Comment by mih | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mih | Hacker News Reader

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A fellow Arch user here. Although I would not classify it as a portability problem, I have mixed feelings about Desktop on Linux. I use KDE Plasma myself and there is not shortage of messages and bug reports on the headaches GTK poses due to theming. Ever so often, you run into a GTK app that simply turns out to be unusable because the UI elements aren't visible. Same thing with GUI apps written in Java , which look ugly and exhibit strange quirks.

Now KDE does provide compatible themes for GTK, but the fragmentation in GTK (2 vs 3) does not help. The solutions are at best a stopgap measure till the next major version breaks what you managed to get right. It's a never ending game of whack-a-mole. It does not help some of the most popular apps are written in GTK. As I speak due to reasons I haven't investigated yet, I am unable to paste text contents in GTK apps. Windows has other points I take issue with, but at least the UI just works as expected and doesn't seem to hang by a thread.

Hey there! -- I absolutely hear you on KDE Plasma... If you feel like putting a few hours (worst case a day or weekend into it) you could take a look at:

- XFCE

- BSPWM (very minimal, lots of set up, and not great documentation, but I manage windows for the most part without leaving my homerow now, so I love it. once you're past). If you're not one for keyboard shortcuts and muscle memory, it may not be interesting, but I run bspwm and love it.

Point taken on the GTK pain, it was so painful that I stopped using it (I used to run linux mint, and cinnamon/mate, Gnome, were also thorns in my side), and wince every time something I want to install has dependencies on GTK (just because it pulls in 10098123 other packages every time).

All the issues you named are KDE issues. I don't want to start a war here but Gnome 3 has really matured since its botched initial release and plays nice with KDE applications (but maybe that's due to Qt being great). I'm not trying to convince you to switch (KDE does have points in its favour, too!), but Gnome 3 is a sound recommendation for new users and causes very few issues.

Gnome does indeed look better out of the box, but I am not in favour of installing extensions for customization. This is something that KDE shines at, with loads of options to tweak appearance and behaviour. XFCE and other tiling managers, I've tried briefly but I always find myself reverting back to Plasma desktop. Without a unifying force behind Linux desktop (Freedesktop helped to some degree), I have come to accept that things will always be shaky in desktopland - the price of freedom of choice.

Yup, the extensions are annoying, but luckily many are packaged, at least in Debian. I have one to get sane Alt-Tab behaviour, a media player indicator, a weather extension (in the middle of the top bar, next to the clock), one to get a suspend button, and another one to arrange my workspaces in a grid. Of those, only the last one isn't part of the gnome-shell-extension* packages. It's annoying to have to use a "tweak tool" to manage this stuff.

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