it was an absolute nightmare getting the keyboard lighting and the laptop GPU to work reliably with KDE Neon.
I ended up just nuking it and restarting with Gnome. Gnome turned out to be a lot more restrictive, but the initial setup load was significantly less than KDE. The graphics card / keyboard LEDs just worked straight out of the box.
The new widgets in KDE were pretty cool and very fluid. The desktop state didn't save for me though and any time I rebooted/logged out, everything disappeared from my desktop...
Sure, in the same way that most DE's will give you a GUI for adjusting monitor layout, but it actually working has nothing to do with the DE itself and everything to do with the underlying distro/OS.
Many Linux users hate GNOME. Sure, it’s not that customizable, and looks like it was made for the smartphone generation. But… I cannot deny that it is very, very polished visually and is much more familiar to people who aren’t as good at computers. If I was building Linux computers for poor people at a charity shop, I would use GNOME.
KDE… it is just so customizable, almost to a fault. System Settings can be mentally overwhelming - and why does every app have to start with the letter K? Also, whereas GNOME is content with generic names like “Web” and “PDF Viewer,” I’m just supposed to know Okular is my PDF viewer?
With every OS racing to the bottom in terms of customisation and the genera dumbing of things down, I am immensely grateful that there are still some desktop environments out there who are willing to offer flexibility.
I’ve tried a few different tiling and dynamic window managers. I even tried writing my own one. But in the end I actually do like the form factor of full desktop environment for when I’m doing graphical based work. And having a DE that doesn’t treat me like a n00b is an increasingly hard solution to find these days.
This are my feelings as well. Also race to the bottom for proprietary OSes includes much worse things such as them increasingly becoming what I would call spyware. The trands in closed OSes are terrible.
Either you and I are looking at a different "System Settings", or you get overwhelmed easily... The one I'm looking at is neatly organized into descriptive categories on the left, with a search function that searches all categories on the top. If I want to configure my mouse, I search "mouse". The mouse configuration screen has the following options:
Left handed mode
Press left and right buttons for middle-click
Pointer speed
Acceleration profile: Flat or Adaptive
Invert scroll direction
Far from overwhelming, I would say this is the bare minimum. I wish there was more. Why can I only choose between two acceleration profiles in this GUI? Why can't I tweak it? From the way you describe KDE, I should be able to tweak it. 90% of the configuration options KDE surfaces in the GUIs would have been standard fair for casual 'normie' computer users 15 years ago; it barely qualifies as a power user DE.
Use `xinput list-props ...` to see the dozens of configuration options that KDE could expose in their mouse settings GUI, but doesn't. I really do wish KDE were actually the way people like you criticize KDE for being.
> I’m just supposed to know Okular is my PDF viewer?
How is "Okular" any worse than "mudbrick trapeeze artist" aka "adobe acrobat"? Click on a PDF and Okular opens it. That's how you know, and I think that's how most people open PDFs.
> is much more familiar to people who aren’t as good at computers
I'm not sure about this. To me Gnome looks like it's a programmer's idea of what beginner-friendly UI looks like but actual non-technical users seem to think it's just confusing and switch back to Windows or MacOS.
About generic names, I'm quite sure that Apple, Google and Microsoft did some research before they called their web browsers Safari and Chrome, or even renamed it from self-descriptive but unique Internet Explorer to Edge.
Kubuntu did this generic names by default option at one point but fortunately there was an option to switch to proper nouns. Having three different apps called Web Browser was a bit odd, and at least to me the generic names give the feeling that the apps themselves are white label knockoff. But to be honest the 'k' everywhere convention feels like cheap house brand too.
I have noticed in recent versions of KDE they put what the app actually is under the name, and the search seems to search those descriptions (like “Kate: text editor”). Still should probably consider renaming them by default, but without context on macOS I don’t know how you’d know “Safari” is the web browser.
You can actually choose whether you want to show application names, their descriptions or both.
It's pretty annoying when you have GNOME apps installed too though, as those don't follow a sensible pattern and you get "Document Viewer (Okular)" next to "View multi-page documents (Document Viewer)" - which is Evince.
If I have two PDF viewers, should both be called "PDF viewer"? Gnome seems to love hiding the actual names (the gnome document viewer is actually called evince).
View it this way. If I’m a new user to Linux, KDE tends to come with far more apps than GNOME, with names that are often so opaque every app is a mystery. And not in a good way.
“Oh… I thought Konquerer might be a video game, involving Conkers.”
You nailed it: GNOME targets new users. KDE doesn't. The advantage of having unique names is that you can actually talk about them, and that includes finding documentation and solving problems via a search engine.
Try finding anythng useful when your query is based on a generic name, e.g. "document viewer crashes".
Applications in every KDE system menu and search box result list have descriptors about what the application does that follow the application name. Didn't mean to be rude but it's honestly not hard to read the descriptor textsbefore clicking on something.
Gnome is the only Linux environment I know of (including DEs like KDE, window managers like Openbox and compositors like Sway) that support the TILED attribute (present in the monitor's EDID).
So high-end displays like LG Ultrafine 5K, etc. can only be used at native resolution under Gnome. All the others handle it as two displays.
> I’m just supposed to know Okular is my PDF viewer
People would just double click the PDF file and it will open in the PDF viewer.. not sure why would you want to know beforehand about what is the PDF viewer name.
> If I was building Linux computers for poor people at a charity shop, I would use GNOME.
These will be low powered computers. KDE's Kwin allows you to disable compositor, which is essential on low powered computers to make things not sluggish, GNOME's mutter doesn't allow that and it will feel very sluggish.
I'm among those that don't like Gnome the desktop or project, but I do agree regarding the use of generic names vs having to know that Dolphin for some reason is the name of the file manager.
I used to use OpenSuse Tumbleweed but ended up switching to Manjaro for the AUR. Currently in the process of moving to Arch after all the problems I've had with poorly documented Manjaro updates that break half my system.
Using the AUR on Manjaro is a risk because they hold packages in the Manjaro repos back compared to Arch.
So `libfoobar` might be at 1.2 in the arch repos and required by an AUR package but it's only 1.1 in the Manjaro repo which will lead to broken packages.
If you're going to use the AUR, use Arch basically.
KDE is what kept me away from Linux for a long time.
I think everything they make "looks bad" (layout, design, graphics etc.) and I feel like they're just pushing out half-finished features.
It's really a desktop about quantity over quality.
Cinnamon is what finally "clicked" for me.
I wish KDE the best of luck, but I just cannot stand it.
Apart from an early dalliance with Enlightenment 16 due to scavenging 486 computer components from skips in Cork (I fondly remember the donation of a P90 from my friend Barry) KDE has provided me with an almost ideal desktop environment of unparalled configurability and utility. It is fast, light, and as beautiful as you wish it to be.
Regarding the blurry icons in alt tab, I think this is a general problem on Linux and not KDE specific. I had the same issue with certain icons in Cinnamon, and the following steps fixed it for me:
Find the desktop file, for Cinnamon they're stored in /usr/share/applications
For the blurry icon, append to the end of the file (obviously replacing Audacity with the app name)
Tried it recently to kick the tires on fedora and wayland as well. Pretty good and better than before but still so goddamn cluttered. Wish most stuff was plugins that I could remove.
All I want is a desktop as good as Win 2k with a modern terminal. Cinnamon seems to be the closest to that today, finally gave up on mate as it has been rotting from beneath.
> Cinnamon seems to be the closest to that today, finally gave up on mate as it has been rotting from beneath.
I've had the opposite experience. Cinnamon was always buggy and crashing, while Mate never crashed.
Of course, I switched to Plasma about 2 years ago, so I am willing to concede that Mate has had an awful two years while Cinnamon has been bugfixed until the bug reports stopped :-)
I've been using Cinnamon for years now on Fedora. No issues with crashes on my end. I like it as far as I'm concerned it is a solid piece of software, it works and it does what I want I don't need to touch anything to have it working the way I prefer. It may not be the fanciest or have all the bells a whistles but it is what I like.
When I first started using Linux in the early 2000's as a university student KDE was the environment that managed to get me to switch over from Windows. I appreciated just how configurable it was. I would spent hours tweaking my desktop getting everything setup just how I liked it to look. It felt like there was a configuration setting in KDE for just about everything. I remember spending an afternoon procrastinating as a student picking the perfect font for the system clock.
All of that seemed to come at a cost I remember it gradually felt more and more bloated and things became less responsive over time I reached a point where I cared less and less about being able to customize things and more about just having a useable system. I kind of grudgingly used Gnome (in the Gnome 2.6 days) I was never really enamored with it but it "worked".
Gnome 3 lost me as a user completely I just did not mesh with the new paradigm they were going for. I tried out KDE again but this was around the time they were having stability issues and there was some new file indexing system they were using I'm not sure if it was just badly implemented by my distro but it was incredibly resource intensive it would freeze the system for 2 to 3 seconds at a time whenever it kicked it. So I moved on tried out a few other environments like XFCE for a while before settling on Cinnamon.
On a semi-related note does anyone know what happened to Enlightenment? I remember that was the much hyped up desktop environment back in the old Slashdot days I never really hear about it these days.
I didn’t have a big problem with standard bugs but rather constant regressions. Two releases ago Ubuntu Mate had redshift broken, last one broke the GUI theme. Useless work to get it back to normal.
Combined with gtk3 regressions and Ubuntu snap bullshit I’d had enough after ten years.
Moved to mint cinnamon and noticed many little things fixed even the terminal updated, and stayed.
My setup is pretty close to Win2k. There are a few features I use that I don't think 2k had (e.g. Activities), but I've got the menu in the bottom-left, then Task Manager, a few widgets, a notification area and a clock.
As far as terminal goes, I don't think there's any reason to prefer the DE's terminal over your favorite. I use kitty, and it's great.
It's a good choice, but it still lags behind the Win2k GUI in lots of little ways. From memory I remember it not having a service (daemon) manager (think msc) and most Linux explorer type file managers (including Thunar) refuse to implement the full context menu and hotkeys on the left-side tree pane.
On the other hand it had the nice feature in their terminal where it will highlight tabs that have had unseen input. Sheesh.
It's a huge shame that KDE applications won't really work outside of KDE. I get that most KDE developers use KDE themselves, so non-KDE desktops aren't their main focus. But it still seems a shame that so much effort is put into all these tools, but they barely run outside KDE.
For example, if one isn't using KDE, there's no configured KDE icon theme, and most applications will default to simply rendering blank icons. So buttons that have just icons are completely blank.
I also just downloaded `plasma-sdk` to try out `cuttlefish`, an application that's designed to preview the icons from the KDE breeze icon theme. But it's totally broken. The menus render some entries with the text having the same colour as the background. The icons are a mix of KDE icons, GTK icons and some black and white ones (so it's not even usable for its main purpose). Scrolling with the mouse wheel has a weird lag (no touchpad, just a mouse). Clicking on the scrollbar doesn't work, nor does dragging the little "thing" inside the scrollbar.
I don't know how many of these issues are related to me using swaywm, and how many or something else, but there's so many I don't even know where to start. If just one thing is broken, and try to figure it out and report upstream. But if almost nothing works, the same attitude doesn't really work.
That sounds like an issue with your install, I've never experienced any of those issues and I would be surprised if it's a common issue considering the freedesktop.org stuff. https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/
The whole interoperability between desktop frameworks isn't always _perfect_, but it's worked fairly well for probably 10+ years for me (been using linux since the 90's).
I LOVED KDE 3.5. Holy smokes that was a good experience for me growing up. 4 made me switch, and years later, I tried KDE 5 (last year). And eh, I really tried for two weeks. That was super annoying, and coming back to i3 just felt like finally getting air.
It was slow, things didn't work, and weird. I totally understand that people would use gnome or kde and call it a day, because it is much easier to get going with. But if you think you should invest time into your interface I would say try other things as well.
Still lots of other good things from the kde project though!
It seems that virtual desktops have fallen out of fashion, but I still use them and found that they made tiling entirely unnecessary to me. Each program is on its own desktop (Firefox, thunderbird, ...) and the terminal is everywhere through Guake (or Yakuake). Most 'comparative' views are already managed by specialized programs, but if you really need to 'tile' two windows, using meta+left or meta+right to take half the screen is very fast.
Compared to tiling with i3, it's a workflow that requires almost no configuration or learning.
My experience mirrors yours. I started using KDE back in the 1.x days, and continued up through 3.5. I switched to OS X for a few years, then when I came back to Linux I discovered how wonderful i3 was to use. I've been on Sway now for a few years, but they're functionally equivalent with each other.
I try KDE each time a major new release hits, but I just can't give up my Sway workflow. Maybe KDE+ Bismuth would do it.
Coincidentally, I was cleaning out my garage last week, and I booted up an old ASUS eeebox running Kubuntu 12.10. The desktop looked just like the picture in this blog post. I love that style. I had to copy some things off and I was struck by how lovely the interface was to use. It was still quick, and to my eyes really pretty. Made me a little sad to shred that disk and give the machine away (but the general junk reduction is a real relief).
Kubuntu (or, better, KDE on Debian) has always been my OS of choice for desktop use.
My wish for KDE is that they move some of their quirks used, for example, to launch GTK3/GTK4 applications so they start in the right size, or XWayland itself, somewhere scriptable. Right now, if something doesn’t quite work, you need to fix it in C++ and recompile the whole plasma-desktop, which is not very tinker-friendly.
Otherwise KDE has quite a renaissance for the last few years, I hope it continues.
The right size as in "the right DPI". There was this bug with GTK4 apps that they launched at 4x when everything else was 2x (and the usual quirks for GTK3 apps didn't work), and all those XSettings + environment variable stuff Plasma sets were all in the C++ parts of the code.
I went away from KDE because of this constant fluctuation phase, plasma felt never finished, always new ideas but never clicking (unlike eos). Maybe it's time to also revisit. I agree that Kate, kdev etc are great.
I really wanted to change to Linux but a simple thing (what is mentioned in this article that it works flawlessly) of using my laptop on a second screen with the lid closed was not working automatically at all. Probably it is caused by the fact that I have a laptop with a discrete GPU. Tried different distros with KDE, but no luck. Btw, the same things was not working with other window managers either (tried Gnome(s) and xfce)
Shouldn't be this way, having switchable graphics is not exactly a new tech.
Switched to Arch recently, also after years of lazily using Ubuntu (though it was what they used at work as well, so it just made sense to use it on my desktop), and I also am giving KDE another go, and I can confirm a similarly usable experience these days. I absolutely do remember KDE being extremely buggy ten years ago but they seem to have made a ton of progress.
Have been a long time KDE user from the 3.x days through to 2019 when a long standing itch to try a tiling window manager moved me to Awesomewm. I still use Dolphin, Konsole and a few other bits though.
I also seem to remember using the Suse distro in those early times as it was the only one I could find that treated KDE as a first-class citizen and not a bolt-on. (Think I was Redhat before that. This is before the Opensuse and Fedora days.)
I'm not a KDE usr, but in KDE's defense, when you typed "mo" it seems like it assumed "monitor" would be the search phrase instead of "mouse". In that case, both are valid use cases and to me, it's not that weird.
However, I'd prefer something which weighs application names over some other metadata.
Whatever happened to the 1.x revival project or whatever it was called? I am very fond of the aesthetics of the 1.x and 2.x series as it reminds me of classic Windows and MacOS. Is there a way to replicate the look and feel of 1.x and 2.x on modern KDE?
It really is time for the HN mods to review the guidelines. Nearly every comment here has been made almost verbatim thousands of times, in dozens of different forums, repeated for years on end.
The same thing happens when there's any mention of an electron app, or Windows, or software having the temerity to not reveal its source. These issues turn so many HN commenters into echolalics.
This guideline should be extended to cover this kind of repetitive and pointless content:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
Assuming that the guideline writers really mean the justification stated here: more than 50% of the comments in this kind of thread are so often canonical examples of 'too common to be interesting', so the guideline should apply to this kind of standard trigger issue.
I see this as very unlikely as kde and gnome have very different design philosophies. Also KDE used Qt and Gnome GTK, merging the code bases would be problematic.
Extremely unlikely. They’re built on entirely different UI stacks so in a “merge” the codebase for one half or the other is going to have to be binned, and besides that they have very different and largely incompatible approaches in terms of UI/UX design.
I also would never want this. They are completely different products that appeal to different people. It's like asking if MacOS and Windows will ever merge. No, they won't, and they shouldn't (antitrust aside).
They do appeal to different people, but I think the fat part of the curve is made up of people like me - they don’t care. Both work just fine. I can launch applications and manage my machine from it.
To defrag the Linux demographic. If the two camps worked together on a future WM using all the things they’ve learned, maybe something great would come about. Having a single desktop for developers to target if they want to reach Linux users would be nice as well.
It seems like if trends continue, Electron will be pretty much the only way new software gets on Linux and as a platform, Electron sucks compared to KDE or Gnome.
More likely a merger would ruin things for users of bot GNOME and KDE.
> Having a single desktop for developers to target if they want to reach Linux users would be nice as well.
This would be pointless, the vast majority of applications on linux don't care what DE they're run under. You can run Gnome applications under KDE, KDE applications under Gnome, just about any random GUI application under any window manager you wrote up last weekend which the developer of that application never even heard of.
I don't understand what you're on about with Electron. Electron applications run under any DE or WM. Electron is a framework for creating GUI applications, it's not a desktop environment. They're orthogonal. I think you might be confusing KDE with Qt, Gnome with GTK, these things are not the same. An application that uses GTK is not a "Gnome application" unless it's affiliated with the Gnome project. An application using Qt is not a "KDE application" unless it's affiliated with KDE. Most GTK and Qt applications are independent, not affiliated with either KDE or Gnome. But even when they are affiliated with one or the other, you can still use them in the other.
I was sloppy when saying Gnome or KDE rather than GTK or Qt, but it sounds like you were able to see what I was trying to say.
You can run GTK applications under KDE (and Qt under Gnome) iff you install the other runtime. When you do, you’re using twice as much disk space, more memory (due to less sharing), and now have twice as many DE-related vulnerabilities on your machine. IMHO, it’s not ideal.
Electron is really a distinct platform. It requires an underlying DE but doesn’t really use it. It’s a third system and unfortunately it seems to be taking over Linux when it comes to new interesting applications. Both KDE and Gnome feel a little dead from the perspective of an end-user who wants to see cool new apps come out on native Linux. I don’t think desktop Linux is in a particularly good place right now. There’s so much untapped potential and I get a little frustrated to see Electron taking over.
> You can run GTK applications under KDE (and Qt under Gnome) iff you install the other runtime. When you do, you’re using twice as much disk space, more memory (due to less sharing), and now have twice as many DE-related vulnerabilities on your machine. IMHO, it’s not ideal.
Who cares?
That's an extremely nerd/purist sort of concern -- technically true, practically the vast majority of users won't care if it works well enough. Eg, right now I have KDE running, and on top of that there's Firefox, Steam, VS Code and Discord, none of which quite looks like KDE.
All of those run on Windows, which creates exactly the same situation. Discord looks like Discord, not like a native Windows app.
Indeed, the biggest issue with using a mix of GUI frameworks is the inconsistent styling. But anybody who's used desktop Linux for long has either made peace with this, or endeavored to unify their styling. Either way, it's not a problem for the application developer to worry about.
Or Windows. Windows isn't even 100% consistent in style in regards to what you get out of the box, with multiple generations of old stuff always poking out somewhere.
And even MS apps have long invented their own UI -- Office has long brought its own particular controls. And the moment you install almost anything, any semblance of consistency goes out of the window.
At least GTK and KDE are two common, polished styles. For a long time it was a fashion for every random app, including technical things like antiviruses to have some sort of goofy, customized UI toolkit with irregular shaped windows. (https://i.imgur.com/P3Vu11W.jpeg)
Funny how even that goofy shield has retained a dedicated and distinct title bar with window controls that looked almost like all the other title bars.
> iff you install the other runtime. When you do, you’re using twice as much disk space, more memory (due to less sharing),
Such concerns are almost always premature optimization. It costs next to nothing to use Dolphin in Gnome or Nautilus in KDE. Virtually all KDE users have at least some GTK applications they use anyway, Firefox uses GTK and most KDE users use Firefox. The only time this might become an issue is if you enjoy running modern software on antique hardware.
And refusing to use a Qt application in Gnome because you think it will increase your attack surface is.. very odd. If you're only using a single file manager, then you only have to worry about vulnerabilities related to a single file manager. Vulnerabilities in another which you have installed but don't run aren't relevant. I'm using PCManFM but also have Dolphin installed. If there is a Dolphin vulnerability, why should I worry about it? Having Dolphin installed doesn't expose me to any meaningful risk and only costs me about 2MB of hard drive space. It's nothing. It's not even worth my time to uninstall it.
> Electron is really a distinct platform. It requires an underlying DE
I mean.. it doesn't. Electron apps work with bare bones tiling window managers, they generally don't make any assumptions about desktop environments or require you to use one at all. And that's the way it is with other GUI frameworks, and the way it should be.
If you want to make a native linux desktop application, then just pick whichever framework you like best and stop worrying about what DE your users prefer. Their DE preference should have no bearing on your choice. If you choose GTK like Mozilla did, that's not going to stop 99.9% of KDE users from using your program. One in a thousand KDE users actually using Konqueror to browse the web is probably a generous estimate..
tl;dr: "Too many DEs" is not an authentic impediment to writing programs for Linux. It's just an excuse frequently cited by Windows developers who usually don't understand Linux in the first place. 'Fragmentation' is a convenient excuse for their (IMHO reasonable!) unwillingness to cater to such a small number of people. If Qt/KDE didn't exist and GTK/Gnome were the whole of the Linux desktop experience, they'd find another excuse.
There is a KDE Free Qt Foundation to help make sure Qt stays free for KDE users.
> The Foundation has license agreements with The Qt Company, Digia and Nokia. The agreements ensure that the Qt will continue to be available as Free Software. Should The Qt Company discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the required licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreements stay valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy.
everything before the "Add-ons available under Commercial Licenses, or GNU General Public License v3" separator is available under LGPLv3, and that covers very likely 100% of what is used in KDE
over 20 years ago qt was not free software. People on the internet keep parroting this information that they've read in a comment… and so on. The original comment was true and was decades ago.
Personally I used to be a die hard mac user, but then I realized most of the time I just use vscode, firefox and terminal, which could be done on any platform (I chose linux and never looked back).
I'm surprised to see how much Kate can do, and even more so that the author deemed it good enough to use in place of neovim. Maybe I should give it a chance someday.